Empower your customers to manage their virtual infrastructure whenever they want

The quickest way to get an enterprise grade cloud offering to market

The virtual server management capability offered within Cortex enables hosted service providers to rapidly deliver to market a cloud based "virtual datacenter" offering. Cortex securely delegates control of customer resources to end-users, letting administrators have direct management of their own virtual servers and networks through the Cortex control panel, while allowing you to retain control of your hardware.

• No need for development skills, powershell expertise or lengthy research
• Quickly build and change product offerings
• Deliver working solutions to customers in weeks, not months or years
• Easy to use with minimal training
• Reseller support allows you to deliver through channel partners from day 1

Leading Edge Technology

Cortex adds a multi-tenant, reseller enabled layer above Microsoft System Center and Windows 2008 R2. Cortex lets you deliver more value by offering pooled resource management and support for virtual networking. This means that customers can build their own servers, network them together and manage their own pool of virtual resource in their own time frame without needing any involvement from your help desk.

Virtual Datacenter - Delivered

Cortex offers more than virtual server management, Cortex allows service providers to easily sell pools of resource across farms of servers and allow customers to build their own networked virtual servers. These features are attractive to enterprises and are well suited to service providers that want more than just low-value hosting.

Sell through a channel

The Cortex platform has extensive white-labelling and channel features that are fully supported within the Cortex Virtual Datacenter service. Resellers can be granted exclusive access to host servers,

Pooled resources

Cortex allows a customer to be assigned a resource pool – this includes limits on total disk storage, memory, processors and number of Virtual Machines. Once assigned, the customer can easily create, manage, stop, start, upgrade and downgrade their Virtual Servers through the Cortex control panel. If more resource is needed at any time, this can quickly be added by the customer’s reseller.

Virtual Networking

Customers can be assigned with one or more virtual networks, Cortex can automatically assign a VLAN tag or allow this to be configured manually. Once setup, the customer can quickly add or remove virtual servers from the available networks. Cortex allows virtual networks to span across multiple physical hosts managed by the same SCVMM server, this means that the customers virtual servers can be distributed across hosts ensuring maximum utilisation and increased flexibility.

Host Management

Customers/Resellers can be constrained to use a specific host or sets of host machines; this gives providers the ability to sell dedicated host machines that have the value-added management capability offered by Cortex. New virtual machines are automatically assigned to the most appropriate host based on the specification of the virtual machine.

Manage multiple SCVMM Instances

Cortex can be connected to any number of SCVMM instances, allowing management of large numbers of physical hosts and virtual machines.

Server template management

Pre-built server templates in the SCVMM library can be assigned to end customers. For Windows images, these can include server license keys, or the image can be left without a license key and the customer can use their own when building a new server.

Self-management features for customer administrators

• Create blank virtual machine, or create machine from pre-existing template
• Start/Stop/Pause virtual machine
• Upgrade/Downgrade server memory
• Add physical disks and upgrade disk size
• Add multiple CD/DVD drives
• Change CD/DVD media
• Quick connect directly to server console
• View processor usage
• Add/remove connections to virtual networks
• Quick view of current resource usage

Reports

Cortex allows reports to be published to service provider users, resellers and end customer users. The Virtual Datacenter solution comes with a standard set of usage reports

• Service Provider - View host resource utilisation
• Reseller/Service Provider - view aggregated summary of resource vs actual for all sub-customers
• Customer - view summary of machine usage

See screenshots of the control panel