Cloud Aware Monitoring: GroundWork and Eucalyptus Offer Private Cloud Beta Program

Tomorrow, GroundWork Open Source Inc. and Eucalyptus Systems will be announcing that they have partnered to deliver monitoring and management of applications running in a Eucalyptus private cloud environment. If your enterprise is running private cloud powered by Eucalyptus, you now can plug your cloud into the GroundWork's monitoring solution. This allows you to join your view of resources from Amazon and other servers in your enterprise with your private cloud solution. Sponsor What is Eucalyptus? We covered Eucalyptus recently in an interview with the company's founder and CTO. The company is a first-mover in helping organizations build private clouds that can achieve parity with Amazon's EC2. The company's enterprise addition will allow you to run an Amazon instance on your VMware infrastructure, effectively joining your virtual infrastructure and the Amazon cloud. "Detailed monitoring and management of private cloud applications can give Eucalyptus users important real-time information to increase productivity and reduce costs," said Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. "Through our partnership with GroundWork Open Source, Eucalyptus open source users and Enterprise Edition customers can now benefit from a proven, open source solution to monitor private clouds as part of their overall network environment." GroundWork's newest solution offers the ability to monitor topology of your private cloud and to plug the results into the monitoring you are doing with other servers and the Amazon public cloud infrastructure. In the briefing we attended with company executives, several things emerged that we're considering. First, it was pointed out that private clouds are "where the action is" for large enterprises. What we heard is that some companies, like pharmaceuticals that GroundWork currently has in its portfolio simply won't be able to move all of their data out to the public cloud yet. But, they do want to get the benefits of cloud computing internally. Second, we learned that one thing GroundWork's offers is a flexible hosting model, where your monitoring infrastructure can be hosted internally, or in the cloud on a managed EC2 instance. Recently, we checked out CloudKick , another cloud monitoring startup that also can monitor servers in the cloud and in the enterprise. The GroundWorks solution that is launching in beta both offers topology view of the private cloud and flexible hosting options that may be attractive to enterprises that plan on keeping most of their assets internal. From what we can see, CloudKick is positioned to companies that are starting on the cloud for scaling purposes, and GroundWork seems positioned towards companies where the center of gravity is inside the data center and now the private cloud. "More and more of our customers are investigating and investing in private cloud usage. Eucalyptus gives incredible power and cost savings to IT teams building out cloud services. Coupled with GroundWork's automatic instance and application monitoring, this partnership provides a robust cloud solution with clear ROI that enterprises can take advantage of quickly," said Peter Jackson, GroundWork Open Source President and CEO. What is GroundWorks private cloud solution? GroundWorks offers the premise that if you are running a private cloud, the monitoring solution needs to be aware of your architecture (topology, software stacks, and servers). Here is a visual representation of how the company envisions cloud aware monitoring: Here is a screenshot of the GroundWorks monitoring solution: Here is a bit more from the companies on the beta program: The GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud for Eucalyptus beta program offers: "GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud usage to cover on-premise, public or private cloud hosted applications and infrastructure Access to Eucalyptus EE, including VMware support to implement private clouds in existing environments The opportunity to provide direct feedback to the engineering and product teams, helping define the future of IT operations in the cloud Engineering and technical assistance for the duration of the beta program. Participants will gain these benefits with the combined GWOS and Eucalyptus Quickly and easily build and monitor private and hybrid clouds with your existing environment and other public clouds Run Amazon Machine Image (AMI) instances on VMware-based hypervisors within your Eucalyptus private cloud Seamlessly manage environments with multiple hypervisors (Xen, KVM, vSphere, ESX™ and ESXi™) under one management console and transition applications without any modifications Manage service performance and availability based on IT monitoring insight trend and usage reports across environments" More information available about the beta program at http://www.gwos.com/products/Enterprise_Cloud_beta.html It is becoming clear that private clouds are increasingly becoming an important part of the enterprise. Eucalyptus has a real opportunity as a first-mover in deploying them with its tools. From experience, we know that where enterprise-class computing exists, monitoring follows. GroundWork and Eucalyptus are working together to make a seamless offering that plugs into the private cloud deployment process in this beta release - and they are asking for feedback from administers interested in the program. Does deploying a private cloud change your view of administration tools and monitoring? Discuss

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Cloud Aware Monitoring: GroundWork and Eucalyptus Offer Private Cloud Beta Program

Tags:amazon, announcements, architecture, CEO. What, cloud, companies, enterprise, Eucalyptus, groundwork, groundwork open source, Marten Mickos, open source inc, open source solution, partnership, Peter Jackson, private, ROI, servers, virtual

Email Advertising – Reach Your Audience

Businesses are only as strong as their customer base, and the same is true for web based businesses and their audience of only visitors and clients. Many people don’t understand that maintaining and online audience is constant work, and if you can’t figure out a creative way to stay in touch with your online customers and prospective customers, you’re going to lose their business.

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If you think that email advertising might be the method for communication that you’ve been searching for, you have to find a marketing service that will allow you to create the dynamic email advertisements that you need without charging you an arm and a leg to send them.

The best email advertising companies will offer you several levels of participation, so that you can try out the service without committing to a large investment in emails that might not work out. Start with a number of emails that represent just a fraction of your customer base, and after a week or so, compare the number of sales in that group to the sales in the rest of your base. If you notice an increase amongst the email recipients, you might want to try a larger round.

No matter which email advertising company you choose, be sure that they offer targeted distribution, meaning that they will help you to tailor your email announcements and product sales to people who are likely to respond favorably to them.

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