I recently had a briefing with CloudVolumes and this product is pretty amazing.  Capacity on Demand, Flexibility – it’s the stuff of legend, the goal so many datacenters are shooting for, investing, engineering, validating -rolling out internal clouds, building apps on them and so on.  There are lots of ways to define Capacity on Demand, and CloudVolumes has a completely different take on it that introduces the ability to deliver applications, upgrade applications, and even rollback within seconds on systems that are actively running.  The product can also be used to create high availability through stateless server deployments that are set to take on roles dynamically.

From one- many.  This is not just the stuff of some secret lab, but a rather robust enterprise tool that takes leverage to an extreme, so that management of  applications can be brought down to a single image for a given application – all of it easy to manage with a fully integrated report and control console.  Further, the product is tested to scale at over 10,000 VMs, and it does all of this without packaging, streaming or anything of the sort.  It is something completely different and taking it in requires a departure from what we have come to know about application installation.  In desktop service scenarios, fully installed applications are available on-demand and it works with all of the major VDI products like VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop and more.  Back to the datacenter scenario, for those that are well developed on VMware vCloud and vFabric AppDirector, the product is designed to integrate within and is available in VMware’s cloud Applications MarketPlace.  With CloudVolumes, App management and updates can take place across thousands of VMs at the same time, managed as one, and capable of complex multi-tier app deployment through the use of application blueprints.

The secret sauce, if you will, is done through some pretty fascinating refinements of virtualized infrastructure.  By integrated storage and virtual, they can deliver shared volumes through a CloudVolumes-managed VM.  Further, they are able to deliver the applications to VMs in a way where it is indistinguishable from native applications.  As a result of single-point architecture, the foundation is set for a highly-scalable, rapid-deployment system that is unlike anything I’ve personally witnessed.  Success stories are found on the company’s website and the following press release.  CloudVolumes has the potential to change a lot of perceptions about virtualization, application delivery, even business requirements, so this will be one to watch.

CloudVolumes Delivers Industry’s First Instant Workload Management Solutions to Reduce Complexity, Increase Efficiency and Provide Mobility within the Datacenter and Cloud 

By virtualizing above the OS, CloudVolumes eliminates per VM management, installation and migration – providing instant delivery of multi-tier complex server and virtual hosted desktop workloads, simplifying management and drastically reducing costs 

LOS ALTOS, Calif. – May 7, 2013 – Formerly known as SnapVolumes, CloudVolumes today announced the availability of its suite of enterprise-class Instant Workload Management (IWM) products for enterprise server, desktop, and cloud environments. CloudVolumes also is introducing integration with VMware vFabric Application Director. By virtualizing above the operating system (OS), CloudVolumes is eliminating per virtual machine (VM) management, significantly reducing management requirements and costs.

“Virtualization at and above the operating system can massively benefit enterprise datacenters,” said Paul Burns, president of cloud research firm Neovise. “CloudVolumes is breaking new ground here, resulting in improved server and cloud delivery, capacity creation and mobility from one cloud to another, as well as enhanced virtual desktop delivery, configuration management, patch management and more.”

 CloudVolumes products are engineered for enterprise-class workloads with a single point of administration and ability to virtually transport workloads without using physical resources, by nativelyattaching volumes to thousands of running VMs. Additionally companies have a choice to move their workloads to the best available resources in the datacenter or cloud without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. CloudVolumes IWM solution requires no changes to existing infrastructure, OS, hypervisor, application, licensing, policy or infrastructure and delivers:

·       Instant deployment of complex multi-tier server workloads into a running VM

·       Scaling, relocation and recovery instantly across thousands of virtual machines within seconds

·       Migration of workloads between the cloud and datacenter, independent of VM or hypervisor

·       Single image management of applications, dependencies, data and settings

·       Patches, updates and upgrades that are applied once and delivered dynamically to many VMs

·       Department and user installed apps, including personalization for desktop

·       Support for all Windows desktop and server apps including custom developed ones

“The CloudVolumes product is truly a differentiator in the industry by allowing users to change the way IT provisions applications to specific workgroups or change the personality of a server-build to rapidly provisionworkloads such as an SQL server or Citrix Server.  Instead of spendinghours building unique server and virtual desktop workloads, we are able to simply assign the right AppStack to the given server or application workgroup,” said Cory Merritt, president, Sage Infrastructure Solutions Group. “At Sage, we have leveraged CloudVolumes to take a base Windows Server 2008 R2 build, and by applying the appropriate AppStack, turned the base server into a SQL Serverwith a simple reboot.”