Abiquo expands Cloud Management for CIOs

Abiquo launches the latest version of its cloud management platform – Abiquo 3.4. With many CIOs and IT managers struggling with managing virtualisation, public clouds and the emergence of Docker container technology, Abiquo 3.4 is designed to provide them with the tools they require in order to help improve the agility of their businesses, control the costs of IT systems, while maintaining compliance with the IT policies that senior management demands.

Abiquo 3.4 introduces two new major features to its platform:

Docker
Abiquo 3.4 has a revolutionary new plugin to work with Docker containers. These technologies have recently started making in-roads within enterprises and service providers due to the cost and efficiency offered compared to traditional hypervisors. With this new plugin, Docker becomes truly multi-tenant, ensuring that companies will be able to manage multiple real production workloads running in Docker containers with the same level of control, security and auditing they expect from their hypervisor infrastructure. Using Docker is now as easy as using a VM on a hypervisor, dramatically reducing the need to learn terminal commands. Abiquo’s technology also improves Docker’s usage of networks and storage. For DevOps teams, Abiquo brings its consistent REST API to Docker, giving unified programmatic access to all infrastructure types. For Admins, Abiquo’s logging and reporting extends its class-leading management to Docker for true enterprise-grade control.

By adding Docker to its offering, enterprises and Service Providers can use Abiquo to offer true hybrid clouds to the business units and customers who need them. By deploying Abiquo 3.4 they can move Docker systems from under the desk to the data centre, managing them alongside VMWare, Hyper-V, KVM and Citrix systems and their public cloud accounts from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, DigitalOcean and more.

New public cloud support
Abiquo 3.4 extends its public cloud support, introducing IBM SoftLayer and CloudSigma as new public clouds which can be offered through the Abiquo hybrid cloud solution. This support can be used by service providers to extend their offerings, and by enterprises to fully manage a wide range of on-premise and public cloud infrastructures.

Multi-disk templates
Abiquo 3.4 now supports virtual machine templates with multiple disks. This will enable customers to create templates that fulfil sophisticated drive requirements for specific applications, particularly in Microsoft Windows environments. Virtual machines provide companies with the flexibility of virtualisation without spending the time and money to buy and maintain the hardware that hosts the virtual machine.

These are in addition to existing features including virtual machine and application monitoring capabilities, which provides users with visibility over the performance of their cloud workloads, with all metrics accessible through one single integrated portal. Other existing features include: Added support for Microsoft Azure, which enables users to easily add and manage the environment as an Abiquo public cloud region within the Abiquo 3.2 cloud management platform; and an OpenStack plugin, which helps customers reap the benefits of a flexible and agile infrastructure.

“The very nature of the cloud means that CIOs and senior IT decision makers often worry that they have lost control and visibility of their IT estate. With the launch of Abiquo 3.4 these fears can be addressed.” comments Ian Finlay, COO at Abiquo. “The addition of Docker support, new public clouds and multi-disk templates means CIOs will have more control than ever before and gain a 360 degree view of their infrastructure, both now and in the future.”