insights report: openqrm 5.1 is available

7/30/2019 INSIGHTS Report: openQRM 5.1 is available

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openQRM 5.1 is available

OpenStack and Eucalyptus have a serious competitor

INSIGHTS Report

Analyst: Rene Buest

September 02, 2013

INSIGHTS

iminate the Status Quo Find your Blue Ocean


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2013 NewAgeDisruption.com

openQRM-Enterprise has released version 5.1 of its data center management and cloud infrastructure software

openQRM. With the new release all customers are now able to enjoy, among other things, to connect their private cloud

infrastructure with public cloud environments, and thus to span a hybrid cloud. The overall picture looks really promising.

Although the heading at first can suspect that openQRM is something completely new, which is trying to outstrip

OpenStack or Eucalyptus. But this is not by a long shot. openQRM already exists since 2004 and has built up a wide rangeof functions over the years. The open source project from Cologne, Germany unfortunately lost a little in the crowd,

because the marketing machines behind OpenStack and Eucalypts run at full speed and the loudspeakers are many times

over. Certainly, openQRM must not hide from them. On the contrary, with version 5.1, Rechenburg's team again has

vigorously gain functions and particular enhances the user experience

The new features in openQRM 5.1

openQRM-Enterprise sees in the hybrid cloud an important significance for the future of cloud as well. For this reason,

openQRM 5.1 was extended with a plugin to span a hybrid cloud with the cloud infrastructures of the Amazon Web Services

(AWS), Eucalyptus Cloud and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). Thus, openQRM is using AWS as well as Eucalyptus and UEC

as a resource provider for more computing power and memory and is able to manage public cloud infrastructures as well

as local virtual machines. This allows administrators, based on openQRM, to transparently provide their end-users Amazon

AMIs via a cloud portal and to monitor the state of the virtual machines via Nagios.

Another new feature is the tight integration of Puppet. With that end-users can order virtual machines as well as public

cloud infrastructures with personalized, managed software stacks. The best technical renovation is the consideration of the

Amazon Web Services high-availability concept. Does an Amazon EC2 instance fail, automatically a new one starts.

openQRM 5.1 is even able to offset the outage of an entire Amazon Availability Zone (AZ). Is an AZ not available anymore

the correlate EC instance will be started in another Availability Zone of the same region.

According to CEO Matt Rechenburg, openQRM-Enterprise expands the open source solution openQRM consistently with

cloud spanning management solutions in order to empower its customers to flexibility grow beyond the borders of their

own IT capabilities.

In addition to technical enhancements much emphasis was placed on ease of use as well. In openQRM 5.1 the user interface

for the administrator was completely revised. This ensures a better overview and user guide. Even the dashboard, as a

central point has benefited greatly, by all of the information such as the status of the data center, are displayed at a glance.

New features have been introduced for the openQRM-Enterprise Edition, too. This includes a new plugin for role-based

access rights management, which allows fine-grained setting permissions for administrators within the entire openQRM

system. With that complete enterprise topologies can be mapped to openQRM roles in order to restrict administrators who

are responsible only for virtualization in the enterprise to the management and provisioning of virtual machines.

Further renovations in openQRM 5.1 include an improved support for virtualization technology KVM, by now using it for

KVM GlusterFS volumes as well. In addition, VMware technologies are better supported. This means that now even existingVMware ESX systems can be managed as well as local or over the network bootable VMware ESX machines and can be

install and managed.


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openQRM takes a big step forward

Although openQRM significantly longer exists on the market as OpenStack or Eucalyptus. Nevertheless, the level of

awareness of both projects is larger. This is mainly due to the substantial marketing efforts of both the OpenStack

community and of Eucalyptus. But technological and functional openQRM must not hide. On the contrary, openQRMsfunctions is many times more powerful than that of OpenStack or Eucalyptus. Where the two focus exclusively on the topic

of cloud, openQRM also has a complete data center management solution included.

Due to the long history openQRM has received many new and important features in recent years. However, as a result it

also lose track of what the solution is able to afford. But who has understood, that openQRM is composed of integrated

building blocks such as "Data Center Management", "Cloud Backend" and "Cloud Portal", will recognize that the open source

solution, especially in the construction of private clouds, provides an advantage over OpenStack and Eucalyptus. Especially

the area of data center management must not be neglected for building a cloud to keep track and control of its

infrastructure.

With version 5.0, the structures already begun to sharpen and to summarize the individual functions into workflows. This

was worked out by the 5.1 release once again. The new look and layout of the openQRM backend has been completely

overhauled. It looks tidier and easier to use and will positive surprise all customers.

The extension with the hybrid cloud functionality is an important step for the future of openQRM. The result of the

Rackspace 2013 Hybrid Cloud survey1 showed that 60 percent of IT decision-makers have the hybrid cloud as the main goal

in mind. Here 60 percent will or have withdrawn their applications and workloads in the public cloud. 41 percent left the

public cloud partially. 19 percent want to leave the public cloud even completely. The reasons for the use of a hybrid cloud

rather than a public cloud are higher security (52 percent), more control (42 percent) and better performance and higher

reliability (37 percent). The top benefits, which hybrid cloud users report, including more control (59 percent), a higher

security (54 percent), a higher reliability (48 percent), cost savings (46 percent) and better performance (44 percent).

openQRM not surprisingly orientates at the current public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. Thus, in combination withEucalyptus or other Amazon compatible cloud infrastructures, openQRM can also be used to build massively scalable hybrid

cloud infrastructures. For this purpose openQRM focuses on its proven plugin-concept and integrates Amazon EC2, S3 and

Eucalyptus exactly this way. Besides its own resources from a private openQRM Cloud, Amazon and Eucalyptus are used as

further resource providers to get more computing power quickly and easily.

The absolute killer features include the automatic applications deployment using Puppet, with which the end-user to

conveniently and automatically can provide EC2 instances with a complete software stack itself, as well as the consideration

of the Amazon Availability Zone-wide high-availability functionality, which is neglected by many cloud users again and again

due to ignorance. But even the improved integration of technologies such as VMware ESX systems should not be ignored.

Finally, VMware is still the leading virtualization technology on the market. Thus openQRM also increases its attractiveness

to be used as an open source solution for the management and control of VMware environments.

Technological and functional openQRM is on a very good path into the future. However, bigger investments in public

relations and marketing are imperative.

1 Rackspace 2013 Hybrid Cloud Survey: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/rackspace-2013-hybrid-cloud-

survey-results


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Contact

New Age DisruptionEliminate the Status Quo Find your Blue Ocean

Rene Buest

Dipl.-Informatiker (FH)

M.Sc. in IT-Management and Information Systems

Koernerstrasse 30

24103 Kiel

Phone: +49 (0)431 28 93 42 52Mobile: +49 (0)173 36 49 461

E-Mail: [email protected]

Web: http://newagedisruption.com

Twitter: @ReneBuest

CloudUser: http://clouduser.de

insights report: openqrm 5.1 is available

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