CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 Delivers Greater Flexibility and Control in the Cloud
Digg
Reddit
Delicious
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
BuzzBy the CloudSwitch Team
It feels like just yesterday that we unveiled CloudSwitch Enterprise to the world. Since then we have closed many large commercial customers, learned a lot from their use cases and have been hard at work building major new functionality in the product. Time flies when you’re having fun – in less than six months, we have delivered version 2.0 of our award-winning CloudSwitch Enterprise software. This release has some great features and improvements driven by our customers’ use cases as they move to the cloud. The 2.0 Enterprise release is further proof that we can innovate at a brisk pace on our core architecture, building on our patent-pending Cloud Isolation Technology™.
Our fundamental value proposition remains unchanged. We continue to provide customers with the ability to extend their internal virtual infrastructure to the cloud environment of their choice, independent of the provider’s underlying virtualization platform (VMware, Xen, etc.). This allows customers to run applications in the right cloud computing environment without requiring them to make any modifications to their applications or management tools – we maintain the same IP address, MAC address, storage controllers, subnet information, etc. Everything continues to work in the cloud just as if it were running locally in the data center.
We are seeing a growing level of confidence in how enterprises use the cloud. They are starting to move towards a production-oriented set of workloads beyond the initial development and test scenarios we saw earlier in 2010. With that trend in mind, we’ve developed new features that allow customers to provision new applications in the cloud, to extend network topologies into the cloud with full security and control, and to scale and better manage their growing cloud workloads via our CLI tools and intuitive web-based user interface.
Provisioning in the Cloud
This capability was driven by numerous requests from our customers to provision exactly the image they want in the cloud as opposed to relying on a cloud provider’s options, which may not always meet their specific requirements.
With CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0, customers can now provision virtual machines in the cloud following the same process that they would in the data center. Our user interface gives you the ability to provision in the cloud with point-and-click simplicity by configuring virtual machine parameters such as the operating system, memory, number of disks, storage controllers, network settings and boot options to provision your application stack in the cloud either using your gold ISOs, or by leveraging PXE boot. You can provision as many virtual machines as required, add as many NICs as necessary, generate new MAC addresses for them and get console access to the virtual machines being provisioned in the cloud. Our CloudFit™ function allows you to use any combination of a cloud provider’s instance sizes to customize the cores, memory, storage, compute capacity and region before you provision in the cloud. All these features give you the freedom to create new virtual machines in the cloud without having to change other data center services such as DNS and identity management.
Now that customers can provision in the cloud, the next step is to automate the process of creating virtual machines in the cloud so they can scale up or down to meet peak demand. CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 has SOAP-based web services and command line interfaces to enable auto-scaling in the cloud, for capacity on-demand, such as cluster scale-outs and website scaling during marketing campaigns and seasonal peaks.
Extending Enterprise Network Topologies into the Cloud
Firewall in the Cloud & Public IP Access
As discussed in one of our previous blog posts, CloudSwitch gives customers secure, public connectivity to their applications in the cloud through a fully-featured firewall in the cloud. This allows customers to securely host multi-tiered applications in the cloud and give end users direct access to these cloud resources–reducing bandwidth constraints within their data centers and improving performance by moving compute resources closer to the end users.
There are also scenarios where customers use CloudSwitch to handle peak demand in the cloud using the load balancer that is part of our firewall solution. This is particularly useful when handling spikes in traffic during cyclical events such as tax season and holiday shopping. Our infrastructure allows customers to seamlessly direct traffic to the most appropriate load-balanced resource in the cloud.
Check out our how-to video to learn more about how you can create a secure, public IP gateway to the cloud.
Layer-2 Connectivity with Layer-3 Support
A core aspect of our architecture is to provide layer-2 connectivity between the data center the cloud. This allows our customers to run their workloads in the cloud without changing any network configuration data such as IP addresses, MAC addresses and netmasks, since this is transparent when connectivity is established at the data link layer.
Over the past several months, we have heard requests for layer-3 connectivity to use IPSec and other capabilities. For instance, if customers want to create IPSec connections from their branch offices directly to the cloud they now have the option to do that using our firewall in the cloud. This is in contrast to other technologies where all traffic is routed from the data center to the cloud. CloudSwitch provides customers with options to use their own routing controls, and leverage their existing networking tools. Internally, we still have layer-2 transparency so we can maintain the same IP address and MAC address for virtual machines in the cloud. Every enterprise customer has a unique and often highly-complex network configuration and CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 provides the flexibility to mix and match layer-2 and layer-3 connectivity based on their needs.
Multiple Subnets
CloudSwitch now offers sophisticated networking capabilities that allow customers to configure their networks in the cloud according to their specific requirements. CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 gives you the flexibility to build network topologies in the cloud that extend organizations’ internal data center networks. Customers can represent multiple subnets in the cloud, span subnets across clouds if necessary, easily map multiple NICs to multiple subnets through our user interface, and use a firewall to connect two subnets much like a colo deployment.
In addition to our networking enhancements, we’ve also added broader geographic support, including all Terremark and Amazon regions and availability zones, to ensure that customers get the best “fit” for their performance and compliance needs.
Working with Our Customers to Drive Cloud Innovation
The market for cloud computing is growing quickly and we’ve seen an increasing level of confidence in our enterprise customers and prospects who are using the cloud. The features in CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 will help address customer needs for greater flexibility, scalability and control as they begin to run and scale production workloads in the cloud. We take great pride in working closely with our customers at the forefront of the cloud revolution, and being responsive to customer and market requirements through our agile development process. Watch this space for more exciting product announcements in 2011 and try CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 so you can start running your enterprise applications in the cloud today!
Join our "CloudSwitch 2.0 Launch Overview & Product Demonstration" live webinar to learn how our enterprise customers are running their Windows and Linux apps in the cloud simply and securely using CloudSwitch.
Reader Comments
There are no comments yet. Be the first to create one!
