CloudVolumes
Eliminating the Need for Per-VM Management, Installation or Upgrades

Managing today’s elastic computing demands across data centers and the cloud, including dynamically scaling and moving workloads as required, can prove to be a tedious job. There is the need to perform costly and time consuming conversions of virtual machines making migration extremely difficult. Enterprises need to pay less attention to the aforementioned tasks and should instead simply focus more on moving what is important, the workload itself. While the current cloud industry does not have many companies to help such organizations, a company from Santa Clara, CA named CloudVolumes, has Instant Workload Management (IWM) solutions for virtualized servers, desktops and the cloud, including integration with VMware vCloud and Citrix XenDesktop, and are proving to be the knight in shining armor for such companies.

CloudVolumes redefines application and data management and eliminates the need for per VM management, installation and migration. Formerly known as SnapVolumes, CloudVolumes, Inc. was founded in early 2011 by virtualization, security and datacenter luminaries to provide IT with new enterprise class solutions for instant-workload management that takes full advantage of virtualization, supports legacy applications, eliminates the need for re-architecting or rewriting existing software, and works with existing policies and management solutions in the

The Uniqueness of CloudVolumes

CloudVolumes is shifting the paradigm of how virtual machines are managed and updated. With the click of a button, one can deliver any number of applications and any amount of data to any number of virtual machines within seconds. This is true even for large, multi-tier applications/workloads that are several gigabytes in size. Moreover, CloudVolumes will seamlessly integrate into an organization’s existing virtual infrastructure which means there is no need to replace a company’s storage, hypervisor, network, or virtual machines.

This non-disruptive approach is achieved through working with all existing virtual infrastructure and storage, &through using shared virtual disk volumes: Installed once, used anywhere, applications delivered via CloudVolumes are indistinguishable from native applications creating a highly scalable architecture.

The Technology behind the Firm

With traditional management and deployment solutions, if an application needed is in ten different virtual machines, then it must be installed ten times over. If an application needs to be updated, it is separately updated in each and every virtual machine. In essence, traditional solutions are failing to leverage the full potential of virtualization by doing the same task n number of times for n virtual machines.

“With CloudVolumes, this is no longer necessary. We change the old way of doing things by turning an otherwise monolithic virtual machine where everything is tightly locked together, into modular virtual environment where those components that can be shared are swapped in and out on an as needed basis,” adds Shaun Coleman, Co-Founder and VP of Products at CloudVolumes.

For sharable components, such as application binaries and read-only data, there is only one copy that all virtual machines in a datacenter or cloud can simultaneously share. This is achieved by leveraging a read-only volume that is concurrently attached to each virtual machine.Parts of the virtual machine which are specific to that workload or user including; per-VM configuration, customization, license keys, log files, and data, can remain within the virtual machine or be placed into a separate writable volume. This computer or user writable volume is optional, but there are several benefits to using a separate writable volume including being able to convert entirely generic server virtual machines into a workload such as a database or web server within seconds, or having a users unique state move with them as they move from one non-persistent desktop VM to another.

The RoadMap with CloudVolumes

Adding to the large family of products and solutions of CloudVolumes, the team has recently introduced CloudVolumes v2.0 to expand the deployment and management of workloads and applications into new areas. Through this the team claimed users will now be able to instantly provision workloads to cloud providers, while enterprise developers can easily test and deploy their application stacks. CloudVolumes v2.0 also adds enhanced support for Citrix XenApp. The company is also announcing an upcoming capability called AppCloaking, which will give customers additional flexibility to deploy multiple applications inside a single AppStack and expose specific applications per user based on policy.CloudVolumes has worked very hard to come to the zenith of the virtualization and cloud industry. The firm has always wanted to eliminate the need for per-VM management, installation, or upgrades. It has left no stone unturned to implement this vision and it has no plans to stop anytime soon.