Gale Technologies intros service tiering for cloud

Gale Technologies has introduced new service-tiering capabilities for its GaleForce Turnkey Cloud software platform designed to create a self-service, automated infrastructure for physical and virtual resources. The platform is aimed at enterprises but also can power IT-as-a-service offerings for service providers, according to the company.

The new functionality is designed to help IT architects design and deploy service tiers for compute, network and storage infrastructure and package them as easily consumable services—for example, as gold, silver and bronze levels.

“We designed the GaleForce Turnkey Cloud solution to simplify moving an enterprise’s existing infrastructure to a cloud, even using legacy infrastructure,” said Scott Powers, Gale’s director of product marketing. “It allows customers to convert their existing static IT environment into a dynamic private or hybrid cloud in only two steps and as little as two weeks, without requiring expensive and complex hardware or tools.”

Service tiers are what the company refers to as “the building blocks of service catalogs and an essential first step for automation and self-service enablement for deploying cloud infrastructure.” GaleForce also lets users design and publish end-to-end infrastructure templates containing multiple infrastructure elements.

“Scenarios that will see the fastest returns on investment include environments with frequent buildup and teardown of infrastructure—data center staging and QA environments, training clouds, sales demonstration and proof of concept clouds, development and test environments, and disaster recovery test environments,” Powers said. “Plus, any environments that require frequent and fast delivery of cookie-cutter workloads.”

At the recent Cisco Live 2011, Gale and NetApp jointly demonstrated the GaleForce Turnkey Cloud Solution for NetApp with service tiering, along with integration to the Cisco Unified Computing System and Cisco Nexus data center switches. (View the demo here.) Gale also recently announced the availability of three new resource adapters for the GaleForce automation software: the NetApp OnCommand open management storage APIs, Cisco UCS servers, and Cisco Nexus 5000 series switches. 

“GaleForce offers composite automation and orchestration that allows provisioning of bare metal as well as virtual resources, enabling organizations to run all of their applications—virtualized or not—in the cloud,” Powers said. “Not all applications are fully virtualized, and GaleForce provides dynamic, on-demand, and self-service provisioning capabilities to heterogeneous environments, extends the reach of what is generally referred to as cloud.”

Powers is confident that simplification of the cloud migration process will help accelerate enterprise adoption.

“Confusion is one of the biggest barriers,” he said. “There are far too many cloud computing products on the market that are either too complex or have insufficient capabilities for most organizations. Until GaleForce, there hasn’t been a simple, straightforward way to quickly and effectively build and deploy the cloud solution that enterprises need to manage both physical and virtual resources.”