CloudVolumes Workload Manager Targets Hybrid Clouds
Virtualization management software maker CloudVolumes is rolling out a new release of its eponymous tool stack, targeting hybrid clouds. The company has also announced a new capability it calls AppCloaking along with enhanced support for XenApp, the old-school application virtualization tool from Citrix Systems.
CloudVolumes, which describes itself as virtualizing everything above the operating system, said the latest version of its tool provides what it calls "hybrid multi-cloud enablement." That capability would allow enterprises to provision workloads to cloud providers. The CloudVolume tool has been tested to scale up to 10,000 virtual machines.
This pathway to large cloud providers opens the door to creating more hybrid cloud use cases. Hence, the company claims, users could move relatively easily from their datacenters to the cloud.
At the same time, developers could test and deploy their applications stacks. That feature could be used to drive more efficient utilization of computing and storage resources via increased virtualization, CloudVolume asserted.
In one user example, a customer, Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said it is leveraging the company's tool to rapidly deploy and manage complex desktop applications to students and faculty.
CloudVolume said it is uncovering other use case examples of how to manage workloads so they can be deployed "in a cloud or the virtualized world," said Harry Labana, the Silicon Valley company's chief product officer.
A key question for virtualization specialists like CloudVolume is whether the growing number of software tools targeting deployment of applications via datacenters as well as the cloud will fuel overall growth of hybrid cloud computing and storage. The infrastructure needed to do that appears to be emerging.
Hybrid cloud marketers acknowledge that maintaining control over business applications in the public cloud remains an issue. Potential customers "have undoubtedly worked for years to align their datacenter workloads with the right levels of performance, data protection and governance,” Adam Fore, director of cloud marketing at NetApp, recently told EnterpriseStorageForum.com.
“As they seek to implement hybrid clouds, they will need to consider how to maintain data control while leveraging a variety of different cloud services.”
Meanwhile, CloudVolume also said it is releasing its AppCloaking feature soon but did not specify a release date. The capability is designed to deploy multiple applications inside a single container, so they are delivered only to qualified users.
The capability is aimed at making it easier to deploy multiple applications within a single applications stack, the company said.
Version 2.0 also extends support for the Citrix virtual application delivery tool, XenApp. The updated version of the virtual appliance also supports XenDesktop, the much broader product from Citrix that streams whole virtual machines rather than shared applications, along with VMware's Horizon, which also is used to broker virtual PC images from centralized servers.
CloudVolumes 2.0 is available now. Pricing information was not immediately available.
