Hyper9, Inc., the enterprise-class virtualization management company, today announced its latest product release focused on bringing greater transparency to the “black box” of virtualization initiatives. The solution features a Cloud Cost Estimator Lens, a customizable dashboard that uses data and analytics to estimate how much it would cost to run a company’s virtual machines on Amazon EC2. Additional features include integration with common collaboration tools such as Microsoft SharePoint, wikis and other external web portals, and support for VMware vSphere 4.1.

While the operational benefits of virtualization have been well-established, it’s often difficult for application teams and business stakeholders to understand how virtualization ties back to tier-1 business processes – and to collaborate and share these insights back and forth.

Hyper9’s latest release helps organizations pinpoint how much memory and CPU capacity VMs have been allocated, and how much network bandwidth and storage throughput they are consuming, and then translates those costs into what they would pay to run a mirror environment in Amazon’s EC2. This helps IT set and compare baselines between internal and external cloud deployments, and recommend the best investment decisions for the business.

Integration with third-party collaboration portals such as SharePoint provides another level of critical transparency. Using Hyper9, business owners for a key service or application can now access real-time reports showing the uptime of critical VMs, the amount of resources they are consuming, and the potential “chargeback” cost to the business – without ever leaving their SharePoint application. This information can then be shared cross-organizationally to prioritize virtualization initiatives and focus investments on the areas of greatest benefit to the business.

“One of the key barriers to virtualization success is the lack of transparency into how critical elements are performing, what they cost, and how those costs tie back to the business,” said Bill Kennedy, CEO of Hyper9. “With our new Cloud Cost Estimator and third-party portal integration, we can help enterprises analyze that data in the context of their own internal operations, project those costs to other external environments, and even share that information cross-organizationally for more strategic decision-making.”

For more info, visit: https://www.hyper9.com/product_lenses.aspx.  To request a demo, go to: https://downloads.hyper9.com/h9ds/scheduledemo.jsf.