News

Cloud Orchestration, Disaster Recovery Tools Released

GigaSpaces Technologies and RackWare each release 3.0 versions of their software for enterprises doing business in the cloud.

• By David Ramel
• 08/01/2014

The GigaSpaces Cloudify 3.0 orchestration and automation tool was redesigned to provide "intelligent orchestration" of cloud apps, the New York-based company announced.

To achieve this intelligence, a feedback look automatically addresses problems that are detected without the need for human intervention, along with maintenance tasks such as installing updates. The technology to provide such automatic corrective measures is blurring the line between monitoring and orchestration, the company said.

Cloudify 3.0 provides building blocks for custom workflows and a workflow engine, along with a modeling language to enable automation of any process or stack, GigaSpaces said. A new version is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of this year that will feature monitoring and custom policies that can be used to automatically trigger corrective measures, providing auto-healing and auto-scaling functionality.

GigaSpaces said the new release is more tightly integrated with the open source OpenStack platform, which it said is rapidly becoming the de facto private cloud standard. "The underlying design of Cloudify was re-architected to match the design principles of OpenStack services, including the rewriting of the core services in Python and leveraging common infrastructure building blocks such as RabbitMQ," the company said.

It also has plug-ins to support VMware's vSphere and Apache's CloudStack, while plug-ins for VMware's vCloud and IBM's SoftLayer are expected soon. Its open plugin architecture can also support other clouds, and plug-ins are also expected soon for services such as Amazon AWS, GCE Cloud and Linux containers such as the increasingly popular Docker.

And if automatic corrective measures aren't sufficient to handle problems and outages occur, RackWare introduced RackWare Management Module (RMM) 3.0 for cloud-based disaster recovery for both physical and virtual workloads. The product release coincides with a new research report from Forrester that proclaims "Public Clouds Are Viable for Backup and Disaster Recovery."

The system works by cloning captured instances from a production server out to a local or remote disaster recovery site, synchronizing all ongoing changes. In the event of a failover, the company said, a synchronized recovery instance takes over workload processing. The company said this system provides significant improvement over traditional, time-consuming tape- or hard disk-based backup systems. After the production system outage is corrected and the server is restored, the recovery instance synchronizes everything that changed during the outage back to the production server to resume normal operations.

"By utilizing flexible cloud infrastructure, protecting workloads can be done in as little as one hour and testing can be as frequent as needed," the company said. "The solution brings physical, virtual, and cloud-based workloads to the level of protection that mission-critical systems protected by expensive and complex high availability solutions enjoy."

In addition to the new ability to clone production servers and provide incremental synchronization for changes in an OS, applications or data, the company said RMM 3.0 can span different cloud infrastructures such as Amazon AWS, RackSpace, CenturyLink, VMware, IBM SoftLayer and OpenStack.