Narrow down your cloud tool choices
By Bill Claybrook, Contributor
Most enterprises know the major cloud computing solutions providers, but several lesser-known players are making their mark. Whether any of these vendors will be successful is unknown.
So, with hundreds of cloud solutions providers on the market, what’s the best way to classify them to find the one that products meets your needs? Early attempts to categorize cloud providers haven't been really useful in shedding light on leaders in key areas like application migration, automation and monitoring.
And all of these tool categories have benefits. Cloud application migration tools are necessary for mobbing apps and creating hybrid clouds. Automation tools facilitate provisioning, reduce errors and cut costs, making them highly visible. Cloud monitoring tools, while basic, haven’t received as much attention, even though they are needed to ensure performance and security. Here are a few of the top cloud tools in each category.
Application migration tools
Interoperability is an important topic in cloud computing, especially when it comes to hybrid clouds. And a key piece of interoperability is application migration, or the ability to move apps back and forth between private clouds and public clouds or between one public cloud and another.
Moving applications between clouds allows enterprises to choose the most suitable technology and avoid vendor lock-in. But this migration isn’t possible without tools that work with different cloud vendors and services. There are a number of companies in the application migration market, including the following:
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CloudSwitch Inc., which Verizon Communications acquired in 2011, uses Cloud Isolation Technology to facilitate multi-tier application migration to the cloud. Cloud Isolation Technology is a virtualization technology layer that automatically runs on top of the cloud provider’s hypervisor and beneath an end user’s OS.
The virtualization layer relays information to the virtual machine (VM) without requiring any additional information from the cloud provider. It protects and isolates an environment in the cloud. You don’t need to modify applications when using CloudSwitch; the technology maps an application so it appears to be running within the target cloud environment while maintaining the same configuration as the source environment. - Racemi DynaCenter, captures a server (physical or virtual) in either a data center or a cloud and then deploys it in a target environment. An important component of Racemi Inc.’s application migration tool is a management appliance that can access the captured server environment as well as the target server environment. It maps between the two environments.
- AppZero provides software that creates, controls and maintains virtual application appliances (VAAs). VAAs are self-contained, portable units that do not have an OS. If you have an enterprise application, you can virtualize its deployment using AppZero products. Once it is in VAA format, you can move it between various IT infrastructures.
- Citrix Systems Inc.’s NetScaler Cloud Bridge extends the source cloud to make cloud-hosted applications appear as though they are running on one contiguous enterprise network. The bridge contains a secure tunnel that provides connectivity between clouds and allows data and information to be moved securely. It also offers transparent access to application services that are hosted in the source cloud, such as domain name system (DNS) and lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP). NetScaler Cloud Bridge creates an overlay network that is a logical extension of the source cloud DMZ to make the settings on the target cloud virtual LAN (VLAN) appear similar to those on the DMZ VLAN.
