At HotLink we address holistic management through a pioneering new technology, platform transformation. With platform transformation, the underlying virtual platform is abstracted so IT organizations can deploy multi-platform infrastructure but manage it just like a single platform, utilizing their existing management toolset – no additional dashboard is required. In this way, IT organizations can standardize on a management solution while deploying the right hypervisor for each workload, use case or economic constraint. This flexibility enables IT managers to reduce cost, eliminate vendor lock-in, leverage existing skills, and extend their management investment cross-platform.
Cost savings, flexibility and agility are top priorities in most enterprise IT shops. In fact, those priorities are the reason IT managers adopted virtualization in the first place. As these deployments grow and virtualization costs of single vendor solutions spiral, managing cost and enabling greater flexibility still ranks at the top of the priority list.
Using HotLink’s new platform transformation technology, IT managers can tier their virtual infrastructure to accommodate a range of requirements and price points, while standardizing the management layer. By fully decouple management consoles from the underlying virtual infrastructure, data centers can mix & match hypervisors, extend existing management tools cross-platform, apply policy-based automation across all infrastructures, leverage existing skills, eliminate vendor lock-in, and dramatically reduce infrastructure costs. We are very confident that these are top concerns of most progressive data centers.
When IT managers first started virtualizing server infrastructure several years ago, standardization was an effective way to evaluate the virtualization approach in a range of use cases. At that time, vendor choices were limited, and VMware was the most mature. Today, the feature gap between hypervisors is greatly reduced, and IT managers have a range of virtual infrastructure platforms capable of addressing the business and economic needs of an ever expanding list of use cases. Vendor lock-in and cost are top of mind as virtualization proliferates. Evaluating choices for targeting different virtual platforms to meet diverse needs is a natural and expected outcome of a maturing technology like server virtualization.
HotLink pioneered new platform transformation technology to abstract the underlying hypervisor and enable IT organizations to deploy multi-platform infrastructure but manage it as a single uniform platform. Utilizing HotLink SuperVISOR to extend VMware vCenter’s robust management capabilities, administrators can utilize their existing management tools to natively manage XenServer, KVM, and Hyper-V, alongside vSphere. This bottoms-up approach eliminates the complexity of multiple management consoles while enabling the flexibility of heterogeneous virtual platforms.
Today, IT managers have more options to virtualize their datacenter than ever. This freedom of choice allows IT to select the management tool and hypervisor that best meets their needs and budget. True independence from vendor lock-in necessitates that platforms and virtual machines must be independent of the management layer. Therefore, when deciding which management solution to use for mixed hypervisor deployments, true freedom of choice requires solutions that completely eliminate vendor lock-in while providing access to native management features without adding complexity to the environment.
The best management solutions are those that leverage existing skill sets, reduce complexity, and provide opportunities for organizations to utilize the most cost-effective virtual infrastructure for their environment. The HotLink SuperVISOR platform allows organizations to meet all these goals – and more.
