Bluelock Portfolio™
Manage and forecast cloud costs.
While cloud computing continues to deliver on the promise of enabling businesses to be more agile, today’s information professionals face increasing pressure to deliver the most value possible for every dollar spent on technology. Bluelock Portfolio™ is designed to enable you to make fast, effective decisions and wrench the most value out of the cloud.
The visibility and control provided by Bluelock Portfolio, the first tool of its kind, makes it easy to control your cloud resource use as well as your cloud spend.Alleviate any worry about your bill being different than you expected at the end of each month when you use Portfolio to manage, forecast and control your costs at any time.
Manage costs by business unit, application and project.
Identifying which business units, applications and technology components are consuming the largest amounts of your budget or bill is no easy feat for many companies using cloud.
Truly understanding this data can enable you to consider alternative ways of delivering your application that might drive additional efficiency. This could mean working with the developers or your software vendor to tune their usage of CPU or RAM or creating a script to purge unnecessary log files and lower your storage costs. It can also empower you to better explain your costs to a business unit, your management or the finance department if they need a better understanding of technology cost for a given application.
Bluelock Portfolio allows you to quickly and easily create different views of your data so that you can produce the right information for your business.
Lower your costs.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding the actual requirements of an application often lead to over-provisioning precious and expensive technology resources. This approach often leads to high costs or the starvation of applications competing for the same resources.
By looking at actual, historical usage analytics Bluelock Portfolio helps identify applications that are not regularly using all of their allocated resources. Use this information to easily adjust your Bluelock Virtual Datacenter resource allocations and maximize efficiency by clicking over to VMware vCloud Director from Portfolio or by working with Bluelock Support.
Because Bluelock offers two types of Virtual Datacenters, you can also create greater cost efficiency by optimizing which VDCs your applications are running in. If you have a more transient application or workload, using a 2-Series Virtual Datacenter allows you to turn on and off resources at any moment while paying only for what is being used that month. Customers are able to create efficiency by placing applications or workloads that require greater performance and security and have a known amount of resources needed each month in the 5-Series Virtual Datacenters. Customers commit to the resources they know they’ll use and use burst capabilities to manage spikes in usage and traffic. Combine those options with ability to the visibility and control inherent in Bluelock Portfolio, and you can achieve even greater cost efficiency by managing your workloads across VDC types and using burst capabilities to strongly align your cloud spend with your business success.
Forecast future spending.
In many cases, it’s not the actual overspending that causes trouble; it’s the fact that the increase is a surprise. Maybe it wasn’t in the budget or isn’t in line with the revenue generated by the application. Or maybe the increase simply came much sooner than expected.
With Bluelock Portfolio’s performance charts, you can spot utilization growth over time and project future needs before they happen. This allows you to plan better, or alert other areas of your business that might be impacted, and make necessary adjustments.
Act quickly to avoid a poor user experience.
If you spot a need for more resources, you can take action from within Bluelock Portfolio by clicking through to our self-service portal, powered by VMware vCloud® Director.
Once in vCloud Director, turn up or down the amount of resources inside your Virtual Datacenter. The cost for resources like memory, CPU and bandwidth are metered on a daily basis, so you have the ability to change your allocation levels and stay on budget.
Don't go at it alone.
Once you’ve looked at the charts and data inside of Bluelock Portfolio you might still have questions. You may want an outsider’s opinion on what the data is telling you. Our trained staff has a successful history managing application environments in the cloud and is happy to guide you through the decision-making process.
These decisions can be tactical, to help deliver some short term gains, or may be more focused on the future. For example, if you have a new project coming up and want to better understand the cost and resource requirements we can also leverage our experience across hundreds of other applications to determine a corresponding profile for your new application that might help right-size your environment on day one.