Hotlink Turns the Cloud Inside Out by Crossing Interoperability Boundaries

At a time when Microsoft and VMware are in the early stages of providing cross-platform manageability, the newly debuted HotLink, via its SuperVISOR technology is enabling vCenter to natively manage Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The secret sauce for HotLink is its ability to "decouple management consoles from the underlying virtual infrastructure and enable native interoperability of hypervisors."

According to HotLink CEO Lynn LeBlanc, who refers to herself as a "serial entrepreneur"--she was previously CEO and founder of FastScale Technology--HotLink is solving the problems of incompatible software platforms and products faced by users as they move up the infrastructure stack, which is a relief to IT staffs who have previously found themselves bogged down by incompatibility issues. As LeBlanc puts it, "Hypervisors are very similar and they all do similar things, so they should be able to have data models that are also similar."

Her goal is simple: provide a data center solution that uses unique platform transformation technology that "abstracts virtual infrastructure so enterprises can mix and match hypervisors using their existing management consoles."

HotLink attacks heterogeneity from the "bottom up," creating hypervisor interoperability using a native management console capability from within vCenter. LeBlanc says this approach is superior to single-vendor silos and management overlays employed by vCenter and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Although HotLink, which emerged from stealth along with the SuperVISOR announcement, has only 18 employees and seven customers to date, it received $10 million in series A venture funding in January, and according to LeBlanc, the market is open to what she has to offer. "It's been a pretty short selling cycle for us, because the dollars are so significant in a large enterprise," she says.

The base price for the SuperVISOR platform is $25,000, which includes support for an additional hypervisor and five concurrent hosts.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/16/2011 at 12:48 PM