Parallel Works today added support for OpenStack to a control plane it developed to unify the management of heterogeneous IT environments.
The ACTIVATE platform developed by Parallel Works makes use of a YAML syntax to automate the management of clusters in a way that is similar to how GitHub manages repositories. The company currently provides support for deploying pre-configured clusters via a single click on cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Parallel Works CEO Matthew Shaxted said adding support will make it simpler for IT teams to add instances of OpenStack at a time when many of them are looking to repatriate workloads running in public clouds to a private cloud running in an on-premises IT environment or move workloads off of commercial virtual machine platforms such as VMware.
Regardless of motivation, the ACTIVATE platform reduces the total cost of IT by providing a single platform to manage clusters versus requiring organizations to hire separate teams to manage each cloud computing environment where workloads have been deployed, noted Shaxted.
Additionally, ACTIVATE also provides access to analytics tools that enable IT teams to manage costs in near real time, he added.
The ACTIVATE platform is most widely used today in high performance computing (HPC) environments but is now starting to gain more traction among IT teams that are moving to centralize the management of multiple environments, said Shaxted.
Providers of cloud services have been making use of control planes they developed to automate the management of IT infrastructure at scale for years. Many internal IT teams are now looking to employ that same approach to streamline the management of heterogeneous IT environments at a time when there is greater sensitivity to IT costs. The single largest component of any IT budget is the labor needed to manage an IT environment. A single control plane promises to make it simpler to manage multiple IT environments using a smaller team that only needs to master one rather than multiple management frameworks.
The degree to which IT organizations will unify the management of the various platform silos they currently employ is naturally going to vary but over time the percentage of workloads running in multiple IT environments is only likely to increase. Application developers have become more adept at identifying which cloud computing environments are better optimized for running certain classes of workloads.
At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) applications require access to scarce graphical processor units (GPUs). As a result, more IT teams are finding it necessary to add support for additional cloud services to run those applications. In fact, the more complex IT environments become the more inevitable it becomes organizations will need to find some way to automate workflows.
The challenge and the opportunity now is to find a way to achieve that goal in a way that enables those IT teams to retain as much granular control as possible without increasing total costs to a point the organization can no longer afford.
