Ahead in the Clouds: Building an Extensible Data Center with Cloud Workload Mobility

June 21, 2016

Michele Borovac

Many have viewed migration to the public cloud as a one-way trip – kind of like moving your family to another country. As with any big move, you prepare. You research and identify a place to live. You figure out which belongings you’re taking and what you will leave behind. You pack carefully to make sure you don’t pay exorbitant moving costs, and you eventually settle in your new destination and start to unpack. Will your family be happy in the new location? You hope so – but there are certainly no guarantees. With cloud migration, the problems are similar. Which cloud is the right one? Which applications can and should be moved? How much will it cost in time and dollars to migrate, and ultimately, how do I get back out of the cloud should my needs change or if the cloud doesn’t deliver what I expect?

IT organizations are being asked to help define their company’s cloud strategy, but they are often between a rock and a hard place when deciding whether it’s better to keep applications on premises or move them to the cloud. The cloud promises agility, scalability, and an appealing pay-as-you-go model. But a recent Morgan Stanley report indicates that 90% of CIOs have cloud migration projects have stalled or failed. This level of risk puts the cloud out of reach – especially for stateful enterprise applications with large data sets.

Real Cloud Agility
The promise of the next-generation data center builds on the success, agility and cost efficiencies that have been achieved through virtualization. The natural next step for the software-defined data center is to attain workload mobility in the cloud. There is value in leveraging public cloud resources for so many reasons: dev/test, unplanned projects, offloading legacy applications, cloud-first initiatives, data centers consolidation, disaster recovery, and the list goes on.

But the tools to support cloud adoption have been behind the curve. Adapting workloads for new cloud environments can be cumbersome and unpredictable. Moving and testing the data associated with applications is time consuming and potentially risky if that data is sensitive or regulated. IT staff must learn new technology and management tools before they can become truly effective in the cloud.

Velostrata’s vision is to enable cloud workload mobility. What does this mean? We make it possible to truly leverage the cloud as an extension of your datacenter. You can move workloads into, out of, or around the cloud to support business requirements.

With Velostrata, cloud migrations are low-cost, fast and low-risk. Moving back on-premises or to another public cloud is quick and easy. Unlike the taxing process outlined above, Velostrata moves your actual application instance in a matter of minutes – not a replica that needs to be re-synced with the data changes that happen during the move. Because storage can stay on premises until your application is fully proven, you always have a safety net. Using our relocation analogy, it’s like moving with your suitcase – your bag has everything you need to get started in your new location, while your shipping container is moves slowly with everything else you’ll need later.

This workload mobility removes many of the barriers that have prevented organizations from broader adoption of a multi-cloud strategy. If you’d like to learn more about Cloud Workload Mobility, or about using Velostrata for public cloud migration or dev/test use cases, visit our resource library.