Credit Suisse Spawn DynamicOps Enters Private Cloud Game

The cloud-management space got a little more crowded today with the release of DynamicOps’ Cloud Automation Center. That market is currently full of hot startup vendors like Cloud.com, Nimbula, Eucalyptus and Abiquo, all of whom are trying to give companies out-of-the-box internal clouds that mimic the public-cloud experience while maintaining existing IT policies, so DynamicOps has a great deal of competition. However, the Lexington, Mass.-based company does have a couple of aces in the hole that might make it particularly appealing to enterprise customers.

One is its evolution from an internally developed virtualization-management solution at megabank Credit Suisse into, a spinoff company selling that software to the greater IT community in 2008. Credit Suisse was managing thousands of virtual servers and desktops while DynamicOps’ underlying Virtual Resource Manager software was developed, so scalability isn’t an issue. In fact, said VP of Marketing Rich Bordeaux, one customer currently manages 30,000 VMs and virtual desktops and is looking to have more than 60,000 within 18 months.

Furthermore, because the bank wasn’t about to move certain application from physical servers, physical-resource management is inherent in the Cloud Automation Manager. The new features in Cloud Automation Manager are what make it truly cloudy, though: multitenancy, self-service provisioning, and the ability to provision and manage resources from Amazon EC2.

DynamicOps’ other ace is that Cloud Automation Manager is an integral part of Dell’s recently announced Virtual Integrated System (VIS) offering. The DynamicOps software is the foundation of the VIS Self-Service Creator component. VIS is Dell’s attempt to combat competitors’ converged infrastructure solutions (e.g., Cisco UCS and HP BladeMatrix), so such an OEM deal should help validate DynamicOps’ claims of enterprise-readiness (if the Credit Suisse heritage doesn’t already do so).

Of course, it’s hard to get too excited about any cloud software right now before organizations actually start buying it. Web hosts and MSPs have been buying up software from vendors like VMware, Cloud.com and 3tera, but most other businesses appear to be doing no more than dipping their toes in the water right now.  DynamicOps has a strong virtualization-management history, though, and an existing customer base to tout (and sell), so perhaps it can break in where others appear to be left outside.