Ravello Systems brought a new SaaS product into general availability yesterday that is designed to make app testing in the cloud easy and convenient.  This ‘cloud hypervisor’ technology lets companies collect the virtual systems that an app runs on and then creates a replica of that complete environment for testing in the cloud.  When you look at the frenetic pace at which companies are now developing apps, the need for a rapid deployment test cloud environment becomes pretty obvious.  This happens because many data centers are increasingly maxed out, or the deployment process is cumbersome.  With Ravello Systems acting as the original hypervisor, the apps can maintain their native properties, making for a better test altogether.  Enterprise developers can create full replicas of multiple virtual machine applications without modification. App testing in non-consistent environment previously meant major modification of those apps because of the different platforms.  The result is quicker deployment, faster testing and validation, and dollars saved.

Ravello has put in a lot of work to get to this point.  Working through thousands of beta test users, they finalized this general availability release, their flagship product known as HVX.  Ravello achieved $26 million in funding back in February, and its founders are the developers of the open-source KVM virtualization hypervisor.   Impressive credentials aside, HVX is an instant contender in a competitive test/dev landscape.  The difference here is the ability to seamlessly use any leading public cloud platform to perform test scenarios and build development environments quickly and easily.  Public cloud platforms like AWS, Rackspace or HP Cloud can all be integrated efficiently and with cost-effectiveness – and there’s more integration on the roadmap.  Ravello also boasts no capacity constraints in the deployment of replicas, making test and development configurations essentially as scalable as you need it.

In a briefing with Navin Thadani, senior vice president of products At Ravello Systems we discussed the various points of this product and the clarity of the business need and opportunity.

“Ravello takes the issue of reproducing, recreating actually – entire application systems from your enterprise data center, then putting those in the cloud – that becomes something that is easy to do, you can get it replicated simply, quickly in the public cloud”

Ravello’s proprietary technology that runs underneath is a fascinating machine.  I mentioned HVX – the hypervisor, there’s also a component called I/O Overlay and it maintains the connection between storage and networking through software-defined networking.  This is particularly important deploying an entire app platform, where there are quite likely numerous virtual machines that are configured within that deployment.   That’s the scalability piece – flexible, powerful, intelligent.  Ravello prices its service on a per-user basis, adding costs on the complexity of the configurations, size, and performance.   Ravello makes it easy to rent space for test and development, rather than having enterprise go out, roll their own test environments on site at great costs from an engineering and capital side.