CloudSwitch v2 Hot on the Heels of v1

Companies such as CloudSwitch, Nasuni and Riverbed have an increasingly compelling story to tell as storage and enterprise apps move progressively toward the cloud. No matter what its content, the ability to securely transmit and receive encrypted data without the fear of having it hacked sounds better every day to senior IT management.

The newly released v2 of CloudSwitch Enterprise is a downloadable software appliance that installs easily into VMware and Xen environments in 20 minutes (What, no Hyper-V?). Its beauty is in its ability to securely simulate data center environments—including management solutions—in the cloud, making interaction transparent to users and developers. As the company puts it, "CloudSwitch eliminates the engineering efforts and changes to applications, networking and management tools that were previously required to use the cloud, protecting customers from lock-in."

Via a simple point and click, v2 provisions new Windows and Linux applications in the cloud without any modifications. This is accomplished through network boot support and ISO support (CD-ROM/DVD). v2 also provides Web services and command-line interfaces for programmic scaling to meet peak demands. In addition, it eliminates network bottlenecks by "extending internal network topology into the cloud and allowing secure, public IP access." Also new is broader geographic coverage, including Terremark xCloud Express & eCloud, Amazon EC2 East, West, EU and Asia Pacific regions.

CloudSwitch, which is releasing v2 just six months after v1 debuted, is counting on making a hit with IT via its ability to get face time with strategically oriented CIOs and senior managers on the application development side of the house. According to CloudSwitch co-founder and VP of Products Ellen Rubin, the company’s strong security story also resonates with top security officers, who are understandably leery of cloud security.  "We really try to enable our customers to lock things down," Rubin says, adding that CloudSwitch, which is funded by Boston-based venture capital  firms, currently has a dozen customers, including two large pharmaceutical firms and a large telco service provider.

CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 is currently available with a free 15-day trial. Pricing begins at $25,000 for an annual license, including basic support and up to 20 concurrent virtual machines under management in the cloud. Available server packs are available for scaling. Cloud usage fees are paid separately to the cloud provider, and additional pricing for scaling cloud deployments is available.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 12/13/2010 at 12:48 PM