Fusion Launches Cloud Computing Test Lab
Fusion PPT announced today that the company has expanded its state-of-the-art InnovationLab to include a Cloud Computing Interoperability and Portability Test Lab.
Fusion PPT has identified portability and interoperability as crucial to the broad acceptance of cloud computing and has expanded the company’s InnovationLab to provide a test-bed for addressing the challenges surrounding portability and interoperability. The Cloud Computing Interoperability and Portability Lab is a robust cloud environment that is connected to many of the major cloud service providers. The addition of this Lab provides Fusion PPT engineers and their clients with an environment in which they can test a variety of cloud computing portability and interoperability tools and emerging standards in multiple provider environments.
The environments that are already part of the Cloud Computing Interoperability and Portability Test Lab include Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Rackspace Public Cloud, IBM Softlink, Terremark, Savvis, OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, VMWare vSphere, among others. In addition, the Cloud Computing Interoperability and Portability Lab includes a big data testing cloud with Apache Accumulo and Hadoop.
Portability and interoperability of cloud computing services are essential to realizing the full value of cloud computing in any enterprise cloud environment. With an effective implementation of these capabilities, companies will be able to share and move data or resources easily from one environment to another within the cloud. Without proper consideration of cloud portability and interoperability, however, organizations are exposed to the risks of inefficient continuity of operations between cloud providers, vendor lock-in, and the lack of a comprehensive enterprise cloud management interface.
Many cloud service providers have proprietary applications, platforms, infrastructure, and application programming interfaces (APIs) that prevent heterogeneous enterprise environments from being fully interoperable and portable. Standard interfaces for portability and interoperability between cloud providers help mitigate these issues, but there is no incentive for large providers to aggressively support these efforts, which would allow their customers to easily move to a competitor.
As a response to this reality, a wide variety of standards, specifications, and tools have been developed to address these limitations, but most of them are not yet mature or have not been widely accepted in the industry. Cloud consumers must wade through these various options to identify, validate, and integrate one or many of these products into a complete solution for their enterprise cloud computing environments.
“The Cloud Computing Interoperability and Portability Test Lab allows our clients the opportunity to experiment with and further understand their options in addressing cloud computing portability and interoperability,” remarks CTO Don Magrogan. “This Lab assists clients in navigating the expansive landscape of emerging standards and tools.”
By utilizing this lab, Fusion PPT is able to assess an application’s ability to run on federated cloud systems, determine whether the application can be moved easily between environments, and evaluate how well the application interacts with various service providers and other tools. Cloud management tools may also be quickly tested in the environment to provide SLA, reporting, and billing aggregation across providers. The Cloud Computing Interoperability and Portability Test Lab includes network and authentication simulation as well as application load and stress testing tools to closely simulate public, private, and hybrid cloud computing environments across the SaaS, PaaS and IaaS cloud computing models.
