CloudSwitch Enables True Cloud Federation

Posted by Pavan Pant on Sep 02, 2010 at 1:15 PM

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By Pavan Pant

As with any transformative technology that is new to the market, both public and private clouds have generated massive amounts of hype, bold predictions, a whole lot of confusion and raging debates amongst the cloud cognoscenti. Opinions vary across the spectrum with some experts claiming that data centers will be rendered obsolete by the public cloud, while others are dismissive of the public cloud but support private clouds. It’s clear to us at CloudSwitch that a more likely scenario lies squarely in the middle of those two extremes. This week at VMworld (where we were exhibiting with our partner, Terremark), we were pleased to hear that VMware believes that “hybrid cloud is the tide coming in.” From Paul Maritz’s keynote through many sessions and product announcements (including the release of the long-awaited vCloud Director), the message was all about hybrid clouds.

One of our previous blog posts discussed the notion of hybrid clouds and the fact that most enterprises will follow such an approach in the future. Amazon, Terremark, Rackspace, Savvis, Blue Lock and other public cloud providers give customers elasticity, better service delivery and low CapEx costs. Meanwhile, there are solutions such as Eucalyptus and VMware’s vCloud Director that provide the interface and management tools to help organizations build private clouds while interfacing with public clouds to create hybrid cloud models.

Both use different APIs for their hybrid models with Eucalyptus delivering tight integrations for EC2 using Amazon’s APIs and VMware vCloud Director working with vCloud DataCenter Services (VMware’s terminology for public cloud providers) such as Terremark that leverage vCloud APIs. However, these technologies do not assist with creating an environment that spans hypervisors and cloud providers without changing the applications. If customers build private clouds that are not using the same virtualization infrastructure as their preferred public clouds then what does it really mean to hybridize their clouds?

Consider a scenario where a customer builds a private cloud using Eucalyptus or VMware vCloud Director. That private cloud still ends up being different from your data center (much like a public cloud) - the networking may be different, versions of virtualization technology may be different and the storage infrastructure may be different. All this means that applications in the data center will need to be changed before moving to the private cloud. As an example, if your QA team runs servers on their own subnet in the data center how can this be transitioned to a private or public cloud without incurring additional costs to change those servers?

CloudSwitch’s core value proposition lies in the ability to securely transport a customer’s existing virtual infrastructure to the cloud provider of their choice, independent of the provider’s underlying virtualization infrastructure (VMware, Xen, etc.). This effectively allows customers to securely move and operate servers from their data center across hypervisors to private cloud providers without requiring them to make any modifications to their application – we maintain the same IP address, MAC address, storage controllers, subnet information, etc.   Once customers have moved their servers to the cloud they can operate and manage them just as they would in their data center. CloudSwitch has an intuitive web based interface which gives customers server lifecycle management options such as start, stop and clone.

Similarly, if customers have a private cloud which uses either Eucalyptus or VMware vCloud Director CloudSwitch can speak to those APIs and facilitate the transfer and management from these private clouds to public clouds.  This enables a hybrid model where private clouds leverage public clouds for spikes in usage (cloudburst), or lab-on-demand use cases for training and POCs.  CloudSwitch does all the work of integrating the environments across these private and public cloud hypervisors, merging networks and transferring servers without modifying them in any way. 

Many years ago, I had the privilege to work on the first iterations of RSA’s identity federation product both as an engineer and as a product manager.  Federated single sign on enabled the portability of identities across security domains and allowed for the secure exchange of sensitive data outside the firewall without requiring any changes to the identity itself. 

While the markets for Identity Management and cloud computing are unambiguously different, the notion of federation to make portability and interoperability easier for enterprises is a common theme. CloudSwitch is in a unique position to help enterprises with true cloud federation by moving workloads seamlessly from the data center to the cloud (private or public), between private and public clouds (hybrid), across public clouds and back to the data center without requiring customers to make any changes to their applications. Regardless of the starting point, CloudSwitch offers customers an easy, effective method to leverage the benefits of the cloud while ensuring portability across clouds.

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CloudSwitch delivers the enterprise gateway to the cloud. CloudSwitch’s innovative software appliance enables enterprises to run their applications in the right cloud computing environment—securely, simply and without changes.

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