Virtual Instruments introduces Cloud migration readiness service

Customers face critical questions related to cost and performance before initiating their migrations, and prior to the introduction of the CMR service, they were unable to confidently answer these questions. With the CMR service, enterprises can:

• De-risk their upcoming cloud migrations
• Validate the suitability of the targeted applications based on their on-premises performance SLAs
• Understand application dependencies
• Preserve performance in the cloud
• Compare and contrast estimated costs of various cloud platforms

 

For many enterprises, moving select applications to the cloud is a core pillar of their digital transformation strategy, as it offers significant value in terms of business agility, faster innovation and scalability. However, migrating legacy applications to the cloud is a major initiative for most enterprises, and they must answer crucial questions before doing so – such as whether their business-critical applications will perform as expected once in the cloud, how much it will cost to run those applications in the cloud, and which cloud provider makes the most sense. Since many enterprises’ internal IT organizations lack deep cloud expertise, they need to partner with a services provider that offers extensive workload behaviour knowledge, performance expertise, and supporting cloud migration technologies.

 

By combining workload discovery, dependency mapping and workload profiling, the CMR service simplifies the decision-making process and reduces the time to migrate enterprises’ large number of diverse workloads. The CMR service enables enterprises to simulate and validate cloud workload performance before migrating the workloads and determine if migrated workloads are performing adequately – as well as the steps to take if they aren’t. The CMR service includes the ability to select the optimal CPU, memory, and network and storage configuration for each migrated workload using simulated workloads.

 

“Enterprises are increasingly enamoured by the business benefits offered by the cloud, but many of them don’t make the move due to fears their critical apps will underperform once taken off-premises,” said Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates. “The insights delivered by Virtual Instruments’ new CMR service will help enterprises determine whether cloud migration makes sense for their installed applications and which cloud offering is the most cost-effective. As a result, Virtual Instruments is well-positioned to help their enterprise customers reap the benefits of the cloud without exposing their businesses to the inherent risks.”

 

To successfully reduce cloud migration complexity, right-size cloud configurations, and validate cloud performance, the CMR service defines four distinct phases:

 

1. Discovery - Discover application workload characteristics and identify dependencies between installed compute, networking and storage elements.

2. Profiling - Distill hundreds or thousands of workloads into a small set of representative synthetic workloads that accurately characterize performance.

3. Playback - Accurately play back representative synthetic workloads in the cloud to select cost-optimal configurations and placements – without compromising workload performance.

4. Monitor - Monitor actual workloads post migration to the cloud to identify any unforeseen performance or capacity issues.

 

“Considering the potential cost and time savings at hand, enterprises are under significant pressure to intelligently move their applications to the cloud – but doing so without adequate planning and analysis can be more costly than staying on-premises. Understanding which workloads can be successfully migrated to the cloud both from a performance and cost perspective is a critical customer need,” said Rick Haggart, SVP of Professional Services at Virtual Instruments. “With the new CMR service, enterprises gain tremendous insight into the performance and behaviour of their applications before they migrate to the cloud. By adding this crucial element to their cloud migration strategy, enterprises can cost-effectively embrace the cloud to advance their digital transformation initiatives.”

 

“Getting to the cloud successfully is more challenging than most IT leaders realize. It is critical to understand how applications interact within their environments in order to create the optimal cloud solution design, while controlling costs and mitigating risk,” said Ray McCay, VP of Solutions Strategy, ViON, a leading cloud service provider headquartered in Virginia. “We partner with Virtual Instruments and leverage the unique insights their CMR service delivers to ensure our customer cloud migration projects are successful.”