CloudSwitch Releases New Version With Enhanced Enterprise Features

CloudSwitch, Burlington based company founded in 2008 to make life easy for enterprises to extend their datacenter to the cloud, today announced the release of version 2 of their software with enhanced enterprise features. This release quickly follows version 1 of their software released about 6 months ago. With CloudSwitch, enterprises can easily run their applications on the cloud without any need to re-architect their applications or giving up the existing management tools and policies to take advantage of the cloud. This new version of their enterprise software addresses customer requirements for greater flexibility, scalability and control in the cloud.

What is CloudSwitch?

CloudSwitch is a software appliance that can be installed by the enterprises on a VMware or Xen environment and can be used to securely extend their datacenter to the public clouds. In spite of some of the problems that still persists in the public clouds (along with the FUD unleashed by those with stakes in traditional IT world), enterprises are very keen on trying out the public clouds. They may not put their mission critical workloads into public clouds yet but they want to push some of the applications into the public clouds in order to take advantage of its low cost and elasticity. There are many solutions that help enterprises push their applications to the public clouds. However, most of these solutions require enterprises to re-architect their applications and/or use new management tools. With it also comes issues like modifying the enterprise IT policies to fit in the cloud. What CloudSwitch wants to do is to extend the enterprise datacenter into the public clouds, like Amazon EC2 and Terremark, by tapping a technology used in the old days called network bridge (which operates at Layer 2 of the OSI stack). They took this technology along with layer 3 technologies to build a hybrid bridge that securely links the datacenter to the public clouds. This is somewhat similar to Amazon VPC but bridged much more deeply allowing enterprises to extend their datacenter IP addresses, MAC addresses, etc. inside the public clouds. Since CloudSwitch offers full encryption and isolation in the public clouds, it helps reduce some of the enterprise concerns about security in the public clouds. Even though CloudSwitch now supports only Amazon EC2 and Terremark, they are planning to add more cloud providers in the future.

What new in Version 2.0?

With this new version, enterprises can now

Provision new Windows and Linux applications in the cloud with point-and-click simplicity and no modifications
Better manage and control resources for flexible, on-demand scaling
Eliminate network bottlenecks by extending internal network topology into the cloud and allowing secure public IP access

With this new releases, enterprises can go beyond the dev-test workloads on the public clouds to customer facing applications. Now enterprises can run wide ranging applications on the public clouds while maintaining their datacenter policies intact. More importantly, they can keep their existing tools for managing the public clouds without any need to sign on to a new cloud management platform separately.

The key features of the new version includes:

Provisioning of new virtual machines in the cloud (in addition to migration of existing ones), through Network boot support and ISO support (CD-ROM/DVD)
Web services and command-line interfaces for programmatic scaling to meet peak demands
Broader networking options to extend enterprise network topologies into the cloud
Enhanced user interface support for better scalability, control and ease of use
Broader geographic coverage (Terremark vCloud Express & eCloud, Amazon EC2 East, West, EU and Asia Pacific regions)

Conclusion

For enterprises, cloud is equally attractive and fearsome. Companies like CloudSwitch can help enterprises overcome their predicament by offering more secure ways to extend their existing datacenters to the cloud and let their IT use the tools they are familiar with. This hybrid path is the best way enterprise organizations can embrace public clouds more and more in the future. There are many other advantages of using an offering like CloudSwitch in this Wikileaks era. I will talk about them in the future. CloudSwitch is clearly an interesting and important player to watch in the enterprise cloud market.