Abstract: A system of portable and flexible deployment of dedicated and virtual servers comprises a plurality of geographically-dispersed data centers comprising a plurality of dedicated servers, a plurality of hosts operable to host a plurality of virtual servers, a management workstation operable to capture dedicated and virtual server images, an image repository operable to store the captured server images, and an intra-data center networking infrastructure enabling communication within the data center. An integrated management system is operable to control and manage deployment of server images to dedicated and virtual servers located in a user-specified data center, and an inter-data center networking infrastructure enables communication between the plurality of data centers.

Abstract: Various embodiments of a object metric tracking system are disclosed, applicable to distributed systems composed of a variety of computing nodes coupled together via a network. The computing nodes are arranged in various physical and virtual configurations via a configuration system. Detector nodes are also coupled to the distributed system, each node including one or more modules dedicated to collecting data about tracked system metrics. The data from the detector nodes is sent to a processing engine where it is decomposed for quick storage in a data storage pool including a number of independent storage nodes. A smart metric tracking object is used to provide programmatic access to the data in the storage pool, automatically abstracting away the details of the storage system. A reporter component processes the data and provides human or machine-readable reports for integration with various systems, including a reporting website.