Bluelock Portfolio™

The first cloud-aware decision support tool.
While cloud computing continues to deliver on the promise of enabling businesses to be more agile, today’s information professionals face an increasing pressure to deliver the most value for every dollar spent on technology. While helpful, this new more agile infrastructure comes with a cost that can quickly spin out of control if left unchecked. However, with effective visibility and control, it becomes much easier to align your utilization and spending. Bluelock Portfolio™, the first cloud-aware decision support tool, is designed to deliver on this promise by enabling you to make fast effective decisions and wrench the most value out of the cloud.

Managing services hosted in the cloud can be a challenge, one that public cloud provider Bluelock is addressing with Bluelock Portfolio, a decision support tool that enables customers to break down their cloud costs by region, site location, line of business or application. Users can identify which business units, applications or technology components compose the lion’s share of their cloud costs, and quickly pinpoint spending trends. They can then educate their teams about what is really happening in their environment, and the financial impact of their actions.
-Lynn Greiner, The Globe and Mail

Release Notes

KEY BENEFITS

Truly understand the cost of IT
Spot the outliers
Lower your bill
Act quickly
Avoid unnecessary spending
Forecast future spending

TRULY UNDERSTAND THE COST OF IT

Have you ever wondered how much it costs to run a particular application, support a particular line of business or know your total software licensing spend last quarter? Bluelock Portfolio allows you to break your cloud costs down by region, site location, line of business, application, resource component or even by Virtual Datacenter.

SPOT THE OUTLIERS

One of the most challenging areas of managing cost and technology resources is to identify which business units, applications or technology components are consuming the largest amounts of your budget or bill. 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, 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.

STAY OUT OF THE LINE OF FIRE

Have you ever been caught between the application owners and the folks who pay the bills? All too often, the frustration is directed at the messenger and not at the actual problem. Bluelock Portfolio helps you to quickly pinpoint spending trends and outliers so that you can help educate your team about what is really happening in your environment and the impact of specific behaviors. This keeps the conversation where it should be.

LOWER YOUR BILL

Fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding the actual requirements of an application often lead to the over-provisioning of precious and expensive technology resources. This approach often leads to high costs or the starvation of applications competing for the same resources. Bluelock Portfolio can help you find applications that are over-provisioned by identifying those that have too many resources dedicated to them compared to their actual historical usage. You can easily adjust your Virtual Datacenter or work with Bluelock Client Support to make the appropriate changes to better align your spending with your resources.

AVOID UNNECESSARY SPENDING

Another way to lower your costs is to use historical trending to spot potential overages that will take you into a more expensive burst mode. Getting ahead of these bursts and allocating the appropriate amount of resources allows you to continue to consume at the lowest rate available.

FORECAST FUTURE SPENDING

In many cases, it’s not the actual overspending that causes trouble; it’s the fact that the increase in spending was a surprise and either wasn’t in the budget, isn’t in line with the revenue generated by the application, or simply happened much soon- er 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 so that they can make any necessary adjustments.

ACT QUICKLY

If you spot an opportunity to lower your cost, you can take action from within Bluelock Portfolio by clicking through to our self-service portal powered by VMware vCloud® Director. In vCloud Director you can turn up or down the amount of resources inside your Virtual Datacenter. Because the cost for resources like memory, CPU and bandwidth are metered on an daily basis, the ability to change your allocation levels allows you to stay on budget.

DON’T GO IT ALONE

So you’ve looked at the charts and data inside of Bluelock Portfolio but still aren’t quite sure what the best, if any, changes should be to your Virtual Datacenter environment? Let us know. Our trained staff has been managing application environments in the cloud for a long time and are ready to help guide you in making better decisions. These decisions can be very tactical to help deliver some short term gains, or focused more on the future 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.