It’s an exciting week in the world of cloud! CloudHealth Technologies has officially announced support for VMware and data center environments, giving customers a way to manage cost, optimize performance, set policies, and evaluate workload migrations — all with the CloudHealth platform.
Before I dive headlong into shameless self promotion and start talking about the what, let me backpedal a bit and begin with the why….
This quote is from a Gartner press release in which the research firm heralds a “massive shift” to a hybrid way of life. The analysts over at Gartner aren’t the only ones pointing out the tectonic movements taking place within IT. Podcasting pundit David Linthicum recently told Geekwire that about 85 percent of public cloud users, by his estimate, also rely on the data center.
By now, we’re all tired of hearing how cloud computing has revolutionized business and technology [although I reserve the right to use that exact terminology in future marketing materials 😉 ]. The cloud’s impact on agility, innovation, and scalability is nearly impossible to quantify. Let’s all just agree that it’s pretty massive. The benefits have driven many out of the server room and into migrating assets and workloads over to ______ (insert IaaS vendor of choice).
But we’re not sitting around lamenting the death of the data center. That technology stalwart has withstood the test of time, and still reliably offers a customized, dedicated system to companies that wish to retain full control over their data. And many do. Hybrid cloud infrastructure is the new normal. According to Forrester, 62% of public cloud adopters state that they plan to use or are using hosted private cloud, with another 62% planning to use or already using internal private cloud. Within the next 12 months, these figures will rise to 81% for hosted private usage and 80% for internal private cloud usage.
Ultimately, enterprises are left straddling a precarious infrastructure divide between the data center and the cloud — i.e. the Old(ish) and the New(er). Data silos make it nearly impossible to easily or effectively manage and optimize on-premises and cloud infrastructure together. Moreover, any company trying to select and evaluate workloads to migrate to the cloud is left taking shots in the dark, with no way of understanding the downstream application and infrastructure dependencies of those workloads. Not exactly a promising recipe for success.
Here’s the part where CloudHealth comes in.
By supporting both VMware and physical server environments, the platform lets you visualize and control your data center and cloud environments with a single, consolidated view. That yields unprecedented levels of insight and analysis, along with integrated recommendations across cost, usage, and performance in the data center. Enterprises can also use the platform to set policies that govern data center environments, assist in migrations from the data center to the cloud and rightsize virtual machine assets.
So there you have it. Pretty exciting stuff! And we’re not done yet — in the coming months, stay tuned for more CloudHealth news around managing hybrid environments at scale. In the near term, if I’ve left you wanting more, register for this onDemand webinar, to learn more about how CloudHealth optimizes your hybrid cloud environment, and participate in a live Q session.
