CloudBolt Command and Control is a customer-premised virtual appliance which enables single pane of glass management of multiple underlying virtualization platforms. CloudBolt C2 allows IT staff and management broad visibility into overall resource utilization and how virtual machines are being consumed by users and groups across the enterprise.
CloudBolt C2 Enables Unified IT Management
Virtualization Management Using Existing IT, No Rip and Replace
CloudBolt C2 layers on top of your existing management tools. Whether your environment is comprised of a single platform, or a heterogeneous mix of virtualization and cloud technologies, CloudBolt C2 enables you to ensure every component is identified, tracked, and leveraged for maximum efficiency. Each specific asset category is turned into a manageable resource pool, provisioned and allocated on demand according to existing business policies, and procedures.
Public Cloud Deployment Management
Give your users the ability to request and deploy resources into public clouds as if they were managed in your own environment. CloudBolt C2 gives you visibility into and control of public cloud deployments, and helps you keep track and meter your public cloud usage. Integrated cost accounting and reporting features ensure that end users and groups can track their usage costs for consuming various public cloud resources.
Cloud Frameworks (EE)
Cloud frameworks such as OpenStack and Eucalyptus present a valuable benefit in unified management of an enterprise environment. They offer the ability to drive significant efficiencies and transform the way enterprise delivers dynamically-scalable infrastructure and services. CloudBolt C2 is able to interact with and manage cloud frameworks in a similar manner to how it manages traditional virtualization environments. This enables enterprises to stand up new technologies in parallel to existing environments, experimenting or implementing the best-of-breed stack technology to solve the problem at hand, without further complicating the top-level management and visibility into the resource usage enterprise-wide.
Physical Server Management
CloudBolt C2 VE manages IPMI-compatible physical servers with unified command and control architecture and that allows customers to integrate and manage them as if they were another virtualized resource. CloudBolt C2 VE manages both physical and virtual servers, and gives enterprise organizations the flexibility they need to integrate and configure custom environments.
Scalability
CloudBolt C2 can rapidly scale and manage an entire enterprise’s IT infrastructure. A single instance can manage thousands of virtual machines, physical servers, and public cloud deployments. The solution can manage and filter services by server owner, group, server name, or any other classification. CloudBolt C2 is an agentless solution that works through APIs to interact with resources instead of embedding itself within the service’s configuration.
Consistent, scalable management across hypervisors, data center automation tools, cloud frameworks and public clouds ensures optimal efficiency and improves server-to-admin ratios.
Configuration Management / Data Center Automation Integration (EE)
Companies that are looking to deploy private clouds for their mission-critical production environments have to do more than just simply provision a virtual machine and leave it alone. CloudBolt C2 is designed to integrate with industry-leading data center automation (DCA) and configuration management tools. CloudBolt C2 will leverage the significant configuration and invest that has already been made in these technologies to expand their reach and relevance in the datacenter environment.
If desired, organizations that have yet to adopt DCA tools will be able to select the most appropriate tool for the environment, and using CloudBolt C2, seamlessly integrated it into the datacenter environment, offering those unique packaging and configuration capabilities cleanly and simply to users and consumers.
Network and Storage Management (EE)
CloudBolt C2 has been designed to support and integrate with network management and virtualization tools such as Nicira, providing secure virtualized connections to public cloud providers, and across virtual environments and even data centers.
Managing storage fabrics is also an important factor in resource consumption by end users. Providing users the ability to request and manage storage in an easy yet accountable manner is an important factor in driving out inefficiencies in the provisioning of virtual resources. CloudBolt C2 enables organizations to automate the addition of storage to virtual resources in a manner which ensures both required approval, as well as full accountability of storage usage. CloudBolt C2 is designed interact with storage management tools on industry-leading storage platforms in order to effectively manage storage consumption.
CloudBolt C2 Enables Easy Resource Consumption
Automated Self-service Delivery to Business Users
Enterprise organizations can stay responsive to individual, or group requirements utilizing the built-in CloudBolt C2 Order Request and Approval system. Increase productivity and eliminate bottlenecks with a self-service portal that delivers on-demand allocation, provisioning and approvals that can even be configured to point to internal or external catalogs.
CloudBolt C2 features tools to pre-configure parameters for resources and environments specific to end users or groups, simplifying the order request and approval process. CloudBolt C2 enables enterprise organizations to provide faster, more relevant responses to internal business units, while keeping tight control over data exposure with role based access. Mission critical and sensitive data can be restricted to single or multi-tenant environments with just a few clicks.
Clean and Intuitive Unified User Interface
CloudBolt C2 simplifies the job of managing systems and applications into a single pane of glass. A data-driven, flexible and configurable unified user interface opens the door to identifying, tracking and managing all IT investments in CloudBolt C2, and makes every IT asset highly visible. CloudBolt C2 unified user interface allows IT administrators to configure, manage and maintain their environments using a single intuitive interface that leverages product interoperability.
All provisioning actions in CloudBolt C2 are done asynchronously, allowing users to continue on other tasks within the CloudBolt UI while their provisioning jobs are running in the background.
Customizable Data-Driven Interface
CloudBolt C2 has a unique approach to modeling server ordering parameters that allows for varying granularity. For example, a QA team may be given a much simpler set of parameters when ordering servers than would a production deployment team. Similarly, both of those teams may need to enter slightly different parameters when ordering servers in a different data centers. The power to customize the ordering process is in the hands of the group and environment administrators, and is simple and intuitive using the web interface for CloudBolt C2.
CloudBolt C2 is Efficient
Virtual Machine Sprawl Control
CloudBolt C2 can discover and account for existing virtual infrastructure, bring it under management, and assign ownership to the proper user and business group. Optional expiration dates, and reminder email notifications ensure that every new virtual machine that is consuming resources is still needed. After a VM’s useful lifecycle, CloudBolt C2 workflows that are customized by individual organizations ensures actions like decommissioning, recycling, and/or archiving take place.
Quotas / Resource Limits
CloudBolt C2 allows you to easily define CPU, memory, storage and cost limits for each logical environment. Email warnings as quotas are approached, or hard-limits where additional services are denied are a configurable option. Quotas can be set to a group level, which allows a sub- group manager to delegate assigned quotas to other users and groups under that particular group’s control. Since no sub-environment can exceed its allocated resource limit, there isn’t any danger of users exceeding the capabilities of the physical infrastructure. Within a business, end user and group environments with full quota usage have the option to negotiate with ones that are far below their allocated quota to further encourage efficient infrastructure utilization.
Reduce Complexity and Simplify Management
CloudBolt C2 consolidates visibility to IT assets, presenting them as a tightly integrated unit that operates seamlessly across multiple platforms and IT resources. The innovative CloudBolt C2 architecture is specially designed to manage a heterogeneous mix of technologies, maintain complex configurations, and obviate the need to interact with a series of different products’ interfaces in order to accomplish a single task.
CloudBolt C2 features an elegant data model, an orchestration engine, and abstraction layer that enable enterprise organizations to achieve a wide range of business benefits: lowering costs of operations, empowering users of IT resources, and achieving greater visibility into resource usage patterns. CloudBolt C2 consolidates management and maintenance of IT resources and infrastructure and interfaces with any product or category of product, making it simple to configure resources, adopt new technologies, and phase out unused resources.
Global Infrastructure Management
CloudBolt C2 provides a single management suite that supports multiple data centers. A single instance of the solution manages geographically dispersed data centers under a single pane of glass. CloudBolt C2 features a map view that visualizes resource allocation and usage by location so that enterprise organizations can effectively manage capacity, and plan for future infrastructure purchases and server placement.
Pricing of Resources
CloudBolt C2 allows organizations to price each CPU, Memory, Disk and license unit so organizations can view the potential running costs of a service before it is provisioned. This gives customers the ability to forecast costs and determine the cost/benefit for proposed services. Management can review the operating costs for services already in use, compare the actual historical resource utilization, and make alterations to existing deployments to increase infrastructure efficiency and control costs.
Resource Usage Visualization Tools
CloudBolt C2 grants powerful insight into overall enterprise resource utilization. Customers can visualize usage of CPUs, memory, and storage over a customizable time range. This visualization can be as granular as a single server, or at a high level for utilization across an entire business unit. This enables organizations the ability to review and adjust quotas for business units, further optimizing resource consumption and driving out waste from the environment, and the potential to avoid unnecessary infrastructure purchases.
Software License Management (EE)
CloudBolt C2 has reporting features that give organizations an accurate accounting of software license usage in real time. Administrators can specify which licenses are used with which software, as well as assigning costs to each license for accounting purposes. License usage is fully under CloudBolt C2 Admin control, so enterprise organizations can provision, allocate, decommission, or recycle on demand. Strict policy also ensures that licenses are not over-allocated.
This visibility into usage over time can have significant cost implications. Being able to recycle licenses upon service retiring and subsequent re-use in new deployments makes organizations more efficient in their license usage. Proper accounting and visualization will not only give organizations leverage in negotiating future software license agreements, but can also give insight into how instrumental a piece of software is to core business activities. This empowers enterprises to freely test and adopt new technologies and phase out usage of technologies that are underutilized or unused.
CloudBolt C2 is Safe and Secure
Role-Based Access with Delegated Control
Hierarchical user management and role based permissions allow delegation of management according to any customer designated organizational structure. A CloudBolt C2 end user experience is limited to the hierarchy below them, ensuring that end users are not able to view restricted resources, or perform unauthorized actions. A single Web-based management console is context sensitive to the role and permissions of an end user, increasing security, reducing complexity and providing unparalleled ease of use.
Administrators with proper permissions can modify end user roles, permissions and access to any environment or group resources. Using the CloudBolt C2 administration portal, managers can restrict or grant permissions and access to data, resources and environments with just a few clicks.
External Authentication
CloudBolt C2 integrates with your existing LDAP or AD authentication infrastructure so that it is not necessary to separately manage user identification and groups. CloudBolt C2 can leverage your existing directory for authentication purposes, and even supports token based authentication, including PKI.
Secure
The CloudBolt development team utilizes proven secure development practices and gives great attention to code the product in a fashion that limits vulnerabilities. In addition, the CloudBolt team has scanned the product with HP Fortify™ Static Code Analyzer to search out, identify, and significantly reduce the likelihood of any remaining security vulnerabilities in the product code. Additionally, CloudBolt C2 is designed to support multi-tenancy, and protects user and group data and resources from unauthorized access or change.
CloudBolt C2 also makes use of FIPS 140-2 compliant cryptography.
Network Assignment
Exposing network options, model environments, and isolation of VLANs for a group means that virtual machines are only able to access networks specified by Administrators, ensuring continued isolation for sensitive applications or systems.
CloudBolt C2 is Extensible
Flexibility
CloudBolt C2 has extensible modular connectors that are easily customized for any IT process or policy in an enterprise organization. CloudBolt C2 Orchestration Hooks give administrators the ability to call out to external systems at every step throughout the provisioning process, allowing organizations to adopt CloudBolt C2 no matter where they are in their journey towards the next generation of enterprise IT. Enterprise organizations can seamlessly integrate various external technologies (e.g., ticketing, Operations Orchestration, Authentication, Configuration Management, network virtualization, cloud frameworks and databases), providing a limitless number of ways to configure IT environments.
Open and Agnostic / Vendor Neutral
CloudBolt C2 is open and vendor agnostic so it can be used with market-leading technologies. CloudBolt has no proprietary infrastructure technologies and has no allegiance to technologies. Our interests are to encourage the most efficient and cost-effective management of enterprise IT now and in the future. With CloudBolt C2, customers can utilize a combination of hypervisors, data center automation tools, cloud frameworks, public cloud deployments, and other external technologies simultaneously.
C2 enterprise organizations have the ability to test and evaluate cost efficient and open source alternatives in development and test environments, and include them in production environments when they are ready. Adding new technologies while maintaining the integrity of management and compliance future-proofs an organization’s IT and ensures that IT can keep up with the constantly changing business and IT landscape.
CloudBolt C2 has a Smart Design
A sophisticated data model combined with a powerful abstraction layer and orchestration engine makes IT assets fully transparent, and presents them as cloud. Easily configured extensible, modular connectors allow for customization of virtualized environments, seamlessly integrating IT resources and assets. CloudBolt C2 architecture ensures that each technology is managed consistently, reducing the need for niche expertise in the underlying resource technologies.
CloudBolt C2 integrates easily into existing IT environments, and provides interoperability for new technologies as they’re introduced, and that includes new versions of existing technologies. For example, CloudBolt C2 can simultaneously communicate and consistently manage several different versions of VMware vCenter. Both end users and managers can view, provision services and manage existing services without regard for a service’s virtualization technology, operating system, or application.
The powerful CloudBolt C2 architecture combined with an automated self-service order provisioning system frees IT staff and teams from repetitive manual tasks, allowing them to focus on core business initiatives, capacity planning and implementing business policies into their IT environment.
RESTFul API
CloudBolt C2 has a RESTful API, which enables external tools such as ticketing and Operations Orchestration systems to securely interact with CloudBolt C2 services and functionality. CloudBolt C2 can integrate into every aspect of your existing and future IT management, and workflow processes.
Customizable Branding (EE)
CloudBolt C2 can be fully branded with an organization’s logo and color scheme within the client and without code modification, providing a seamless view for users consistent with internal corporate branding.
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