RackWare Hybrid Cloud Platform

Enterprise Essentials for Cloud

Security

There are many aspects of security when it comes to cloud migration and management. HCM provides multiple mechanisms to users and administrators for authentication. This ensures that organizations have a seamless authentication strategy across their datacenter and cloud environments.  Additionally, HCM allows management teams to configure a security overlay that defines user access to templates and which templates can be provisioned in certain environments.  Everything is locked down and guaranteed to operate within the defined contexts.

Performance

RackWare's HCP does a discover and analysis for all replications. It begins by understanding the existing hardware the application runs on. HCM ensures target servers in the cloud are provisioned with equivalent hardware so applications perform just as well, if not better, than the original workload. Additionally, HCM can generate multiple provisioning models based on the analysis of the data. For example, HCM can spec to peak values of resource consumption and adjust the target VM up or down to ensure workloads run properly at the most economical level.

Function

The cloud should provide a commensurate set of functionalities relative to the enterprise’s datacenter. Moving, protecting, and managing applications across multiple physical and cloud environments often gets complicated, requiring more time, resources, and manual intervention. RackWare automates this process so IT teams can save time and labor to focus on other strategic priorities.

Cost

RackWare's Hybrid Cloud Manager (HCM) has multiple features around cost.  All costs for resources are tracked and can be reported with numerous filters such as organization, user, individual server, etc. When deploying a workload, HCM shows the predictive cost of the workload across different cloud environments. More importantly, AutoParking and AutoScaling provide huge cost benefits by saving on operational state of workloads in storage and being able to decommission the running instances. These workloads can be re instantiated to their previous operational state later through manual pushbutton commands or automatically with defined policies and triggers.​

Migration 

Enterprises need workload mobility to seamlessly move workloads into and between clouds, at minimal costs with minimal downtime. RackWare’s file-level replication and sync technology gives enterprises granular control over what data and applications to migrate while reducing cutover times through intelligent sync of only changed files. It’s simply more efficient than moving entire blocks of data at once.

No Lock-in/Mobility

RackWare's proprietary replication technology is truly any-to-any, allowing migration from any cloud/datacenter to any other cloud/datacenter. Users are never locked-in to any one cloud. The performance characteristics of the replication technology also ensures that moving workloads between clouds is fast and seamless, with almost zero downtime.

Hybrid Cloud Management

RackWare’s Hybrid Cloud Management is a complete solution for organizations that have resources across a wide variety of environments with requirements to maintain and manage legacy systems, while seamlessly utilizing newer technologies such as cloud for greater flexibility and cost benefits. To effectively face this challenge, HCM allows organizations to manage and control costs with structures in place for self-service, audit trails, reporting, and continuous economic optimization. HCM enables organizations to safely evolve to cloud technology while bridging the gap between mission-critical legacy environments and greenfield deployments.

RackWare’s HCM solution has a broad application, with benefits to production, DR, QA and performance analysis workloads in addition to Test/Dev. HCM provides IT Management complete control over cost, security, and performance.

The RackWare HCM software manages resources and how those resources are used, spanning data centers, private clouds, and public clouds. Overlaid on top of resource management is an architecture for managing organizations and users with budgets and approval mechanisms. With HCM, hierarchies of Organizations (Orgs) and Users can be defined with highly granular Role Based Access. Permissions and approval structures can be applied and enforced across the hierarchy or Organizations and Users with detailed Audit logs.

HCM is also designed for cost optimizations through workload monitoring and analysis, and illustrative provisioning and deployment models. AutoParking, and AutoScaling easily and effectively save cost by consuming compute resources only when needed.

In many environments, workloads running in the cloud are not required 24/7, but rather at particular times throughout the day, week or month. Substantial cost savings can be obtained for customers by employing strategically timed parking and unparking of cloud resources. Automated parking and unparking of resources, in any environment, at critical pre-determined times ensures adequate capacity during peak periods and cost savings during non-peak periods.

Robust policy engines and alerts across all capabilities complete the picture of true Hybrid Cloud Management.

Disaster Recovery / Backup

Business Continuance via Disaster Recovery is an essential element of IT and takes on many forms. The high end consists of high availability solutions that provide realtime replication of systems. While these systems provide seamless continuity during outages, they are large, complex, and expensive. At the other end of the continuum, however, Disaster Recovery is little more than tape backup or backup to NAS which has complicated and lengthy restore procedures which take hours or days. Most cloud solutions are little more than a slow VM import process from some form of a backup.

A major improvement can be achieved in disaster recovery with a solution that simply extends the existing IT architecture into the cloud. With its elastic, on-demand and geographically dispersed resources, cloud is the perfect vehicle to deliver DRaaS and backup services. RackWare’s Hybrid Cloud Platform makes use of proprietary replication technology to deliver disaster recovery with minimal RPO and RTO while allowing the user significant scope for adjusting parameters around cost and performance.

Although cloud provides the perfect landscape for disaster recovery implementations, one of the inhibitors to growth has been the ongoing cost of operations to run cloud as a DR site. Most disaster recovery solutions require workloads to be up and running in the target location, incurring huge costs. For many enterprises, when faced with the choice of substantial costs versus long RPO and RTO times, they’ve had to settle for the long RPO and RTO times. RackWare’s Disaster Recovery solution has both pre-provisioned and dynamically provisioned options, allowing the intelligent balance of cost and performance relative to workload priority.

Pre-provisioning allows users to have DR workloads up-and-running in the DR site, with near-continuous replication allowing RPO and RTO times in single-digit minutes. Dynamic provisioning allows users to replicate workloads to storage in the DR site. Dynamic provisioning eliminates the compute and memory costs of running workloads, while still allowing for aggressive RPO and RTO times.

Many of RackWare’s customers choose to pre-provision their critical workloads and dynamically provision their less-critical workloads. With this approach, RackWare customers have reduced DR costs by over 80% relative to other vendors.

RackWare’s DR sync policy engine provides unparalleled configuration options, enabling the user to sync to the DR site at the desired rate, while allowing for black-out periods where syncs can be automatically paused (for example, if the user does not want to sync at the same time a local backup event is scheduled to run).

Cloud Migration

RackWare’s Hybrid Cloud Platform Mobility feature leverages the proprietary replication and sync technology to allow the migration of workloads from any datacenter or cloud to any other datacenter or cloud. RackWare Migration does not require any access to the Hypervisor and does not install any agents on the source servers. Key features of RackWare’s Migration are

• Comprehensive discovery and analysis of the source environment

• Auto-generation of migration wave plan from discovered data

• Replication and delta-syncs are non-intrusive to source/production servers.

• No access to hypervisor required

• No agent installs on source servers

• Auto-provisioning into all major clouds

• Automatic right-sizing of target servers

• Minimal (minutes) downtime during cutover.