Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

QualiSystems Upgrade Aims to Simplify IoT, DevOps 

QualiSystems' CloudShell

Looking to strengthen security for the Internet of Things, QualiSystems today unveiled CloudShell 6.3 Release with enhanced networking support and infrastructure monitoring. The upgrade is designed to help enterprises continue using legacy applications and hardware as they move to DevOps, agile development, and cloud.

The infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud management platform simplifies configuration required to support mixed topologies, according to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor. Environments can be a blend of mainframe sessions, Sparc servers, bare metal x86 servers, on-premise and public cloud virtual machines, QualiSystems said. IT departments can forge seamless connections in topologies consisting of virtual and physical networking such as virtual switches, L2 Ethernet switches, and OpenFlow SDN switches and controllers, the company noted.

IoT and big data are forcing many enterprises to integrate once freestanding systems, said Alex Henthorn-Iwane, vice president of marketing at QualiSystems in an interview. This generates security worries and technological integration hurdles, he said. When IT initially partners with engineering on adding IoT capabilities to an existing product or to bring basic test environments to the engineering department, it can take a long time, said Henthorn-Iwane.

"You can imagine how hard it is to set up a network with some devices in it, that takes a lot of labor. When you're in the early R&D days, it's ok. But when you're trying to really become operational they usually start thinking how can we automate this and that's when they find us," he said. "A number of [products] are only public cloud solutions so that doesn't work for devices or they'll find there are solutions that only work for virtualized servers."

Customer World Wide Technology's Advanced Technology Center, for example, uses CloudShell to deliver complex infrastructure environments from its service catalog, said Dave Chandler, enterprise networking practice manager, in a statement.

"The ATC has implemented a hybrid matrix switching architecture consisting of a combination of physical layer 1 switches and OpenFlow SDN switches, all orchestrated by CloudShell," he said. "This flexible connectivity allows the ATC to meet a variety of service performance requirements while optimizing costs."

Alternate approaches were sluggish, said Henthorn-Iwane.

Alex Henthorn-Iwane, QualiSystems

Alex Henthorn-Iwane, QualiSystems

"They had so many pieces of IT infrastructure that they were trying to make sharable and usable to so many different teams that were so slow, they realized they had to automate it," he added.

QualiSystems enhanced the latest iteration's monitoring capabilities and now allows service designers to oversee datacenter or lab-wide infrastructure and perform infrastructure and resource monitoring per-lab environment. Designers see the results via contextualized monitoring graphing that shows traffic levels, availability, and other indicators in real time.

"You can actually bring up these monitoring views and bring up live data in this specific infrastructure, in this specific environment. A lot of monitoring capabilities in most cloud platforms are focused on applications," Henthorn-Iwane said. "Because we have a lot of capabilties in infrastructure, we wanted to have real time monitoring for the infrastructures themselves. Most of these capabilities take us deeper into the ability to make these mixed environments as a service have richer features and easier to use."

The newest version of CloudShell is available now.

 

About the author: Alison Diana

Managing editor of Enterprise Technology. I've been covering tech and business for many years, for publications such as InformationWeek, Baseline Magazine, and Florida Today. A native Brit and longtime Yankees fan, I live with my husband, daughter, and two cats on the Space Coast in Florida.

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