HotLink Corp. is announcing a new version of its HotLink Cloud-Attach Platform for helping customers easily create hybrid clouds using a combination of VMware Inc.’s virtualization software and Amazon Web Services, and managed by VMware’s vCenter management console.

Nearly a year to the day after the company first rolled out its hybrid cloud platform, HotLink is adding support for Amazon high-performance services, improving cost reporting and simplifying disaster recovery.

The company’s platform lets IT teams natively extend their traditional virtualization management systems to public infrastructure-as-a-service and unify hybrid management without introducing a lot of new tools. Managing hybrid clouds with the familar vCenter platform is a major selling point. “We have extremely deep integration with vCenter,” said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of HotLink.

HotLink says it can make public cloud resources logically equivalent to a company’s on-premise virtualized resources. That means users can deploy cloud-attached AWS resources into their current environment in about two hours while automatically getting disaster recovery, cloud bursting, hybrid management and integrated development and test.

Customers can use existing VMware management capabilities for AWS resources, unify networking and security management with vCenter, apply existing VMware templates, scripts and workflows in AWS and extend vCenter-compatible tools to AWS resources.

The new Cloud-Attach Platform supports high-speed AWS instances and solid state drives, 64-bit processing and parallelization of virtual machine imports. This release features faster restores for disaster recovery (DR) and the company now stores up to 500 change sets on its virtual machines for DR purposes.

HotLink provides cost optimization of AWS environments by reporting on charges for granular subaccounts, users, application stacks and AWS services mapped against customers’ budgets. Analytics and alerts can be applied for powered-on but unused instances, undersized instances, purging recommendations for unused data and historical spending data. The features collectively can reduce AWS costs by 50 percent, LeBlanc said.

“We haven’t found that The Amazon bill is structured to help manage costs,” she said, “So we have built our own calculation methods for extracting costs in a way that’s much more usable than what Amazon is providing.”

Load optimization features include load balancing recommendations for on-premise data transfer, workload placement analytics across availability zones, intelligent scheduling for bandwidth management and AWS account configuration for fewer bottlenecks and faster throughput.

Cloud-Attach Platform incorporated into HotLink’s managed disaster recovery service, which is priced in gold, silver and platinum tiers that provide weekly, daily and continuous service delivery for $70, $90 and $125 per virtual machine per month on an annual contract, respectively. HotLink also sells the software alone, but LeBlanc said more than 80 percent of new customers opt for the managed service.