Opalis Allows Amazon EC2 Cloud Management

Opalis Software wants to make it easier for businesses to manage the cloud computing resources they use in Amazon’s EC2 environment.

Opalis on 13 May announced the beta of its Cloud LCM (life-cycle management) offering, which is designed to give IT administrators greater control over those resources in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, one of the larger public cloud computing environments.

Opalis is working with Amazon Web Services on the solution.

Yale Tankus, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Opalis, said the Cloud LCM offering enables businesses to pay for the cloud resources only when they’re needed, and to turn them off when their use is over.

“Using the Opalis LCM solution, customers can manage availability, provisioning, consumption and decommissioning of cloud resources across private and public cloud environments to ensure that the billing meter stops running when the cloud resource is no longer needed,” Tankus said in a statement.

The offering is part of the company’s larger Opalis v6 Cloud strategy announced in March and aimed at making it easier for customers to manage application deployment and configuration across physical, virtual and cloud environments by automating many of the processes. In April, Opalis introduced cloud management capabilities for Microsoft System Center.

The Opalis Cloud LCM offers dynamic cloud services, which enable IT administrators to consume cloud resources based on their own metrics, such as time or cost. In addition, a Web-based self-service portal enables users to provision Amazon EC2 resources through time-based management to control use and cost.

There also is an integrated approval process to help with auditing and control of the use of cloud resources, e-mail alerts that let IT administrators know when the use of the cloud computing resources is about to expire, metering of services to tie use with cost, and integrated reporting capabilities to keep track of resource use and for chargeback.

The beta for the Cloud LCM offering initially will be offered for free as a service and accessible through Amazon in June.