The pay as you go compute capacity of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) can be leveraged by organizations of all sizes to dynamically respond to spikes in business. An ideal use case is to move less compute demanding workloads to the cloud to free up on-premise computing capacity.
This creates an additional tier of compute for the data center and facilitates a low risk method of utilizing cloud resources. For this use case to work optimally, the migration to and from the cloud should be as seamless as possible. The native tools available from VMware, Microsoft and Amazon, however, don’t provide this type of seamless workload migration or administration and management of the unified pool of on- and off-premise resources.
HotLink’s Hybrid Express product fulfills the need for a non-disruptive co-existence between an on-premise private cloud and the Amazon public cloud. Storage Switzerland wrote a briefing note on HotLink’s SuperVISOR product earlier this year.
Their Hybrid Express solution is focused on providing the EC2 platform transformation and workload transportability that organizations need to elastically manage and scale their workloads into the Amazon cloud. This is done by integrating the organization’s Amazon EC2 account directly into their preferred management infrastructure – either VMware vCenter or in this new release, Microsoft SCVMM (see below).
Since it plugs-in directly into the existing hypervisor management infrastructure and console, the administrator doesn’t have to learn how to administer, manage, monitor and navigate with yet another pane of glass. It also makes movement of virtual machines to and from the Amazon cloud as simple as a drag and drop action; without having to go through the multi-step process of creating an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) VM image.
HotLink Hybrid Express opens up a whole new world for the server administrator. New servers can be provisioned to the Amazon cloud based on existing and well tested on premise templates. It allows the balancing of compute demand by using the Amazon cloud as a secondary tier of compute services or as a primary tier for new applications.
The product is more than just a migration tool, it centralizes monitoring, command and control of EC2 instances, side-by-side with on-premise hosts and VMs into the vCenter or SCVMM interface. Even VM specific tasks like cloning and snapshots can now be triggered from within that single familiar interface.
Storage Swiss Take
HotLink is more than just a cloud automation tool. These tools tend to focus on creating self-service portals, workload orchestration and service catalogs, which for companies that need it are very valuable. The broader market, however, needs more of a transformation solution that provides a single point of integration to allow for the seamless administration and movement of VMs between hypervisors and cloud locations.
These organizations also need the ability to centrally act on, not just monitor, virtual instances from within that single interface. HotLink provides these capabilities in the most practical way possible, by integrating into the management console already in use (vCenter or SCVMM).
HotLink is not a client of Storage Switzerland
Twelve years ago George Crump founded Storage Switzerland with one simple goal; to educate IT professionals about all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought after public speaker. With over 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN, Virtualization, Cloud and Enterprise Flash. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection.
