Am I looking forward to the presentation at Virtualization Field Day 5 from OneCloud? I have no idea! Why? Well, here is a company that I know absolutely nothing about! I can’t remember ever coming across OneCloud in any of my journey’s or conferences! Honestly, I think this is the first company that is the only company that is presenting at VFD that I have absolutely no clue about what they do…
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Disclaimer: As a Virtualization Field Day 5 delegate all of my flight, travel, accommodations, eats, and drinks are paid for. However I do not receive any compensation nor am I required to write anything in regards to the event or the sponsors. This is done at my own discretion.
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That will certainly change fast
OneCloud will present at VFD5 on June 24th at 1:00 PM where I’m sure we will all be enlightened a little more on the solutions they provide. That said I don’t like going in cold, knowing nothing about someone – thus, this preview blog post will at least help me understand a little bit about everything OneCloud has to offer…
So let’s start from the ground up. OneCloud is essentially a management platform for a hybrid cloud play. Their core technology, the Automated Cloud Engine (ACE) is the base to where they provide other services. From what I can tell ACE essentially facilitates the discovery of your on premises data center, taking into account all of your VMs, physical storage and networking information. From here, ACE can take different business objectives and transform these into API calls in order to essentially replicate all your infrastructure into the public cloud – for now, it appears to be just Amazon’s AWS which is supported.
The service running on top of ACE is OneCloud Recovery. OneCloud Recovery allows organizations to facilitate a disaster recovery or business continuity solution involving the public cloud as the primary target – skipping costs and complexity of implementing a second or third site on premises.
So here is how it all happens from start to finish – OneCloud is deployed into your environment, via the virtual appliance route. Another instance is also deployed into Amazon. From there it auto discovers your environment; your networking setup, storage configurations, data and applications are all tied together and somewhat of a blueprint of your environment is created. You then use their policy engine to apply RTO and RPO objectives to your applications. OneCloud will then provision a fully functioning virtual data center in Amazon – one that mirrors your environment in terms of networking and configuration. OneCloud not only duplicates your environment into Amazon, but it will also optimize both your compute and storage in order to minimize costs. Meaning it will scale down on CPU where it believes it can and place your data onto the most cost effective storage. Once your data is there OneCloud performs ongoing replication in order to meet the RPO you have selected. From there it’s just a matter of performing your normal DR tests and engaging in any failover (and failback) operations.
OneCloud seems to have some interesting technology and I’m looking forward to learning more at VFD5. Some questions for OneCloud that come to mind – How do they compare to VMware’s vCloud Air DR services? Do they plan on expanding out to other public clouds such as Google, Azure, or vCloud Air? With a strong software base in ACE do they plan on moving outside just the DR/BC realm – things such as DevOps and public cloud labs come to mind. I really like how they are abstracting away what can be some very complicated API calls to Amazon – any time a company provides a solution that involves simplicity it’s always a good thing, but especially so when dealing with the complex networking and configuration of public cloud and disaster recovery. If you would like to learn more about OneCloud with me you can do so by watching the live stream on the VFD5 event page. That stream, along with any other content created by myself will be posted on my VFD5 event page as well.
