Moab Adaptive Computing Suite™ is an intelligent data center and cloud management system that automates the decisions and process of provisioning diverse resources against diverse incoming workloads and changing conditions based on business policies and service level goals. It provides on-demand user self-service resource requests for cloud environments with usage chargeback and an administrative dashboard to simplify management.

With the Moab Adaptive Computing Suite, you can transform existing heterogeneous physical and virtual resources into a shared pool of resources that delivers improved capacity and faster time to value in meeting business needs with reduced cost and management complexity. You can also leverage your preferred resource management technologies as you create an agile, automated and adaptive data center or cloud environment to address key IT challenges including:

• Deliver IT services to the business faster to take advantage of new opportunities, improve business processes, and respond to changing market conditions
• Reduce capital and operating costs by optimizing utilization and capacity of resources and reducing IT management complexity with intelligent automation across resource allocation and management processes
• Automate chargeback for resource usage and reporting to recapture costs, align costs to business priorities, plan for future capacity needs, and optimize data center and cloud performance
• Ensure rapidly expanding number of IT services won't fail so IT staff can scale with intelligent allocation of diverse types and states of resources in the cloud or data center to diverse types of incoming workload requests—including physical and virtual resources and mixed hardware, OS and hypervisor platforms.
• Meet service level requirements and respond to changing conditions by dynamically adapting resource allocations and provisioning across end-to-end services without manual intervention using policies

Moab Adaptive Computing Suite provides the capabilities to transform your data center and create a cloud environment that is agile to respond quicker to business requests for IT services, has dramatically higher resource utilization to reduce costs, and is intelligently automated across IT processes to reduce management effort, costs and risk of IT service failure. Moab Adaptive Computing Suite provides the intelligence needed to manage your cloud infrastructure from its initial stages and as it evolves too accommodate more workloads and users, enabling it to be agile, automated and adaptive—three essential abilities for long-term cloud and data center success. Key benefits include:

• Decrease the time to value for new services for the business, from months to minutes, with self-service user requests via a portal and automated resource allocation and provisioning
• Bill or chargeback for the costs of services to users and groups to recapture costs, move IT from a cost center to a service provider, and align IT services costs with business priorities
• Ensure services are allocated the optimal set of resources from the diverse cloud pool to avoid failure, business disruption and additional management costs and headaches via proven workload templates and allocation policies that ensure services are set-up to best practices and compliance requirements
• Reduce operating expenses by dramatically reducing the IT staff burden required to allocate and adjust resources for the growing number of IT services by applying and automatically enforcing resource, user, group and workload policies and templates and automating resource maintenance jobs; freeing valuable IT staff for new projects
• Reduce spiraling capital expenses by maximizing utilization and capacity out of existing heterogeneous physical and virtual resources by pooling sprawled, siloed resources, optimizing their scheduling, and eliminating wasteful overprovisioning with best practice workload templates.
• Reduce risk to the business by automating the enforcement of SLAs for cloud services with policies that automatically prioritize requests and respond to changing conditions to make sure services stay at required performance levels without IT staff intervention, such as auto-migrating live VMs to prevent performance issues.
• Reduce data center energy and consumption costs by automating power efficiency management, such as automatically activating power-saving modes on or powering down idle nodes
• Dynamically adapt resources to meet changing business needs and conditions so needed services are available and responsive to the business from initial creation and across the service lifecycle, such as automated self-healing policies and responses.

Moab Adaptive Computing Suite uses aggregated real-time environment information for rich context and advanced policies to make decisions and orchestrate actions across customer heterogeneous cloud resources such as mixed operating systems, hypervisors, hardware and resource managers. The solution has at its core the Moab Workload Manager intelligence engine. The intelligence engine automates the continuous collection of real-time information from across the data center or cloud environment, without agents, to create a unified view of the environment from which decisions can be based and automated including:

• Workload requirements
• Heterogeneous resource types, availability and current use state
• Service level agreements for groups, organizations or specific IT services
• Policies
• Provisioning and virtualization orchestration requirements and status
• Event and workflow status and requirements

Moab Adaptive Computing Suite has a modular interface-based design so that it can layer on top of your existing hardware, middleware and virtualization technology investments, as well as easily incorporate new ones added in the future through purchase or acquisition. Moab can orchestrate actions to provision or de-provision resources quickly for certain portions of the environment through one set of technologies and actions, and provision other portions of the environment through a different set of technologies to fully utilize existing processes and templates if desired. The creation of a cloud environment creates the opportunity to standardize some of these middleware tools to optimize performance and processes, which the flexible and modular architecture of Moab Adaptive Computing Suite supports.

The following high level diagram shows the major components of the Moab Adaptive Computing Suite and how they interact with the other components of a cloud or data center solution architecture.

Moab Adaptive Computing Suite is a policy-based intelligent cloud management system that automates the request and dynamic allocation, provisioning, and re-purposing of resources for requested IT services. It provides a self-service web application for users to request catalog-based services, makes intelligent decisions on the availability and best match of resources to utilize for the service requests, then reserves and enables chargeback for the resources. This intelligent decision making is critical not only for rapid delivery, but also avoids services failures as a result of being placed on resources that cannot fully meet their needs, which in turn generates problems for the IT department and causes business disruptions.

Moab Adaptive Computing Suite automates, through a customers preferred resource managers, the activities needed to quickly provision resources for each service as well as de-provisioning them at the end of the requested use to be re-purposed. Moab Adaptive Computing Suite also makes the decisions and initiates the actions needed to dynamically adapt cloud resources, such as VMs, to respond to changing workload demands and resource conditions, without IT staff intervention. The solution uses aggregated real-time environment information for rich context and advanced policies to make decisions and orchestrate actions across customer heterogeneous cloud resources such as mixed operating systems, hypervisors or hardware.

Key capabilities include:

• Self-service user creation of services via easy-to-use portal, with catalog-based service templates that automatically specify the optimal resources needed, speeding request, approval and delivery while reducing IT staff burden and costs
• Billing or "showback" for costs of resources by user and group, including flexible rates and charging models
• Create proven workload templates that identify the best practice resource set-up and process for each service, as determined by IT, to avoid service failures and wasteful overprovisioning
• Automate the optimal allocation and reservation of heterogeneous resources based on fine grain modeling of each service request's resource needs against the current use state of resources, and even historical resource performance, guaranteeing the resources are available now or at future time requested with advanced resource allocation and reservation policies
• Automatically initiate provisioning and de-provisioning via policies to deliver heterogeneous physical and virtual resources in minutes instead of months, without IT staff intervention, and ensure the quick repurposing of resources
• Customizable administration dashboard that provides real-time reporting to identify issues and optimize performance.
• Automatically enforce service-levels and SLAs for cloud services in line with business priorities via SLA & resource sharing policies that reduce business risk and ensure satisfaction
• Automatically initiate live workload migrations to meet service needs and maximize utilization with Virtual Machine (VM) migration policies that pack VM workloads onto underutilized resources to maximize utilization and capacity or move them from overcommitted resources to avoid service performance issues
• Reduce resource power consumption with intelligent power management policies that power down idle resources and intelligently power them back on in preparation for anticipated workloads
• Automate the reservation and running of maintenance jobs across cloud resources to avoid disruption of regular workloads, reduce management complexity and increase the compliance of cloud resources
• Automate self-healing policy workflows and responses to specific events or application and resource states to reduce management cost and complexity and ensure needed service levels are delivered

Our customers use Moab Adaptive Computing Suite to solve key IT and business challenges that they face at different stages of data center and cloud maturity. These use cases are often inter-related and tend to build on one another as your data center or cloud strategy and solution evolves over time. It is important to consider not only the immediate challenge and use case you are focused on with your cloud or data center solution, but also the subsequent challenges that you want the solution to address in future stages. There are three major uses cases that most customers want and need to consider in selecting a cloud or data center solution. Many customers have a strategy for their data center or cloud solution that focuses on evolving their deployment over two to three stages. This ensures success at each stage and delivers greater value to the organization as the capabilities of each previous stage can be leveraged and extended to solve additional business challenges and provide expanded business benefits. Some organizations with more mature infrastructures and strategies may even look at implementing multiple use cases at one time.

Three key use cases Moab Adaptive Computing Suite can help customers address are:

• Agile Cloud or Data Center: Focused on speeding delivery of IT services and resources to the business from months to minutes with automated allocation decisions, provisioning and chargeback based on business policies.
• Automated Cloud or Data Center: Focused on improving resource utilization and capacity as well as service level delivery to reduce hardware and management costs and increase customer satisfaction with a greater number of cloud workloads and users, especially after implementing an agile cloud.
• Adaptive Cloud or Data Center: Focused on dynamically adapting cloud infrastructure to respond to changes in services demand or resource conditions to reduce risk and optimize service delivery to the business.

The new Moab Adaptive Computing Suite 6.1 release delivers key new automation enhancements that enable IT organizations to be more agile in delivering the services their business needs while ensuring that those services stay up and running through automation intelligence. The cloud management solution has extended its unique abilities to create agile, automated and adaptive data center and cloud environments that self-optimize and manage to meet dynamic business needs and conditions.

New enhancements and capabilities in Moab Adaptive Computing Suite 6.1 include:

• New workload management capabilities to improve self-service automation and cloud service reliability by automating customer’s best practice workflows for approving, provisioning and de-commissioning resources. The new workload templates reduce IT staff burden, configuration errors, and issues. The workload templates are also modular in design to enable common provisioning and decommissioning workflow steps to be re-used between cloud services and to leverage existing best practice IT process scripts for maximum efficiency. And these workload templates leverage Moab Adaptive Computing Suite's existing unique management abstraction layer that integrates and organizes the chaos of complex heterogeneous IT environments by orchestrating workflows across multiple heterogeneous resource management tools and integrating with existing workflow engines.
• New holistic management across each cloud service’s environment intelligently manages and applies policies, decisions and actions across the set of resources for a service. This ensures proper provisioning and decommissioning, and avoids issues during the service lifecycle as the different resources are dynamically managed. This mapping and consideration of the relationships between all of the resources of a service further improves the reliability of each service throughout its lifecycle. These extended holistic management capabilities build on Adaptive Computing’s leadership in multi-dimensional analytic policies that model IT resources, workloads, SLAs and priorities across domains to automate real-time decisions and actions.
• Consolidated cloud events reporting gives administrators real-time visibility into resource and workload events and issues to better understand and optimize the performance of their cloud environment. The new events reporting tracks, filters, and enables quick analysis of workload and resource activities and events across the cloud in one view giving administrators a powerful tool to understand and maintain control over dynamic cloud environments. Access to the events reporting is role-based to ensure security of the cloud environment, as only authorized IT staff can access and analyze data in this full cloud view of events.
• Easier portal customization enabled so organizations can tailor the cloud portal to their specific needs with new user interface framework enhancements. The enhancements make it easier for your web developers to create and customize pages in your portal to meet the specific needs of your organization, from branding to custom request forms and data integration.
• Enhanced chargeback flexibility allows you to set chargeback rates for custom billing scenarios such as set-up versus periodic resource usage. These enhancements build on the existing flexible chargeback rates and model capabilities available with the Moab Adaptive Computing Suite to ensure you can implement the showback and chargeback parameters your organization needs.
• Simplified installation for faster time to value with the new Adaptive Solution Installer that accelerates the basic installation process of the solution components so the focus can be on tailoring it to your environment and business needs.

See how the Moab Adaptive Computing Suite can help you create an agile, automated and adaptive cloud and data center that self-optimizes to meet the dynamic needs of your business. Request a demo , Request a call from a solution advisor who can answer your questions or set up an evaluation, and help you tailor a solution that addresses your organization’s needs.