UShareSoft Scan to Cloud

UShareSoft, Inc., in cloud software delivery and management, announced UForge Migration, a product that allows cloud providers and enterprises to migrate live server workloads to cloud in under 30 minutes.

Offering white-labeling, it enables cloud providers to propose Migration as a Service offerings, quickly migrating customers to scale their cloud business.

UForge Migration ‘deep scans’ live physical or virtual servers down to individual files. Users can then migrate the server straight to cloud, or import the scan into their private workspace in UForge Factory, UShareSoft’s server template management platform, for software governance, security analysis and maintenance before migration.

UForge is cloud and hypervisor agnostic, meaning workloads can be moved between clouds and virtual data centers. This includes migrating workloads between VMware and Amazon or Windows Azure, or cloud and hypervisor environments based on Abiquo, Apache CloudStack, Eucalyptus, Flexiant or OpenStack.

30-Minute Migration to Cloud
Cloud providers can now offer new migration services, moving customer workloads from an existing data center or other cloud such as Amazon, into their own cloud.

UForge Migration scans a live system, retrieving the meta-data of every OS, middleware and application file. The user can then fully assess the system before migrating it to their chosen cloud in a single click. UForge automatically removes drivers and tools specific to the existing environment, and adds those for the new environment, also handling variables such as networking configuration, disk partitioning, storage etc. The scan is intelligent, only uploading the necessary information and not the entire disk. This decreases the total migration time to under 30 minutes.

Software Modeling for Governance and Maintenance
Together, UForge Migration and UForge Factory offer cloud providers and their enterprise customers full software governance and traceability as they migrate workloads to cloud.

The system scan can be imported into UForge Factory then modeled as a server template, enabling users to:

• Use an existing live system as a server template
• Implement OS or other software updates prior to migration
• Inject additional drivers or tools
• Share the template with colleagues for further development and testing
• Execute and compare incremental scans, for life-cycle management, security alerts and detection of manual changes

Cloud providers also benefit from the ability to:

• Build an application marketplace by empowering ISVs to onboard migrated and customized application stacks
• Enable automated migration of customer workloads with no lock-in
• Move customers from their public cloud to a managed hosting environment without having to re-build from scratch

"UForge Migration changes the dynamics of software delivery to cloud, combining fast migration with full analysis and governance of the software stack. That’s critical for enterprise customers," said Alban Richard, CEO, UShareSoft. "Migration as a Service promises to be a killer app for cloud providers who can ramp users more quickly to their cloud, or switch them from cloud services to managed hosting offerings."

"Many existing tools do a good job of migrating live systems, but they effectively move a "black box" instance from one platform to another," said James Weir, CTO, UShareSoft. "Consequently users are none the wiser on the internal packages and licensing of their workload. UForge Migration builds on our expertise in software modeling so users can analyze individual system components and make appropriate changes. We have several customers beta testing UForge Migration and have received very positive feedback."

UForge Migration will be in public beta from early August 2013 (to register.)