A Sizeable Migration Offering To The VAR Cloud Market
As cloud computing gains more and more acceptance for organizations of all sizes, figuring out how legacy systems and the cloud fit together is of increasing interest to service providers and the value added reseller (VAR) community.
In a recent blog post I posted on how automated workload migration is important to achieving quick and on-going ROI from cloud computing investments. Experienced partners and automated migration services fill a vital role in automating the types of specialized knowledge required to move existing workloads into other hypervisors and other clouds.
This week, IT leaders and practitioners from all over Europe will gather in Barcelona’s Fira Gran Via exhibition center for the VMworld Europe conference (hosted by VMware). The conference will, among other things, be a showcase for partners and services that will help IT organizations use virtualization and the cloud to be more productive and vital to their respective companies.
At the show we will be demonstrating with our partner Colt (Colt Technology Services Group) a proof-of-concept phase provisioning solution for cloud migration.
Race Migration and Colt Working Together on a Cloud Migration POC Targeting Customers in Europe
And who is Colt? Colt is the information delivery platform, enabling its customers to deliver, share, process and store their vital business information. An established leader in delivering integrated computing and network services to major organizations, mid-sized businesses and wholesale customers, Colt operates a 22-country, 44,000km network that includes metropolitan area networks in 39 major European cities with direct fiber connections into 19,000 buildings and 20 carrier neutral Colt data centers. Colt’s experience in cloud computing, assets across their estate and investment in facilities across Europe provides companies with comprehensive offerings, which allow you to capitalize on opportunities in the cloud.
To help get legacy applications to the cloud, check out Race Migration. Race Migration specializes in automating the movement of heterogeneous application workloads regardless of the source or destination. Using Race Migration migration solutions can save your organization upwards of USD800 per server migrated versus manual migration methods. Using application migration products from Race Migration enables organizations trying to preserve legacy application, while getting rid of the underlying physical infrastructure, to move these applications to CSP offerings like those from Colt. What could take days per application to do manually, Race Migration can often accomplish in hours.
The service is in development for Colt’s reseller audience who take Colt’s VMware vCloud® services to market in Europe – Initially the POC will be adapted based on patented cloud storage technology. This solution will be an add-on to Colt’s VMware vCloud® service with self-ordering, self-servicing capability that works well for a multi-tenant and multi-channel environment.
And why is this important from a European perspective?
Both Colt and Race Migration believe we are the first managed service providers for cloud to implement, at a large scale, this kind of provisioning in the European Union for a vCloud® environment.
Colt’s reseller audience will benefit three-fold:
- There will now be a simple way to coordinate and execute an expert cloud migration, specifically between platforms, and to ensure a minimum of downtime for processing and migration.
- It is economical, in that it will now be possible to deploy and re-deploy solutions to several destinations with the same images, making migration, testing and R&D extremely efficient.
- And as Colt can offer geo-specificity to several data centers in mainland Europe that offer the VMware VCloud® deployment, the traffic or load becomes minimal between customer and destination.
The potential for this service is great. By leveraging these services it’s highly likely your customer’s legacy applications can be moved from physical servers or VMs to the cloud in a highly efficient way.
For more on Race Migration solutions, check out our three-minute video overview of our migration solutions including the platforms we support.
Executives from Race Migration are available at VMworld Europe by appointment. Send us an e-mail to schedule a meeting.
