Quick Takes: ScienceLogic and Cyan Announce New ProductsQuick Takes: ScienceLogic and Cyan Announce New Products

I had recent briefings with ScienceLogic on software that tackles hybrid cloud monitoring; and Cyan, which rolled out an orchestration application for carriers and providers.

ScienceLogic Maps Private, Public Cloud Dependencies

ScienceLogic has released a new version of its CloudMapper software to help customers understand the dependencies among components of both public cloud services and on-premises equipment and software. CloudMapper, which is part of ScienceLogic’s EM7 suite, automatically discovers the components in a public or private cloud and maps their relationships.

“In the world of hybrid cloud, you have components that live in different places, so it’s hard to understand what’s connected to what,” said ScienceLogic CEO Dave Link. The goal of the new release is to make it easier to monitor hybrid infrastructures, and to get a faster root-cause analysis when trouble arises.

Link said the software will work with public cloud services including Amazon, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure. It uses APIs from these services to build its dependency maps. Administrators can then use these maps to monitor their internal and public cloud services and get a more clear picture of service use.

“If you delete a VM in EC2 but forget to delete the storage, we’d provide a clear line of site to that,” said Link.

CloudOps, a Canadian provider of managed cloud services, is a ScienceLogic customer. The company uses CloudMapper as part of its toolset to manage customer systems, both in private cloud deployments and public clouds.

Donald Donovan, product manager for public cloud solutions and architecture at CloudOps, said he appreciates “the ability to auto-discover the devices and see the hierarchy behind it. We see a host, and it discovers VMs and their performance. The topography is important and useful to us.”

While he said he doesn’t use CloudMapper every day, he does use it for change management to see how a change might affect other devices or services. He also uses it to troubleshoot. “Topography makes troubleshooting faster,” said Donovan.

ScienceLogic offers subscription pricing starting at $14 per month per device, with discounts for volume and term commitment. Because device counts can change in a cloud environment, CEO Link says the bill is based on a daily count that’s averaged over the course of 30 days, rather than the peak device count within 30 days.

Cyan Announces Planet Orchestrate

Cyan announces Planet Orchestrate, a new application in its Blue Planet platform of SDN and NFV software packages for carriers and service providers.

The new application ties together cloud data center orchestration, NFV, and WAN orchestration. The goal is to make it easier for carriers not just to provision services for customers such as Ethernet connections between offices, but to also spin up IaaS- or PaaS-type services in their own data centers.

“Carriers can say, here’s the Ethernet service, but I’m converting my POPs and central offices to data centers, and rather than go to Amazon or Rackspace, you can provision a VM with us,” Cyan’s Recep Ozdag, director of solutions marketing for SDN and NFV, said in an interview.

Planet Orchestrate includes three components. Multi-Domain Service Orchestration, available in Q3, integrates with third-party SDN controllers such as OpenDaylight as well as element and network management systems and cloud management platforms such as OpenStack.

NFV Orchestration, also scheduled for Q3 availability, is a platform for deploying and managing virtual network functions, such as firewalling, across multiple data centers. Cloud Orchestration, available in Q4, lets carriers provision compute, network, and storage to offer cloud services to customers. It also includes a portal to enable customer self-service.

The company said there would be a base price plus costs based on the number of managed nodes, but did not provide specifics.