HotLink Launches Cloud-Attach Platform and Managed Services for VMware and AWS Deployments

HotLink Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for hybrid IT, today announced its new HotLink Cloud-Attach Platform that enables customers to quickly, easily and holistically incorporate public cloud resources into their existing production data centers. The HotLink Cloud-Attach technology offers industry-first capabilities for out-of-the-box interoperability between VMware management infrastructure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) – without adding operational or integration complexity. Additionally, new managed services complement HotLink’s award-winning technology with expert services, so customers can deploy “cloud-attached” data centers efficiently and without public cloud expertise on staff. 

The new HotLink Cloud-Attach Platform is patented technology that lets IT teams natively extend their traditional virtualization management systems to public cloud resources and unify hybrid management without introducing an array of new tools. Taking a cloud-optimized, software-defined approach to management, administration, networking, security, orchestration and third-party tool integration is the key to the elegant simplicity of the HotLink platform, making public cloud resources logically equivalent to a company’s on-premise virtualized resources. Because of the tight integration into VMware vCenter Server, companies can deploy cloud-attached AWS resources into their current environments in about two hours and benefit from easy disaster recovery and business continuity, bursting to the cloud, hybrid management, dev/test and more.

Incorporated into all of HotLink’s product offerings, the new HotLink Cloud-Attach Platform has been purpose built for the public cloud to let customers extend their VMware investments to AWS and:

• Utilize current VMware management capabilities for AWS resources
• Integrate AWS GovCloud for secure public sector applications
• Unify networking and security management with vCenter
• Reuse existing VMware templates, scripts and workflows in AWS
• Use VMware PowerCLI for hybrid automation and orchestration
• Extend vCenter-compatible tools to AWS resources
• Support both the thick and thin vSphere clients
• Automate bi-directional workload conversion without in-guest agents
• Easily manage large and diverse AWS accounts

Leveraging the new AWS API provides access to AWS advanced features, expanded instance types and a large collection of supported guest operating systems. Additionally, the new HotLink Cloud-Attach Platform includes high-performance features required by production environments, including support for high IOPS AWS instances and solid state drives, 64-bit processing, parallelization of virtual machine imports and dramatically faster restores in a disaster recovery scenario. In addition to increasing overall transaction speeds, these performance features can reduce AWS costs by over 50 percent.

“Our business depends on electronic commerce, warehouse systems, distribution and logistics to fuel the growth of our company. Information technology plays a central role in each of these functions,” said Dwight Atkinson, CIO of East Coast News. “We regularly investigated disaster recovery solutions, but the cost was always a huge stumbling block. HotLink makes it possible for us to tap into the AWS public cloud for the business resiliency we have long needed, at a price that finally works.”

HotLink introduced availability of managed services as part of its disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offering in early 2016. Given its immense popularity with customers, HotLink Managed DRaaS has been enhanced and new managed service offerings for deployment, monitoring, alerting and reporting have been introduced for HotLink’s other hybrid IT products. Two of the most compelling new managed services features spanning the product lines include:

• AWS cost optimization – including charges for granular subaccount, user, application stack and AWS services mapped against customers’ budgets; analytics and alerts on unused, powered-on instances; rightsizing of instances; purging recommendations for unused data; and historical spending data for analysis.
• Load optimization – including load balancing recommendations for on-premise data transfer; workload placement analytics across availability zones; intelligent scheduling for bandwidth management; and AWS account configuration for fewest bottlenecks and fastest throughput.

Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of HotLink said, “Public clouds like AWS have been growing at an aggressive rate for the past several years. However, mainstream corporate IT is just scratching the surface of the cloud-attached data center. The HotLink Cloud-Attach Platform is specifically designed to make this new computing model easy and budget-friendly. Let’s face it: some companies are afraid to deploy public cloud resources due to lack of experience and limited staff. The new HotLink platform, combined with cost-effective managed services, provides the perfect solution to get started now.”

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