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CloudVelox Releases One Hybrid Cloud™ 4.0

CloudVelox has announced new enterprise-grade automated cloud workload mobility and optimization capabilities with enhanced management and control features for its One Hybrid Cloud™ (OHC) software. Through automation, OHC accelerates workload mobility and optimization in the cloud by matching data center environments with optimal cloud services to deliver cost savings or improved application performance, without requiring specialized cloud skills. New features for cloud optimization include: application-centric instance tagging, placement groups, multiple security groups, Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. New features for managing workload mobility include comprehensive system reporting and alerts for the successful completion of workload migrations to the cloud. With the new powerful suite of OHC features, enterprises are able to accelerate time to value, are further equipped to meet regulatory and compliance requirements and reduce IT effort while enhancing system visibility, management and control.

According to an IDC study1, nearly 68 percent of organizations are using some form of cloud to help drive business outcomes; however, only three percent have optimized cloud strategies in place today. Businesses are challenged by unexpected cloud costs, the complexity of mapping security and data policies from the data center to the cloud, a scarcity of skilled cloud engineers, and a lack of visibility into monitoring the status of mass workload migrations.

Enterprises want to benefit from the advantages of the public cloud, but without optimization they risk paying for services they don’t need, or not provisioning enough of the services they do need to support the availability and performance required for mission critical applications. Automation is the key to addressing these challenges, by enabling accelerated workload mobility and optimization at scale and completing “mass migrations” successfully in a matter of weeks, instead of up to 12 months.

“’Lift and Shift’ alone to the cloud has provided limited business value and control,” said Raj Dhingra, CloudVelox CEO. “When enterprises migrate brownfield applications to the cloud there can be dramatic inefficiencies if they are not optimized for the new environment. Now businesses can execute migrations with an unprecedented, automated ‘Lift and Optimize’ approach that ensures they receive the full benefits of the public cloud, whether that means reduced costs or improved performance. By matching the application environment in the datacenter to the optimal cloud compute and storage infrastructure whether based on cost or performance, and mapping data center network and security policies to cloud services — One Hybrid Cloud enhances management and control over applications without sacrificing cloud agility and accelerates the payback for even the most complex environments.”

In addition to automated workload migration to the cloud, CloudVelox is the industry’s first automation solution to combine workload mobility and workload optimization. CloudVelox approaches workload optimization in three phases of the cloud optimization lifecycle including pre-migration optimization — available now — and will build on the initial phase with additional features in the second continuous optimization phase and third fully optimized phase later this year:

  • Pre-migration optimization –leverages CloudVelox’s automated application blueprinting capabilities, matching the application’s data center infrastructure characteristics to the appropriate cloud compute, storage, network and security services prior to migrating the workloads to the cloud
  • Continuous Optimization (available summer 2017) — enables continuous optimization of migrated workloads by monitoring key areas such as instance, storage, availability and security policy to deliver actionable insights that can yield cost savings, better performance and availability as well as compliance with regulatory requirements
  • Fully Optimized (available summer 2017) — fully optimized approach further leverages cloud native services to deliver additional agility, cost savings and higher availability. For example, future features in the company’s cloud optimization roadmap include support for autoscale, RDS (MySQL and Oracle) and automated ELB across multiple instances

The One Hybrid Cloud 4.0 include new application-centric security groups, and application-centric placement groups along with comprehensive status reporting and alerts. Security groups can be assigned to a single system or a group of systems to control flow of traffic between and to apps in the cloud, and enable security policies to be mapped from the data center to the cloud to meet regulatory and compliance requirements. An app or a group of systems can be assigned to a placement group in a selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) region to enable performance optimization for applications requiring high performance compute, low latency and lots of network I/O. Automating the assignment of placement groups prior to migration also reduces IT effort in migrating and re-hosting these apps in the cloud.

New features to offer comprehensive reporting, alerts and enhanced management and control include:

  • An inventory of selected applications for replication with cloud characteristics such as CPU, RAM, instance type, storage type and other variables
  • An application launch report of currently replicating applications showing infrastructure services used by each app
  • Application launch status reports providing current status and time taken since launch and other information
  • A Sync report that lists the various systems that have synced and their consistency point.
  • System connect or disconnect alerts to proactively report on disconnected systems
  • Replication alerts indicating if a replication has started, not started or stopped
  • Application launch activity alerts indicating successful, failed, or suspended “launch” and “migration successful” alerts.

Application-centric instance tagging and IAM roles. Instance tagging allows single systems or a group of systems to be assigned tags to classify and categorize the migrated workloads. Tags can specify type of application, line of business, owner and up to 50 other categories that can be used for billing, reporting, utilization analysis and creating policies for cost and performance optimization

Source: CloudStrategyMag