AppZero in the Cloud

For lines of businesses, the cost/value equation argues strongly for movement of applications to the cloud, i.e., Amazon EC2. In these economic times, the ability to convert capital investments to operational expenses is especially attractive - especially if it means that businesses can pay for only what they use.

For many reasons, traditional approaches to virtualization run into a wall when it comes to moving applications to the cloud.  AppZero™ removes those obstacles - both for enterprises moving to the cloud and for providers of cloud services.

AppZero makes it technically easy and economically beneficial for line of business leaders to get IT services that map to the financial models they need.

Both enterprises moving to the cloud and providers of cloud services benefit:

• Enterprises moving to the cloud can easily experiment with moving applications to the cloud - and back again - with no cloud lock in.  AppZero's OS-free VAAs are self-contained units that are completely portable - making them a risk-free on-ramp to and an exit from the cloud.

• Cloud providers can economically offer services that are further up the value stack than simple infrastructure capacity. Cloud providers want instant application provisioning that is as fast and  easy to use as the machine provisioning enabled by server virtualization - with similar isolation benefits.  The server density that AppZero enables produces economies of scale that deliver on the promise of virtualization - with great cost savings.

What's wrong with traditional VA approaches in the cloud?

Virtual appliances (VA) which package applications with just-enough-operating-system (jeOS) share some common attributes that limit their usefulness in general, and hobble them in the cloud.

Most tool sets that create and maintain VAs in the cloud support only Linux, not Unix or Windows.  This limitation leaves out a significant portion of the application universe.  Even more limiting is the requirement of some tools to use their own flavor of Linux, which is a further complication.  These attributes create generic shortcomings:

• Unless you have a Linux application stack, you can't take advantage of these solutions. For the 50% of x86 production servers running Windows today, these tools are no help at all.
• If you do have Linux, but your applications are bound to a version of Linux that these solutions don't support, you're again out of luck. That is, unless you are willing to recode, recompile, and rebuild your applications to run in that distribution.
• Since these tools package OS with the application, you must rely on your VA vendor to produce a stack from the OS up - one that complies with your standards.
• The performance overhead associated with packaging OS with applications, as well as the potential for resource contention, limits the number of applications that can productively run on a single server.

Instant cloud:  AppZero's VAA server-side application virtualization

AppZero software creates, runs, and maintains VAAs in Linux, Solaris, and Windows environments - widening the universe of server applications that can be virtualized.  If your application stack is based on Windows, VAA is the only way to move server-side applications to the cloud without breaking Microsoft's licensing.  Applications are instantly deployed and provisioned, pre-configured in the self-contained VAA - with zero operating system, and making no changes to the OS on target machines.

The attributes of AppZero's VAA approach to server-side application virtualization convey the following advantages in the cloud environment:

• An application packaged as a VAA can be moved from within an enterprise to the cloud, or from server to server, with zero friction. Movement is as simple as a file copy.
• The VAA arrives at a machine that is running a compatible instance of the OS it needs, and the application is instantly up and running.
• VAAs run in complete isolation from each other and from other applications, so they can safely co-exist on one server.
• Performance overhead is negligible. VAA s run at 97% of an application in its native environment. Server density and utilization can be dramatically improved.
• Because VAAs can leverage off-the-shelf VPN technology, and they don't alter the underlying OS on which they run, moving a VAA to the cloud will leave behind no data artifacts. This attribute addresses the issue of cloud security and compliance.

If you would like to discuss how AppZero can help your organization, please feel free to contact us at: info@appzero.com. You may also be interested in our white paper: Jumping on the Cloud Wagon? Pack your server applications for the trip.