Elastra Corp., which provides application infrastructure automation, has upped the ante with the announcement this week of Elastra Cloud Server (ECS) 2.0 Enterprise Edition. The new addition from the San Francisco company will help IT organizations leverage the economics of cloud computing, while preserving existing architectural practices and corporate policies.

Relying on an increased level of automation, the enterprise edition:

• Automatically generates deployment plans and provisions sophisticated systems that are optimized to minimize operational and capital expenses. At the same time, applications are deployed to be compliant with the customers’ own sets of policies, procedures, and service level agreements (SLAs).
• Cuts the lead times IT needs to create complex development, testing, and production environments by automating the processes traditionally managed by hand or via hand-crafted scripts.
• Lets IT organizations maintain control of their operations using familiar tools and technologies while delivering on-demand, self-service system provisioning to their users.

The beta program for the enterprise edition of Elastra Cloud Server involved customers from a variety of industries including: a large European telecommunications company, a leading US federal government systems integrator, and a major IT services and outsourcing company.

Elastra offers a free edition of ECS running on Amazon Web Services and an enterprise edition for private data centers.

I was impressed with Elastra when I was initially briefed in 2007. They have many of the right features for what the cloud market will demand. More data centers will be deploying "private cloud" attributes, and those will become yet larger portions of modern data centers.