It was announced today that Microsoft acquired a company called Opalis. Opalis provides solutions to:
- Cloud Bursting – automate public cloud provisioning to handle peak loads and prevent SLA violations
- Cloud Cover – automate failover to public or private clouds
- Private Cloud Operation – create and manage service driven, flexible capacity with automation
- Sophisticated triggering – subscribe to external events to trigger workflow processes that add, reduce or fail-over to cloud resources according to policies and SLAs
I was wondering if this would be something that would be used solely in Azure. But two things say “no” to me on that. First is the System Center badge on the above site. Second is the line “automate failover to public or private clouds”. Think of Azure as a public cloud. Think of a MS hosting partner running a Hyper-V based private cloud. We already know that MS plans to add the ability to migrate VM’s to Azure from private clouds using VMM. Now I guess they have technology to allow for an automated failover or DR plan, i.e. you can run your daily operations in one cloud and fail over to another cloud.
I can see the bursting and triggering tying in nicely with the OpsMgr/VMM integration provided by PRO tips, e.g. OpsMgr sees a bottleneck and Opalis technology in VMM triggers a new VM deployment to cater for the load. When demand goes down then the burst VM’s are drained and withdrawn. Sounds like a cool idea!
I wouldn’t expect to see this stuff appear for another 2 years. We’ve just gotten VMM 2008 R2 and the Software Assurance cycle will next kick in around October/November 2011 (GA date, RTM being around August 2011).