7 Emerging Cloud Computing Vendors Providing Performance and Optimization Services

June 20, 2011 Off By David
Grazed from Internet.com.  Author: Jeff Vance.

Gartner predicts that by 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets because of cloud computing. Those that retain IT assets will have fewer and fewer as time goes by.

This shift means that IT has to make some decisions about how they handle their cloud resources, both during and after transitioning to the cloud. How will they manage performance across the WAN? How can they best allocate resources in a way that reduces costly waste and redundancies? How can they maintain and develop assets with the greatest ROI?

The following cloud computing vendors intend to help the enterprise make the most out of existing and future resources by maximizing cloud performance and optimizing infrastructure. They tout solutions to help customers cut costs without sacrificing performance in the process.

This lineup includes a bunch of newcomers and startups, along with a couple of incumbents who are slowly but surely repositioning themselves to take advantage of various cloud opportunities.

1. Aryaka

What problem do they solve? With ever-increasing globalization, organizations are not only distributed across miles and states, but around the world. Connecting various branches, datacenters, and offices requires heavy WAN investments. However, as a company’s workforce becomes more widely distributed (all while datacenters and servers become more consolidated), efficiency decreases across the WAN, and costs of keeping everyone connected and productive increases.

What they do: The Aryaka Platform takes a cloud-based approach to application acceleration and WAN optimization. This approach prioritizes real-time applications, such as VoIP, Video and thin-client traffic. The Aryaka Platform works to increase efficiency and performance of the WAN by leveraging proprietary technologies for compressing payloads, managing redundancies, reducing latency, as well as speeding file and data-transfer rates.

The Aryaka Platform is delivered as a service, allowing customers to monitor and scale up/down their bandwidth requirements during periods of high/low traffic, while eliminating physical WAN Optimization boxes altogether.

Why they’re an up-and-comer: WAN Optimization is a solution that has, until now, been reserved for only the biggest companies with the deepest pockets. It’s simply too expensive for the mid-market. By offering a cloud-based, pay-as-you-go solution, Aryaka intends to deliver WAN Optimization to the masses. The opportunity for connecting branch offices alone represents a huge opportunity.

Earlier this month, Aryaka closed a $15 million round of Series B funding, bringing total funding to $29 million. Investors include Trinity Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners.

The company’s President and CEO, Ajit Gupta, has a solid track record in this space, having previously founded Speedera, which was acquired by Akamai in 2005 for more than $500 million. Customers include Gluster, Cloud.com, and Tavant Technologies.

2. Gale Technologies

What problem do they solve? Dynamically provisioning heterogeneous and legacy environments – networks containing a variety of vendors and a mix of physical and virtual resources – is a complicated, time-intensive and often error-prone process. Even with the best of IT teams, managing dynamic environments can become an all-consuming task, leaving little time and resources for other critical IT functions.

What they do: Gale Technologies’ solution is to automate the process of provisioning dynamic environments. Their flagship solution, GaleForce, is a workflow orchestration platform built for distributed environments that could contain a mix of cloud (private, public and hybrid clouds) and on-premise assets.

GaleForce automatically provisions both physical and virtual resources across computing, networking and storage elements. Using GaleForce, organizations can locate, schedule, connect, provision and access servers, virtual machines, networking, storage and software repositories through one comprehensive platform.

Why they’re an up-and-comer: As IT assets sprawl out into the cloud, managing and provisioning those resources becomes a bigger and bigger problem. The fact that GaleForce helps companies protect existing infrastructure investments – while helping them integrate those with cloud environments – places them on solid footing as cloud computing matures.

Gale is backed by an undisclosed amount of funding from Crescendo Ventures. Customers include Cisco, NetApp, HP, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Hitachi and Juniper Networks.

3. Precise

What problem do they solve? With more and more businesses moving applications to the cloud, it is essential to find ways to ensure high performance level for end users. But when performance problems do happen in the cloud – and they will – organizations need a tool to help them pinpoint the source of the problem.

What they do: Precise specializes in optimizing and monitoring the performance of cloud and virtualized applications on physical, virtual and hybrid infrastructures. The Precise TPM automatically adjusts to expansions and contractions of virtual platforms though co-provisioning of the underlying monitored application.

Precise also detects and reduces inter-application impact on performance, such as virtual machine events, batch scheduling, database jobs and storage contention, thereby increasing overall data center efficiency.

Why they’re an up-and-comer: Since most enterprises are moving at least some mission-critical apps to the cloud, anything that can help ensure application performance stands a good chance to gain traction in this market.

Earlier this month, the company rolled out a virtual appliance for Transaction Performance Monitoring (TPM). Targeted at private clouds, the company claims the virtual appliance can be deployed in thirty minutes.

Precise is one of the more established companies in this lineup, and their cloud offering builds logically upon their existing solutions. The company was acquired in 2003 by Veritas for $600 million, preceding Veritas’ acquisition by Symantec. In 2008, Precise was rolled back out, acquired by Vector Capital. Precise is now privately held. Precise claims that its software is used by 1,500 companies worldwide and by 85 of the Fortune 100.

4. SOASTA

What problem do they solve? It’s not uncommon for websites to reach maximum capacity and crumble under the pressure of too many visitors. Not only predictable events (annual sales and marketing events) but also random events (major catastrophes, scandals, natural disasters, etc.), drive people online for information, support, and commerce. So it’s important for organizations to plan for peak traffic.

SOASTA argues that too few organizations perform stress testing to see just how well their sites will perform under peak traffic levels. Without testing, they’re risking outages.

What they do: SOASTA integrates heterogeneous clouds and other resources to create a global test platform for Web and mobile applications. Their CloudTest platform allows testing teams to build, execute, and analyze performance tests as well as to perform predictive analyses.

For larger sites, SOASTA can handle terabytes of data in real-time, but can also transform that data into actionable information and precise analysis and insight that helps businesses make decisions about adjusting resources to meet demand.

Why they’re an up-and-comer: Every time there is a major outage, solutions like CloudTest just look better and better. SOASTA is backed by $22 million in funding, most recently locking down $10 million of Series C funding secured in 2009 for global expansion. Customers include Verizon, Netflix, Intuit, Proctor & Gamble, the Gilt Groupe, TurboTax and more.

5. Talari

What problem do they solve? The demand for predictable and reliable WAN bandwidth is burgeoning as more enterprises centralize applications in private and public clouds. Enterprises deploying private clouds face the challenge and cost of effectively augmenting their existing WAN infrastructure with additional bandwidth. Meanwhile, enterprises looking to use public clouds need to connect to those resources reliably with predictable performance.

Thus, many enterprises are investing heavily in private MPLS connections and leased lines. Private networks are expensive, though, often prohibitively so. According to Talari, MPLS bandwidth costs are 100x higher than public internet bandwidth costs.

What they do: Talari Networks’ WAN Virtualization solution brings the concept of virtualization (software freed from its one-to-one connection with hardware) to bandwidth. Talari’s WAN Virtualization solution enables network managers to use multiple WAN connections – existing private WANs such as MPLS, as well as any kind of Internet WAN links, be they DSL, cable, fiber, Metro Ethernet, etc. – to augment or replace individual private WAN connections.

Talari uses end-end algorithms to do dynamic, real-time, traffic engineering, reacting sub-second to not just link failures but also congestion-related network problems, enabling businesses to build a WAN that is simultaneously less expensive, much higher bandwidth, much lower cost and with lower ongoing operational costs than today’s proprietary, single vendor WANs.

The result is business-class reliability (the company claims 99.99% or greater reliability) and predictable performance for enterprises, drastically reducing WAN costs, and thereby removing the WAN cost obstacles to deploying a cloud infrastructure.

Why they’re an up-and-comer: There is never enough bandwidth. As soon as connections speed up, new applications (video conferencing, unified communications, etc.) use up that bandwidth. Meanwhile, as soon as service providers add to their networks, new traffic shows up almost instantaneously (for instance, mobile data traffic is already stressing so-called 4G networks).

Any solution that attempts to improve bandwidth and network reliability stands a chance under today’s conditions. Talari Networks has received two series of funding totaling $16.2 million from Menlo Ventures, Silver Creek Ventures and private investors. Customers include Lextron, Magnum Semiconductor and the Petroleum Pipeline Company.

6. VKernel

What problem do they solve? Before virtualization, capacity planning was relatively simple. But with virtual machines running on shared infrastructure, under-allocating shared infrastructure or putting too many VMs on one machine can open the door for a host of performance problems, including objects that take up storage space without providing any benefit to users.

What they do: VKernel focuses on finding the right fit for allocating resources on virtual machines. The VKernel virtual appliance (vOperations Suite) includes an Optimizer that analyzes and visualizes usage and performance metrics to correctly size VM allocations and reclaim unused resources while maintaining a buffer for spikes in traffic and usage.

Once usage has been measured and analyzed, administrators can identify unused files, wasted storage, and allocate the correct resource allocation and make necessary adjustments – either on the spot, or via a scheduler.

Why they’re an up-and-comer: VKernel addresses a critical, but often overlooked problem with virtualization, and they’ve already racked up an impressive list of customers, including AIG, Deloitte, Cisco, Dell, NPR, PayPal, UCLA, and the US Geological Survey.

In 2009, VKernel announced $7 million in Series B funding, let by Longworth Venture Partners and including existing investors Hummer Winblad and Polaris.

7. Wyse

What problem do they solve? Although PCs have been the cornerstone of enterprise the last two decades and initial purchase costs are falling each year, the high cost of management and maintenance, along with the high security risks associated with PCs, has many enterprises searching for an alternative.

One such alternative is virtual desktops hosted in the cloud and delivered to a variety of thin clients.

What they do: Wyse focuses on helping business replace PCs with virtual desktops that rival the performance and user experience of PCs, but with greater IT control, much easier administration and lower TCO. Wyse designs devices that can leverage legacy PCs (with the hard drives removed) or zero, mobile, thin clients and cloud clients.

Wyse has also been building up delivery and optimization solutions that deliver performance that is on par (or exceeds) that of PCs.

Why they’re an up-and-comer: Pretty much every other cloud performance and optimization solution that I evaluated for this roundup focused on infrastructure. Be it provisioning or app delivery, these solutions were all datacenter solutions.

What about end devices, though? The so-called “post-PC” era has been talked about for at least a dozen years, yet it’s been slow in coming. The cloud could change that, and Wyse is pioneering both “cloud client” and “mobile cloud” solutions.

Wyse has been in business for 30 years, and has a reputation as a hardware company. Lately, though, the company has been investing heavily in developing cloud optimization software. Although the company still develops hardware, about 90% of their research and development efforts are in software development and engineering.

Wyse’s cloud clients are thin clients that rely on the cloud for computing and storage. The difference between them and traditional thin clients is that cloud clients come with optimized software, enabling them to be hosted in house, in private clouds or even in public clouds. They support a full range of applications, including rich media apps, and for end users offer a familiar user experience.

With its Pocket Cloud solution, which allows users to securely access hosted desktops from smartphones and tablets, Wyse is also slowly but surely setting its sights on “mobile cloud” opportunities.