Velostrata emerges from stealth

Velostrata has also announced $14 million in Series A funding from Norwest Venture Partners and Greylock Partners IL (83North).

Velostrata unlocks the power of the hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud has great promise -- enabling enterprises to own the base infrastructure needed for average workloads, while renting the spikes in the cloud, on-demand -- providing operational efficiency, cost-savings and agility to respond quickly to business demands. However, in reality, implementing a hybrid cloud approach for production workloads has not been practical due to a number of barriers, including security and compliance risks, cost, migration time, complexity and vendor lock-in.

Velostrata removes the barriers to hybrid cloud adoption in a completely new way -- by decoupling compute from storage. Velostrata mitigates security and compliance risks and reduces costs by leaving the storage on-premises. There is no longer a need to overprovision the data center or pay for expensive block storage 24x7 in the cloud. Business agility improves and vendor lock-in is prevented since workloads are streamed to and from the cloud in minutes while performance is optimized end-to-end, despite the distance between compute and storage. With Velostrata, no changes to the applications, images or storage are required, the same management tools and processes can be used, and moving workloads to and from the cloud is as simple as clicking a button. Enabling on-demand hybrid cloud for production workloads is finally low-risk, cost-effective, fast and simple.

“Our vision for Velostrata is to enable frictionless hybrid clouds for any workload in real time,” said Issy Ben-Shaul, CEO and co-founder at Velostrata. “Today, hybrid cloud deployments have largely been limited to corner-cases, because there are just far too many barriers involved for general-purpose use, and in particular, customers don’t want to move their large production data assets permanently to the cloud. At Velostrata, we have developed a breakthrough technology that eliminates those barriers and our unique approach has already transformed the hybrid cloud strategy for our large enterprise users.”

“I was excited to see that we were able to very quickly move virtual servers from on-premises to AWS (and back), without any manipulation or conversion of the VMs and with excellent performance,” said Chuck Wiggins, director of infrastructure at Guardian Industries Corp., a global manufacturing company. “With Velostrata, I have the flexibility to leverage the hybrid cloud on-demand and I’m never locked-in.”

“Velostrata quickly proved they could deliver on both performance and functionality,” said Brian Pillar, IT manager at TechSmith, a global technology company. “The flexibility to move workloads back and forth between my data center and the cloud in minutes while keeping the storage on-premises finally makes hybrid cloud a low-risk, low-cost option for us.”

“Velostrata takes something that is really complex and makes it incredibly simple,” said Troy Jennings, team lead at Just Energy, a leading U.S. energy company. “Movement of VMs between our data center and the cloud was simple and fast, and the user interface and the configuration process were equally simple and intuitive.”

Primary use cases evaluated by organizations include:
? Data Center Extension -- move VMs from overloaded on-premises hosts to the cloud to restore performance and stability
? Cloud Bursting -- provision the data center for average utilization and burst to the cloud on-demand during peak times
? Storage Consolidation -- consolidate storage to a centralized data center while running VMs remotely in the cloud without impacting performance
? Hybrid Disaster Recovery (DR) -- provide site-to-site DR without the additional cost and complexity of duplicating compute resources at the remote site
? Dev/Test -- spin-up VMs in the cloud in minutes without migrating images or storage. Use cloud storage to either store temporary data and automatically sync results on-premises, or have all data persist in the cloud

"Challenges related to data migration have been some of the most significant barriers for implementing hybrid cloud," said Colm Keegan, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. "Velostrata’s approach of decoupling compute from storage could be a way for businesses of all sizes to gain the elastic workload capabilities of hybrid cloud without compromising application performance or data security."