Why AppZero?

Application complexity and rigidity are a drag on the ability of both IT and business to execute.

Application complexity is itself a complex of contributing factors:

• Immensely distributed computing landscape
• Diversity and number of target machines (physical and virtual)
• Variety of target environments (on-premise, SaaS, and Cloud)
• Unrelated application frameworks
• Availability of open source for ad hoc innovation
• Componentization
• Range of application age (legacy to mashups)
• Uneven level of documentation
• Regulatory and governance demands

Application rigidity has a more identifiable culprit: Traditional deployment architectures.

When an application is installed onto a server, the act of installation and configuration creates dependencies that effectively weld that application to that server.  The result is a de facto monolith that is difficult to update, maintain, or move because changes to one aspect of the stack have unforeseen consequences for the whole.

Together, application complexity and rigidity make the process of making any change to an application's functionality or location a time-constrained IT process that spans all skill levels from development and QA through operations.  In the meantime, the business waits.

AppZero™ attacks application complexity and rigidity by decoupling server-side applications from the OS in virtual application appliances (VAA).

Instead of performing complex installation and configuration operations on each server in a deployment, our customers install just once into a VAA.  The VAA can then be distributed across all servers to all locations - on-premise, hosted, or in the cloud -and rolled into production in real-time or over time.  Because a VAA contains only an application with its properties and files, it breaks the dependencies on any underlying hardware and OS environments.

The VAA approach to application deployment and maintenance has many positive ramifications:

• Quick, error-free deployment of applications (seconds, not hours or days)
• Frictionless moves among servers in any number of locations (physical, virtual, or cloud)
• Reduced conflicts between applications and underlying OS
• Update, move, and manage applications as distinct units separate from servers
• Slash unplanned outages caused by improper configuration (analysts place at 80% causality)
• Insulate applications from changes caused by updates to the OS or other applications
• Control interactions from VAA encapsulated applications and underlying OS
• Easily use existing enterprise management solutions because the application is now one VAA file
• Speed time through development and QA to production since reconfiguration is not needed
• Guarantee 100% application consistency during each deployment stage across the lifecycle
• Instant rollback of applications
• Turn recovery efforts into an orchestrated failover or a simple retrieval of a stored VAA (application in ready-to-run state)
• Extend high availability to all applications at almost no cost
• Migrate legacy applications to new and faster environments
• High performance because, unlike virtual appliances, VAAs do not introduce the overhead of OS
• Dramatically increase server utilization by running multiple VAAs on a single operating system and server - reduce the number of OS to maintain and manage.
• Exploit virtualization of Windows applications without violating Microsoft licensing
• Painlessly demonstrate compliance because stored VAAs effectively self-document everything that an application requires to run.

Time, cost, and effort are all slashed in the VAA approach.

Our customers report gains that, at first glance, seem too good to be true.  But these reports are the natural outgrowth of AppZero's concept and clean-cut execution.  Examples of customer experiences include:

• 100% application mobility (server to server - physical, virtual, or cloud)
• Easy movement to the cloud with no cloud lock-in
• Performance that is 97% that of a native implementation vs hypervisor's well-known big hit
• 66% reduction in server/storage footprint
• 80% decrease in application lifecycle costs
• Much faster service to lines of business with improved time to market

We welcome the opportunity to work with you to determine specifically the gains AppZero can bring to your organization. Please feel free to contact us at: info@appzero.com.

For a comparison between AppZero's VAAs and Hypervisors, click here. You may also be interested in our white paper: AppZero turbo-charges server consolidation.