Cloudbursting – that oft-told urban myth that sees workloads magically move across infrastructure like wisps of smoke. It’s a provocative image and one that never fails to get the back up of seasoned IT folks who wrangle this stuff day to day. Truth is that applications have specificities and tying those all up into one package that can be magically moved is a hard task to deliver upon. It’s for this reason that most cloud migration companies have started to talk about disaster recover as their main value prop – de-emphasizing the live migration aspects. Case in point CloudVelocity who today announced the release of its product and a $13M Series B funding round.
It’s interesting to read the CloudVelocity pitch deck – in previous generations of cloud migration marketing (and by that I mean a couple of months ago), one would have expected to see “We deliver cloudbursting” splashed across the front page. These days companies are more circumspect (and honest). CloudVelocity’s front page talks of enabling hybrid clouds and their automated migration and DR service. That’s not a bad thing, the promise of cloudbursting is exciting and all but today there are organizations all around the world that simply want a product that helps them move down a migration path – if their pressing need is DR (as so often it is) then it would be silly of vendors to ignore the opportunity.
CloudVelocity has been going down this path for awhile now – it was funded way back in 2010 but only emerged from stealth a few months ago. Today sees them release their One Hybrid Cloud product that ties AWS cloud services to enterprise data centers – in the process delivering on this hybrid cloud promise and letting organizations run both Linux and Windows apps without modification on the AWS cloud. So, how does it work?
CloudVelocity software is installed within the customer site where it goes through a five step process to effect the migration:
- Discovery
- Blueprinting
- Provisioning
- Synchronization
- Service initiation
Thereafter an environment exists within AWS which, for all intents and purposes, is a clone of the on-premise setup – allowing an application to be moved across painlessly.
In terms of positioning One Hybrid Cloud – CloudVelocity sees a progression in terms of what its customers want from cloud migration – beginning with simple cloud migration, moving on to an extension of dev/test into the cloud and through to using the cloud as a virtual 2nd data center. They also tip their hat in the general direction of unicorns and rainbows suggesting that One Hybrid Cloud can also deliver upon the cloudbursting requirement for traffic spikes. CloudVelocity used the example of one of their customers, Lealta Media, a supplier of rewards-based programs for high schools. Lealta needed to create an elastic dev/test lab but needed to do so without any capital expenditure. Their particular requirement was to essentially duplicate their production environment so that test applications can be moved back to their on-prem infrastructure post-testing. Lealta, not surprisingly given AWS pricing, was able to create a dev/test lab for roughly 90% less than it would have cost to do so on-prem
While this sort of case study is less sexy than the live bursting of massively spiky workload between infrastructure, it’s also probably more realistic – CloudVelocity have done a smart thing to revisit their product positioning. The 100 or so customers who have been using the product certainly think so anyway. As customer ScaleArc says:
We were able to run the entire app stack across multiple machines as is between our engineering and support labs and cloud seamlessly, as a single environment. We leveraged AWS as needed, when needed and without compromise
No unicorns and rainbows, but a rock solid business proposition and that’s the most important thing.
