Virtustream, which made its name bringing enterprise customers' lifeblood financial applications to the cloud, now offers a version of its cloud management software that will run atop OpenStack/KVM as well as vCenter/ESX(s vmw). The goal is to offer the same sort of enterprise service level agreements (SLAs) and support to OpenStack implementations as it does to the more established VMware vCenter world.
This is part of the company's migration of the KVM-based Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) it acquired with Enomaly a few years back. "With this move, we will sunset ECP and it will be the first step toward achieving the unique application latency SLAs on OpenStack that we currently offer today with xStream atop VMware," Rodney Rogers, CEO and chairman of Washington D.C.-based Virtustream said via email.
He acknowledged there is work to be done to get to that parity but the goal is to allow its customers to opt to run "IO-intensive stateful apps such as SAP(s sap) and Oracle(s orcl) on underlying scale-out/commodity architectures with the safety of those application latency Service Level Agreements."
The new xStream 3.0 release will be available next month. Virtustream's key building block is what it calls a "micro VM" a granular measurement of all the virtualized compute, storage, networking assets of cloud computing.Use of that measurement means customers pay for what they actually use, not for a full VM by the hour. Rogers will be on hand at Structure in San Francisco this week.
While web-born startups have embraced cloud and its scale-out, shared infrastructure model for years, enterprises that run their businesses on tried-and-true (and pricey) enterprise software from SAP and Oracle(s orcl) have been more wary. They're used to SLAs that provide them with some vendor protection if something goes awry. They also expect more support hand-holding than is typically available from public cloud providers.
That's one reason that the king of public cloud, Amazon(s amzn) Web Services has been signing on big systems integrators and rolling out more support options as it pursues enterprise workloads. Amazon offers enterprise applications from SAP as well as Oracle databases and middleware on its infrastructure.
Virtustream is banking that its customers will be more comfortable sticking with a provider that knows their business more intimately. Virtustream is also tightly allied with SAP, which invested $40 million in Virtustream last fall. SAP, the leader in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and the company behind the HANA analytics database is doing all it can to persuade customers that it knows from cloud.