HotLink Debuts Amazon EC2 Plug-in for Microsoft SCVMM with Latest Release of HotLink Hybrid Express
April 3, 2013
HotLink Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for heterogeneous virtualization management, today announced the latest release of HotLink Hybrid Express™, the industry’s simplest solution for deploying, administering and managing hybrid clouds. The new release provides Amazon EC2 plug-in support for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) so IT can deploy, administer and manage hybrid on- and off-premise resources using existing virtualization management infrastructure. Additionally, HotLink Hybrid Express is now available in a free edition for both Microsoft SCVMM and VMware vCenter environments.
HotLink Hybrid Express, which also supports VMware vCenter, is the only solution to natively extend on-premise virtualization management infrastructure to public cloud resources like Amazon EC2. HotLink’s patent-pending transformation technology abstracts public cloud platforms and workloads so on-premise management consoles treat them just like on-premise hosts and virtual machines — fully integrated and managed as a unified pool of resources without the need for a separate management console. Since HotLink natively integrates cloud-based resources, Microsoft SCVMM or VMware vCenter-compatible orchestration tools, service catalogs and self-service portals work seamlessly out of the box. Customers can implement hybrid clouds in just a few hours as opposed to weeks or months.
Mike Somerville, NISS manager of systems support and chief cloud evangelist at University of San Diego said, “HotLink lets us open up the doors to our data center and expand it with Amazon EC2 for pennies per hour. The ability to manage Amazon EC2 resources natively using our existing management environment allows us to provision services for our end users instantly and in a transparent way.”
With HotLink Hybrid Express, IT can administer, clone, snapshot and migrate cloud instances in the same way as on-premise virtual machines, utilizing the same management infrastructure and techniques across hybrid resources. HotLink’s integrated, bi-directional workload conversion enables seamless migration to and from Amazon EC2, and users can even deploy cloud instances from existing on-premise templates. Because HotLink Hybrid Express is a plug-in technology, users have the familiar deployment and management interface of on-premise, with hybrid cloud flexibility and agility.
“Enterprises want the elasticity and cost benefits that come with cloud-based computing, but the complexity of multiple management layers, various databases, converters, connectors and customization threatens the return on investment of hybrid environments,” said Mark Bowker, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “For hybrid IT to be viable, IT needs straightforward solutions like HotLink to enable disparate platforms to easily interoperate, whether they happen to be on- or off-premise.”
- Manage Amazon EC2 resources natively inside SCVMM or vCenter — A single point of administration and management is enabled for all on-premise and off-premise computing resources.
- Migrate workloads with simple point and click — Amazon EC2 instances are provisioned as easily as existing on-premise virtual machines.
- Create, use and manage hybrid snapshots — Administrators can create or revert to snapshots either on- or off-premise.
- Automate workload conversion — Integrated, seamless conversion and migration of both Windows and Linux workloads to and from Amazon EC2 eliminates the need to use off-line tools.
- Use existing templates in hybrid environment — Amazon EC2 workloads can be provisioned from existing on-premise templates without rebuilding.
- Standardize policies across on and off-premise — IT can apply policies uniformly in a hybrid environment using existing management infrastructure and techniques.
- Apply automation across hybrid resources — A single point of integration via existing management infrastructure enables streamlined automation across hybrid resources.
“Too many corporate IT managers settle for the proposition that deploying and managing hybrid cloud environments will be a time-consuming, complex journey. In the meantime, their business users are off leveraging public cloud resources on their own, introducing a range of risks to the enterprise,” said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of HotLink. “HotLink Hybrid Express provides an easy-to-implement solution for IT to extend the existing on-premise management infrastructure to Amazon EC2 and offer public cloud resources in a managed and appropriate way, so everyone in the enterprise wins.”
Availability and pricing
HotLink Hybrid Express for Microsoft SCVMM or VMware vCenter is available now. The free edition is full-featured and supports 10 Amazon EC2 instances. The standard edition starts at $26,700. For more information, visit HotLink at booth 543 at the Microsoft Management Summit on April 8-12 in Las Vegas http://www.2013mms.com/, or contact sales@hotlink.com.