Problem Overview

Virtualization has been the foundation for the movement toward cloud-enabled data centers whether they be public, private or hybrid. Companies however have continued to struggle to adapt their enterprise application deployment and management methodologies to the dynamic and elastic nature of cloud computing. Companies still manage even virtual infrastructure and VMs as if they were physical PCs. Traditional methods of managing applications in the physical world start to break down and do not map well to the virtual world. These traditional methods lack the speed, agility, or the cost structure to do this at the scale demanded by cloud environments.

VMs in the cloud may have to be moved either for maintenance, for deploying follow-the-sun workload strategies, a disaster recovery scenario or simply because of elastic demand and capacity creation. Moving the VM often involves time-consuming conversion of VMs from one format to another and moving large amounts of data resulting in excessive network bandwidth usage and delays to the workload being available, and creating new VMs by cloning is a lengthy operation which still means each VM must be managed individually.

The CloudVolumes Solution

CloudVolumes uses a powerful single copy, multiple use capability called Instant Workload Management which allows for a single workload, or a suite of workloads such as a database (Oracle, SQL), a web server and an application server all running on separate VMs to be instantly deployed and configured together as a single grouping.

A single copy of the application and workload can serve multiple VMs – saving storage, network bandwidth and IOPs. Updates and patches to the application can be done once and automatically appear in all the VMs utilizing that application – significantly saving on workload management cost. The VMs can be tuned for performance by keeping the different components of the virtual workload (guest OS, data and settings, applications) in appropriate, separate storage tiers – optimizing price/performance appropriately for each component of the workload.

CloudVolumes is particularly adept at deploying complex application suites such as ERP because the install or updates can be done just once and deployed across many hundreds or thousands of VMs simultaneously. CloudVolumes approach is also hypervisor and cloud agnostic, making it now possible to move workloads between datacenters and hypervisors without the risky and complex effort of converting a VM.