A Simple Solution for the Cloud Migration Challenge

June 20, 2016

Michele Borovac

The discussion about public public cloud today is not about whether to go, but instead, how to get there. Most enterprises have already made the leap to Software as a Service (Saas) – the ‘gateway drug’ of the cloud – with applications like Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce.com and many others. But moving data-rich workloads like SAP or OLTP or custom-made apps to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can prove much more difficult. Why?

Complexity:  When migrating workloads to a public cloud, IT administrators must make significant changes to the applications, storage, images and even drivers. Plus, these employees must now learn new management consoles to manage both on premises and cloud-based infrastructure and storage, further increasing complexity.

Risk:  It’s a huge effort to “forklift” applications and storage, with no guarantee these apps will work as well in the cloud – a scary proposition for any IT manager who wants to keep his or her job. Keeping data secure in the cloud is also a primary concern for many organizations.

Time to Migrate: Moving a production application, particularly a stateful app attached to an anchor of heavy data, takes time. For instance, migrating just 10 TBs of data across a 20 Mbps network link would take 50 days. The current alternatives lend themselves to a bad movie from the 1990’s where several men show up with a suitcase and a bunch of hard drives to copy your data. Re-syncing applications post-migration is also time consuming, complex, and can result in downtime.

Vendor Lock-In:  For all of the reasons above, migrating to public cloud has traditionally been a one way trip, with organizations largely at the mercy of their cloud service provider once they transition. But customers want to have the choice (and leverage) against cloud providers, so they can get better, more cost-effective solutions.

These challenges stem partially from the fundamental design of traditional applications, where compute has been assumed to be tightly coupled with storage to ensure application performance. Velostrata’s approach challenges the traditional perspective on cloud migration. We wanted to tackle a growing problem as more and more companies look to the cloud for a competitive edge.

Velostrata’s unique, patent-pending technology decouples compute from storage and removes barriers to cloud migration. By introducing new technologies like intelligent streaming, boot over WAN, dynamic image adaptation, multi-tier caching, and data pre-fetching capabilities, Velostrata can ensure optimal performance despite the WAN latency between on-prem storage and compute in the cloud. Additionally, there are no manual changes to the applications, images, networks or storage required, and IT organizations can leverage the same management tools and processes they use today.

Velostrata overcomes each of these challenges and opens up the public cloud to organizations that were previously nervous that the benefits were not substantial enough to outweigh the journey.

The Benefits of Velostrata

Improve Business Agility: Organizations can migrate application workloads in minutes while intelligently streaming data in the background. This enables workload mobility across cloud regions without the need to move all storage to cloud as a pre-condition to running the workloads, enabling cloud computing “on-demand”.

Improve Operational Efficiency: IT can leverage the same management tools and processes used today. Furthermore, no changes to the applications, images, or storage are required.

Mitigate Security and Compliance Risks: Velostrata also enables full control over where the data resides (on-premises, in the public cloud, or some combination.) Authoritative data can be kept on premises, if desired – and data in cloud is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Eliminate Vendor Lock-In: True workload mobility is now possible. You can move workloads back on-premises or to another public cloud as desired.

Ultimately, a multi-cloud strategy can improve business agility and give organizations the option to run workloads in the most efficient, scalable and cost effective way. Velostrata can enable that vision. Learn how we do it or contact us for a demo.