A Boston-based startup that proposes to bring the economics of public cloud infrastructure to the private data center launches today with an open source stack that it says can dramatically increase utilization of IT resources while optimizing the availability of computing power for other business needs.

Verilume, Inc.‘s product suite is said to enable IT organizations to put idle or new resources to work in a flexible cloud with user self-provisioning and IT administrative control. The product takes advantage of the fact that the typical corporate data center runs at only about 25 percent utilization, said Dan Petrozzo, a tech entrepreneur who spent 12 years as a CIO at Goldman Sachs, Fidelity and Morgan Stanley. “We essentially help enterprises become service providers in their own right using service provider economics,” he said.

The company’s namesake product is built upon the OpenStack cloud platform, with Seph used for storage and Open vSwitch for network switching. It consists of three basic components:

Verilume Cloud Builder provides push-button deployment of analytics and cloud services using existing, idle and new resources. Verilume said Cloud Builder dynamically architects and automates the deployment of these new services at any scale, instantiating clouds using OpenStack services, establishing secure networking and building a software-defined storage platform automatically. IT administrators can define parameters for cloud deployment according to factors like resource consumption, time and job priority.

Verilume Forecaster is a set of machine-learning technologies that help optimize IT resources in the short-term and make recommendations that administrators can used to estimate availability for their use in an ad hoc cloud.

Verilume Cloud Service is a portal that gives users a single place to access these analytics and cloud services. Prospective users can see what resources are available and provision new infrastructure in the form of virtual machines and storage or new Hadoop clusters.

The initial release of Verilume runs only on top of the VMware hypervisor, but other platforms will be supported in the future, Petrozzo said. The company also plans to add hybrid cloud support in the next release so that users can self-provision virtual instances that span on- and off-premise resources.

Auto-aggregation

Users install Verilume by defining what resources are available as virtual machines. ”We’ve written a set of workflow technologies to aggregate them and instantiate a cloud service on top of them that encompasses networking, computer and storage services,” Petrozzo said. For security and manageability, “We create the ability for the customer to have a tenant market where customers can isolate their workloads.”

Virtual machines can be aggregated automatically. If bare metal hardware is part of the picture, administrators can fill out a template that defines how the resource is to be used. Verilume then launches an instance of KVM to create a temporary virtual server and adds it to the cloud.

The initial release supports Hadoop out of the box, with Docker and Apache Spark support planned for the near term. Unsupported applications can be deployed via templating, in the same way that such applications are hosted on a public cloud service.

Petrozzo said an ideal deployment scenario for the company’s products is a disaster recovery (DR) center, which is designed to sit idle nearly all the time. Verilume could be used to provision that resource for use in non-mission critical applications, with the ad hoc VMs instructed to shut down if the DR facility is needed.

Petrozzo said Verilume has three customers in production with the product suite. Pricing is on a per-node basis, with the first two nodes free and additional loads priced at $3,500 each with volume discounts available.