InMage Introduces Cloud-Optimized Infrastructure

InMage increased its focus on cloud computing through the introduction of ‘cloud-optimized infrastructure.’

Cloud providers that utilize InMage within their infrastructure can offer customers a mix of solutions-oriented services that leverage ‘cloudbursting’ to meet recovery, administrative, and production requirements in new ways that save time and money. Cloud providers can immediately expand their services offerings by deploying InMage as an infrastructure foundation to enhance their own public or hybrid cloud offerings, while end users can deploy it in private clouds as well.

Cloudbursting is a technique that, leveraging virtual server technology, allows application services to be brought up within the cloud on demand. InMage’s cloud-optimized infrastructure is unique in providing a full range of capabilities that automate the movement of application services and data into and out of the cloud at the push of a button. InMage’s cloud-optimized infrastructure platform leverages next generation recovery technologies like continuous data protection, application snapshot API integration, asynchronous replication, automated application recovery (failover/failback), integrated WAN optimization, storage capacity optimization, and disk-based recovery – all managed from within a single pane of glass that provides scalable administration and ease of use for both end users and cloud providers.

“In InMage’s view, cloudbursting is an emerging killer app for cloud-based services,” said Eric Burgener, senior vice president of marketing at InMage. “It adds an application flavor to the mix of on-demand services in a way that didn’t exist before. Cloud providers that can provision server, storage, and network resources on demand can now offer a broader set of tiered services that allow end users to ‘burst’ into and out of the cloud as necessary to address disaster recovery and business continuity requirements, offload maintenance and testing activities to secure cloud infrastructure as needed, and meet seasonal demand with expanded production application services – all without any impact to capital budgets."

As a foundational technology, InMage offers
key advantages of importance
to both end users and cloud providers:

• Flexible licensing which supports the elastic expansion/contraction of cloud-based services and accommodates the billing implications
• Low overhead in deployment and use across server, network, and storage resources, making it a great fit for virtual machine environments that are a key supporting technology in cloud-based computing
• Non-disruptive scalability which accommodates the need for server, storage and other infrastructure growth on both the end user and infrastructure provider sides without impacting client-side production servers
• Enterprise multi-tenancy that securely delivers reliable services to multiple customers with a scalable management model
• Broad heterogeneous support that maximizes cloud provider market opportunities by covering a wide range of server, storage, and application environments found in customer settings

“InMage’s definition of ‘cloud-optimized infrastructure’ is raising the bar concerning what end users should expect from cloud providers,” said William Fellows, principle analyst at The 451 Group. “It represents another step in the direction of utility computing in a way that provides significant value to end users looking to take advantage of elastic information technology (IT) infrastructure.”

InMage’s cloud-optimized infrastructure addresses
three main use cases:

• Disaster recovery – Cloudbursting, through its ability to quickly provision large numbers of virtual servers, allows cloud providers to offer more comprehensive DR and business continuity services. It also gives end users the ability to restart critical business services on application servers in response to disasters or other outages. Application failover technologies can help make these recoveries predictable, reliable, and low risk. Cloudbursting becomes an essential tool in the cloud provider’s arsenal to make sophisticated business continuity services easily available to enterprises – particularly smaller enterprises – to which they might otherwise not have access.
• Administration – Cloudbursting can offer the same support that an in-house test environment does without the infrastructure management headaches and costs. Given easy, affordable access to outside resources, an enterprise may choose to maintain a smaller test environment in-house, leveraging the cloud provider to handle any overage.   
• Production Offloads – Supplementing production with cloud resources may be a bit farther out, but it is still a valid use case. Given easy access to elastic IT resources, enterprises may bring up additional application servers within the cloud to meet seasonal demands without having to expand in-house infrastructure.

Cloud optimized infrastructure is available immediately from InMage and is based on proven technologies that have been evolving and running in production environments over the last five years.