Cloud Cruiser Extends Cost-Analysis Tool for Public, Private Clouds

Cloud Cruiser has extended the analytics engine designed to help IT decision makers determine whether it's more financially feasible to use private or public cloud services.

The company's new Cost Advisor tool tracks usage of datacenter resources, including compute, network and storage capacity, and compares with public cloud service usage and costs. It uses the metrics to predict costs and determine whether it would be more affordable to run specific jobs in a private or public cloud based on historical and future usage.

Cost Advisor initially works in hybrid cloud scenarios running on Microsoft's Windows Server with System Center and the Windows Azure Pack, as well as with its Windows Azure public cloud service, explained Nick van der Zweep, Cloud Cruiser's VP of strategy. However, the company plans to roll out Cost Advisor on the other platforms its namesake product supports, including Amazon Web Services, VMware, Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace. 

"Our intent is to go broad," van der Zweep said.

"We are able to normalize the data that we're getting from Windows Azure private and public clouds, and then we compare and contrast and do recommendations to customers," he added. "Ultimately, you're going to see us do that across multiple private and public clouds and make recommendations to customers based on our financial analytics where it's best to put your workloads."

Cloud Cruiser is known for its namesake product, used to help CIOs and CFOs track usage of public and private cloud services, provide charge back, and determine multitenant billing and cost of public cloud services.

The company this week also announced a partnership with Rackspace, which will support Cloud Cruiser on OpenStack-based Rackspace Private Cloud. It will be bundled with the Rackspace offering but the companies have not yet struck any kind of resale deal.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/20/2014 at 12:17 PM