You have a data center full of Windows and Linux servers running your key applications. How do you migrate them to the cloud; or, at the very least, enable cloud-based disaster recovery?
That’s the question CloudVelox is trying to answer. Their software enables enterprises to move their entire software stack to a public cloud.
I spoke to Rajeev Chawla, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of CV today.
Here’s a quick summary of what I learned:
- CV’s software moves your OS kernel, apps, and everything else required to run your apps in the cloud.
- With the exception of shared-disk clusters.
- Since you are running an unmodified database, you can use its native tools to for sync and recovery.
- As long as its Windows or Linux, you can be running currently on hardware or on a VM.
- One company moved 170 servers to the cloud and shut down one of their two data centers.
- Another company kept their database local for security reasons but put the apps in the cloud.
- Customers usually start with DR and as they get comfortable with the cloud infrastructure, start migrating their apps.
- Pricing is based on the number of servers, not their cores, memory or storage capacity.
The StorageMojo take
There are lots of products offering cloud on-ramps for data, but as I’ve noted, storage is not the killer cloud app. Running applications, especially CPU intensive apps, is the lasting competitive advantage of the cloud.
If CloudVelox can reliably and repeatedly do what they claim, they’ve created a massive freeway interchange from the enterprise to the cloud. Not just an on-ramp.
Courteous comments welcome, of course.
What application were they running that allowed them to separate the application from the database server across a WAN (datacenter to cloud)? The problem with most cloud migrations is how tightly coupled and latency sensitive most datacenter environments all. It becomes an “all or nothing” move, or at least requires them to be moved in large blocks.
Good point regarding latency. This is where AWS Direct Connect / Azure Express Route or similar service from other cloud providers come into play. This provides for a high bandwidth, low (and consistent) latency network connection from a customer’s data center (premises or co-location) into cloud providers datacenters. The enterprise customer mentioned used this architecture to keep the database on-premises in their datacenter and migrated the app to the cloud.