Moving Servers in the Cloud One of Many New Challenges for IT Departments

When the cloud first became a business opportunity, firms used it to launch new applications and services. That is changing now, however, as the cloud has found more widespread adoption and there’s the need to move from one cloud to another and consolidate various servers into a tighter cloud package.

“The cloud really took off with Amazon, and now other folks are gaining ground,” noted Richard Scannell, executive vice president of corporate development for Rivermeadow, during a recent interview with TMCnet. “But it took off in what we think of as greenfield servers. So they were all new servers that were typically acquired to build new applications.”

But that situation is changing.

In its infancy, the cloud was often used to circumvent inefficient IT departments by swiping a credit card and gaining instant infrastructure via the cloud.

“Now that the cloud has been more adopted by the CIO and the head of infrastructure, there’s a desire to consolidate and perhaps get a lot more control over that,” noted Scannell. “So now there is a desire to move around workloads that perhaps were historically kept in the data center, or perhaps are run on multiple different clouds because different business units did different things.”

Firms are trying to get a grip on cloud sprawl and consolidate things a bit more, and this has led from greenfield servers to brownfield servers that are not starting from scratch.

Rivermeadow sees a big opportunity in helping businesses manage this migration, which is why the company has developed turnkey solutions for moving servers—virtual or physical—from the data center or cloud to another cloud. It handles cross-hypervisor architectures, cross-cloud architectures, and makes it as easy as inputting the proper credentials and the IP addresses of the servers that need to be moved.

“If you had 100 servers that were never virtualized, 100 servers running in a private hypervisor (say, ESX), and 100 servers running in a cloud environment (perhaps Amazon), and you wanted to migrate all of those to an OpenStack environment running on KVM, Rivermeadow is a single tool you can essentially upload all the necessary credentials and IP addresses, and without any person being involved, will migrate all of those in the exact same fashion, delivering a bootable clone of each one of those servers into that target cloud,” he said.

Nifty. And quite useful.