Cloud computing has a number of benefits for enterprises, but like any technology it isn’t magic. To do it well CIOs need a management platform.
RackWare Inc., which makes a solution for moving workloads from data centres to clouds as well as between clouds, has extended the capabilities of its Management Module to include disaster recovery.
The feature will be added Tuesday when version 3.0 is released, the Santa Clara, Calif., company said today.
“We can sync the entire image including all the operating system and configuration elements,” Todd Matters, RackWare’s chief architect and co-founder, said in an interview. “It’s less costly (than traditional DR solutions) because we can utilize resources only in the cloud.”
Workloads can be moved one cloud to another or a data centre to another. Any changes in the production OS, applications and data are synchronized to the recovery instance.
The solution is hypervisor and cloud-agnostic.
Born in 2009, RackWare not only moves data images around, it can also wrap policy around them that monitors performance and provisions new resources. For example, if the monitor detects that Web activity picks up on a Friday it can be configured to automatically add more cloud resources that day, then de-provision them when at a time when demand lowers.
Matters says it has a number of Canadian customers including Design Group Staffing of Toronto.
Disaster recovery should appeal to cloud service providers for pulling in customers, Matters said. “It’s an entre to make cloud very attractive to their customers. Being able to provide a low-cost, high performance option at a fraction of the typical cost will be attractive to cloud service providers.”
Management Module offers a number of capabilities, each of which are separately priced. What it calls Discovery costs US$350/workload. Elasticity starts at US $32 a month. Disaster recovery starts at US$60 a month.