Decoupling Compute from Storage in the Cloud

Conventional wisdom holds that compute and data storage should be joined at the hip. In the era of the cloud, however, that can be problematic because for a variety of compliance and security reasons many organizations either can’t or don’t want to move data into a public cloud. Today, Velostrata announced it has raised another $14 million in funding to break that logjam.

Velostrata CEO Issy Ben-Shaul said the company plans to use the funding to not only refine its core technology; it will also build out sales and marketing teams in North America and Europe. Currently in beta, Ben-Shaul said the software that Velostrata has developed enables IT organizations to move production workloads in an out of the cloud in minutes without having to actually move any of the data that resides on premise. Without requiring any changes to applications, images or storage are required, Ben-Shaul says Velostrata software enables organizations to move workload into the cloud via the click of a single button.

In addition, Ben-Shaul said Velostrata is designed to integrate with existing IT management systems rather than requiring a separate console to manage hybrid cloud computing deployments.

While the concept of hybrid clouds has been around for a while now; adoption of it has been fairly limited. For the most part hybrid cloud computing is limited to, for example, running the same flavor of a virtual machine on premise and in the cloud. Instances of truly heterogeneous hybrid cloud computing are extremely rare. Velostrata wants to not only make heterogeneous hybrid clouds more commonplace, but also not force IT organizations to continuously move data between on premise systems and external cloud services.

Ben-Shaul said early adopters of the company’s software are to create virtual extensions to their data centers in the cloud using streaming software that, for example, enables them to dynamically invoke additional compute capacity on demand, also known as cloudbursting. In addition, Ben-Shaul said Velostrata also simplifies disaster recovery and enhances the organization’s ability to move use public clouds for application development and testing.

Given the rise of data sovereignty laws that require data to be stored in a particular region or country and the prevalence of regulations that serve to limit usage of public clouds, the market opportunity that Velostrata is attempting to address should be considerable.

In terms of bringing its software to market Ben-Shaul said Velostrata will look to partners that have deep relationships with IT organizations that are struggling to embrace cloud services without putting their data at greater risk or getting locked into a particular cloud service. Given how many IT organizations are struggling with where and how to store data in the cloud, the opportunity that a truly hybrid cloud creates for solution providers in terms of federating the management of data promises to be significant.