The entire cloud migration space is one fraught with difficulties. On the one hand there are the not insignificant difficulties of actually migrating a production workload in real time – it’s often been said the very notion is a fairy tale. At the same time there is debate about the very validity of the cloud migration proposition – recent thinking around the multi cloud opportunity points to a different reality – a wildly heterogeneous environment where enterprises demand visibility over the different pieces of infrastructure, but not necessarily portability between them all.
Into this complex space comes CloudVelocity, one of the early cloud migration tools which is today announcing the general availability of its Windows and Linux tools for AWS along with an $18M funding round fro Mayfield, Third Point and Pelion. As part of the announcement the company is also boasting it has over 100 enterprise customers live today.
I spoke with Greg Ness, VP of Marketing at the company and commented on the seemingly very busy space they’re in. He concurred that the space is busy but believes that not many solutions have actually resonated with customers – while virtually every vendor is involved in every migration project, there is a distinct degree of confusion as to what each vendor has as a particular focus.
Perhaps as a response to this confusion, CloudVelocity is nuancing its One Hybrid Cloud product story somewhat and introducing a disaster recovery story to go alongside the workload portability one. In this way they believe they’re able to articulate a two step value proposition – seamless DR as an initial step. Since DR is a generally accepted first step for cloud usage, the company can leverage this fact by offering to enable the actual DR process. Thereafter they’re able to extend that message to their core workload migration story.
The company is mindful that DR will become a less important story going forwards as the dual rise of APIs and compelling standards occur. They believe however that DR is the #1 payoff of the hybrid cloud model and that, by automating parts of the migration, they create a practical use case for the hybrid cloud.
We talked about the multi cloud opportunity and CloudVelocity’s hope that this won’t create more islands of disparate resources which would result in a move from existing infrastructure silos to new ones. Their experience with CIOs is that most will not deploy anything serious to the cloud until they have firm control over migration – they may be experimenting broadly with different cloud vendors, but this isn’t for serious core applications. And with industry conversations putting the average deployment cost for a multi-tier app at around $300k for 60 servers – there are some not insignificant cost barriers to get over first.
Which is where the migration tools come in – Cloud Velocity believes the progression of customer use will see customers begin with a migration, move on to a dev/test extension before using AWS as a second data center and finally going all the way and bursting to AWS for spikes – I’m not convinced how much this is really going to happy – despite the fairy tales of cloud bursting being appealing – I’m yet to see concrete evidence that it’s happening in practice.
The issue of how a true hybrid cloud can be deployed was addressed in a great interview at Cloudcast with Brian Gracely and Rajeev Chawla called: Accelerating the Hybrid Cloud . The interview is especially relevant to the demands of deploying traditional multi-tier apps into a hybrid model. It isn’t easy, but it is a powerful game-changer for IT agility, availability and scalability.