Verilume Automates OpenStack Cloud, Hadoop Cluster Deployment

A startup founded by executives with extensive experience working with financial services firms and EMC launched a cloud application service through which IT organizations can automate the deployment of OpenStack private clouds or Hadoop clusters inside their data centers.

Leveraging hard-won experience gained at Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, Verilume co-founder Dan Petrozzo says the Verliume software suite is based on an automated cloud builder the company designed to instantiate stacks of complex software quickly that will make complex technologies more accessible to the average IT organization.

Capabilities of the Software-as-a-Service application include the ability to schedule rollouts, self-service provisioning, and the ability to deploy software stacks on both new and legacy infrastructure. At a time when new technologies are rapidly emerging inside the data center, Petrozzo says, IT organizations shouldn’t have to hire dedicated experts just to deploy them.

“There’s a lot of unprecedented innovation happening in the data center these days,” he says. “The problem organizations have is they don’t have enough expertise behind deploying it.”

As a complement to its core automation software to address that problem, Verilume has also developed Verilume Forecaster, which applies machine learning techniques to help IT organizations optimize near-term capacity optimization requirements. Petrozzo says that while there are plenty of tools available to plan capacity requirements over an extended period of time, most IT organizations need access to analytics that allow them to plan for capacity utilization in near real time.

In the next release of the company’s core application, Petrozzo says, Verilume will also extend its reach to include Infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms to enable IT organizations to have better control over hybrid cloud computing environments.

One of the primary reasons that so much software is being pushed into public clouds using external service providers is that line of business units have developed the perception that internal IT organizations are resistant to change, when most of the time they don’t have the tools required to embrace new technologies. By making use of a cloud application to automate the deployment process IT organizations can not only reallocate staff to tasks that add more value to the business but also address criticisms concerning the level of agility inside their IT organizations, he says.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that every new technology that comes down the pike should automatically be embraced. But it does means that internal IT organizations now have the potential to embrace them once they actually determine their true business value.