16 of the most useful cloud management tools

A growing set of services allow customers to more easily track their cloud usage

One of the biggest concerns users have with public cloud resources is not knowing how much they will cost, given the pay-as-you-go model.

"IT shops are becoming cost centers for service delivery," says William Fellows, a researcher at the 451 Group. "But they're looking for ways to determine how their clouds are running, how much it's costing and whether it's a good value."

CLOUD SHOWDOWN: Amazon vs. Rackspace (OpenStack) vs. Microsoft vs. Google

Page 3 of 3

More information: BMC

Capgemini: Another AWS Partner, Capgemini provides similar services to BMC, including consulting and tools for migrating applications or starting new workloads in AWS's cloud.

More information: Capgemini

CA Technologies: CA Technologies cloud management tools, including CA AppLogic, allow users to deploy and scale existing applications across public and private cloud environments with build in monitoring features using a graphic user interface (GUI) that requires no changes to the application's code. CA has recently enhances its support to deploy management of AWS workloads too.

More information: CA Technologies

Hewlett-Packard: HP has been making a lot of announcements recently about its Converged Cloud Strategy, which it says is a common platform across public and private clouds for users. Based on OpenStack code, the idea is to manage private clouds build on HP servers and have the ability to scale up into HP's recently launched public cloud, all with the same platform. The company has emphasized its support for multiple types of hypervisors on the private cloud side, but has not talked as much about enabling workloads across multiple public cloud providers though.

More information: HP cloud

IBM: IBM SmartCloud is the omnibus suite of services that provide a range of features, from monitoring the health and status of cloud resources, while also allowing automated connections to compute and storage resources from IBM or other vendors.

More information: IBM SmartCloud

ServiceMesh: ServiceMesh manages public, private and hybrid clouds across a common platform, but allowing separate policies for different environments based on access controls and auditing. It charters on a per-virtual machine basis.

More information: ServiceMesh

VMware IT Business Management Suite: Optimized for VMware environments, the company's ITBM provides usage metrics for centralized management of a private cloud, allowing CIOs to become "IT service brokers," the company says. ITBM allows users to set alerts based on cost and service level, and it allows granular information about past, present and predicted future use by individuals and departments as well.

More information: VMware ITBM

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

Read more about cloud computing in Network World's Cloud Computing section.