“With Digital Fuel's unique solution, companies can attain the necessary cost visibility to make critical IT decisions and know what the business impact will be—many, in all likelihood, for the first time ever.”
– George Spalding, VP
Pink Elephant

Digital Fuel Announces Out-of-the-Box IT Financial Management Solution For VMware Cloud And Virtual Environments

Fast, Easily Deployed Solution Produces Major Cost Savings; Platform Easily Allocates Costs, Measures Unit Cost, and Provides TCO of VMware-Based Virtual and Cloud IT Services

SAN MATEO, CA - (June 29, 2010) - Digital Fuel, the leader in SaaS IT Financial Management solutions, today announced the extension of its IT Cloud Cost Management to encompass cloud and virtual environments enabled by VMware and its vSphere virtual infrastructure platform. Digital Fuel has pioneered out-of-the-box IT financial management for cloud computing, enabling IT organizations to track the Total Cost of Operation (TCO), unit cost and performance of specific services and optimize the business value of cloud and virtual environments.

By integrating with the vSphere Webservice API, Digital Fuel’s IT Cloud Cost Management is uniquely able to quickly map cloud and virtual VMware entities and collect performance and usage data. It then combines those results with Digital Fuel’s application capabilities and cost information, in order to give IT organizations a better understanding of the cost of applications and IT services running atop virtual environments based on their resource utilization.

As a VMware partner, Digital Fuel offers a powerful solution for IT executives seeking better control over the cost and business value from their cloud and virtual infrastructure. In addition to TCO and unit cost, IT Cloud Cost Management allows IT departments to manage SLAs of virtual and cloud environments, accurately bill and charge based on usage, make use of underutilized resources, and pinpoint resource bottlenecks.

"VMware is revolutionizing enterprise computing by supporting virtualized solutions for nearly any IT need, from server and desktop virtualization to business continuity and resource consolidation," stated Yisrael Dancziger, President and CEO of Digital Fuel. "This progress creates opportunities for impressive gains from understanding and measuring the cost and value of cloud-based computing. Digital Fuel IT Cloud Cost Management as a single and unified solution for managing cost and value across multiple cloud services, vendors and platforms helps VMware customers realize the full benefit of virtualization."

Out-of-the-Box Solution

Digital Fuel’s IT Cloud Cost Management is a SaaS solution that is easy and quick to access. In a VMware environment, the technology employs the Digital Fuel VMware Connector to discover the user’s VMware topology, mapping virtual datacenters, compute resources and associated virtual machines. It then collects performance data including CPU, memory, network and disk space usage.

Once this data is available, the system combines it with application capabilities and cost information, giving the IT department the reports it needs to measure unit cost, uncover total cost of ownership and its breakdown, free underutilized resources, and reduce or eliminate bottlenecks that can cause application or service outages.

Digital Fuel’s utilization reports provide a firm basis for cost-saving consolidation and virtualization initiatives. The reports identify underutilized compute resources such as hosts or clusters; once found, VMware’s vMotion can be used to migrate virtual machines to different hosts. Digital Fuel’s platform detects the migration changes automatically and continues collecting data without interruption.

Comprehensive IT Business Management

In addition to its cost allocation, budgeting, SLA management and billing/chargeback capabilities, Digital Fuel IT Cloud Cost Management includes a "what-if" analyzer that models costs of IT services including cloud-based cost drivers enabling IT organizations to better plan and optimize based on different available options and business and technology scenarios. It also provides a method for meeting tax and regulatory compliance mandates in an auditable and justifiable manner based on usage, and offers a full range of reports, dashboards, benchmarks, templates and cost models for controlling and optimizing cloud-based IT environments.

To learn more about Digital Fuel’s IT cloud Cost Management for VMware and its vSphere virtual infrastructure platform, a free webinar conducted by VMware and Digital Fuel is available for viewing at http://bit.ly/9uKZfn. A live demo and free workshop is also available about the Digital Fuel IT Cloud Cost Management solution at http://www.digitalfuel.com/solutions/cloud-computing.php.

About Digital Fuel:

Digital Fuel Technologies, Inc., is the leading provider of SaaS IT Business Management solutions including IT Cost Management and Service Level Management (SLM) applications used by enterprises and cloud service providers. The company's SaaS applications manage billions in IT, telco and other business services at companies and governments around the world including BBC, BT, Capital One, Cisco, Computacenter, CSC, Cummins, Dell, Deutsche Bank, General Electric, Global Crossing, IBM, Nationwide, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Siemens, SITA, Sprint, Steria, Telefonica, Telus, VW and Wipro. Digital Fuel is headquartered in San Mateo, California, USA, with offices across North America and Europe. Learn more at www.DigitalFuel.com.