Cloud Expo highlight: Start-Up Herds Hypervisors into One Corral
August 12, 2011
Hotlink Corporation emerged from two-and-a-half-years underground the other day clutching a check for $10 million from a couple of VCs in one hand and a "super-hypervisor" in the other.
The start-up’s got a way to make VMware’s vCenter manager natively support Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Citrix’s XenServer and Red Hat’s KVM hypervisors all at the same time without vCenter even knowing those outlanders aren’t its own ESXi…
The HotLink SuperVisor for VMware is meant to appeal to enterprises with heterogeneous widgetry, which must be just about everybody – well, two-thirds of them anyway – and let them mix and match hypervisors depending on cost, mission criticality, application support, performance, engineering and management requirements, SLAs and legacy imperatives.
HotLink already has enterprise customers, some even paying, and a calculator to figure out what they can save. One figured out that it could save $16.5 million over five years on licensing and support costs by not being locked in to VMware. Very persuasive that. And dangerous. It makes HotLink an acquisition target.
The start-up took a bottom-up architectural approach to the interoperability problem by plunging its mitts into the nasty guts of the databases in the hypervisors.
Out of messing with all that metadata was born HotLink’s patent-pending Transformation Engine, which decouples and abstracts the underlying hypervisors and workloads from the management layer so mixed virtual environments – free of the dependencies between the management tools and the virtual infrastructure – can be treated as unified and native objects inside the VMware infrastructure. Got that?
HotLink then combined its "platform transformation technology" – which translates hypervisor talk into messages vCenter can understand – with a plug-in architecture that provides extensions to the native management consoles to manage all the features of all the hypervisors.
Eureka! vCenter is extended to natively support XenServer, Hyper-V and KVM. No other management console is required; vCenter users can leverage their existing management investment and skills.
The start-up says its approach of unifying management and standardizing integration across all the virtual infrastructure avoids the overhead, complexity at scale, limited integration and constrained functionality of the top-down overlay approach other people have tried despite the limitations of mere APIs.
Done its way vCenter can be used for cross-platform management, orchestration and workflows.
The widgetry can do things like move workloads between hypervisors via hot or cold migration and configure local and remote storage for VMs across hypervisors. There’s health status and security management for all the virtual infrastructure, and policies and automation are uniformly and holistically applied across the disparate virtual platforms. There’s also seamless cross-platform snapshots, cloning and host format conversions.
HotLink also assumes not everything is virtualized and that some things run on bare metal.
The VMware product is HotLink’s first crack at the problem, an obvious choice since VMware is popular with the enterprise. There’ll be others. Microsoft’s System Center’s a likely next move. There’ll also be extensions to cloud platforms like Amazon and Rackspace.
HotLink was started by CEO Lynn LeBlanc and VP of engineering Richard Offer, who did FastScale Technology together. A cloudified software virtualization and provisioning start-up, FastScale was bought by EMC and then passed to VMware.
LeBlanc expects the $10 million HotLink got from Foundation Capital and Leapfrog will be the only outside money it’ll need.
It’s got two of seven customers willing to be identified: Informatica, which HotLink knows from FastScale days, and McAfee, a new account that’s proving to be its biggest. Aside from technology concerns, it says it’s also got customers in financial services, telecommunications and Internet search and an advisory board that hails from BMC, E*Trade, Citrix, eBay, Polycom as well as McAfee and Informatica.
HotLink is still in pilot phase but figure a starter kit running $25,000 for five concurrent hosts and one additional hypervisor besides ESXi when it’s out at the end of the month in time for VMworld. It’ll go through VARs, aiming to sign up the crème de la crème of the ones that have been majoring in virtualization.