Skytap Fleshes Out Its Cloud Automation

Skytap, the self-service cloud automation house, Tuesday introduced advanced notification services, self-healing automation capabilities for robust virtual private networking, and support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

The widgetry is supposed to give businesses a simple secure way to use its hybrid or public cloud and speed cloud adoption.

The company is most excited about its real-time e-mail alerts telling users they’ve tapped out on cloud capacity. Examples include administrator-defined thresholds for available storage, compute and networking capacity assigned as quotas to specific end users or teams.

Notifications can also be set based on total virtual machine hours or the number of total hours that any given virtual configuration has been continuously running.

Businesses benefit from increased control and visibility into cloud use and costs, and can proactively avoid a surprise end-of-the-month bill.

Skytap can now automatically detect dicey VPN connections that may periodically disconnect or fail to reconnect properly, and reconnect them to its hybrid cloud environment.

This self-healing automation ensures that the Skytap Cloud remains available and securely connected to private data centers, while reducing service interruption and the need to manually troubleshoot periodic VPN connectivity issues.

Lastly the Skytap Cloud now supports the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), the open standard for packaging and distributing virtual machines and software.

OVF automates the import and installation of existing workloads and virtualized configurations between private, hybrid and public cloud infrastructures. OVF support is supposed to ease VM portability and decrease platform dependence by letting users leverage a common set of tools across virtual environments. It’s supposed to complement Skytap’s support for VMware’s VMDK file format.

Skytap currently has around 150 accounts. It figures the new technology could bring in the next 100.