AppZero moves workloads from private data centers to the cloud

The merging of private data centers with public compute clouds is a widely discussed goal in the IT industry today. An application virtualization company called AppZero is bringing it closer to reality with a new set of tools designed to move server-based applications from the private data center to services such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud in seconds. AppZero’s new technology, unveiled at DEMO 09 this week, can even move applications from one external cloud to another, sidestepping the problem of vendor lock-in.

“Simply installing applications in the data center -- that usually takes hours. Moving them into the cloud -- even longer. With our software you are able to move applications in a matter of seconds,” AppZero CEO Greg O’Connor said at DEMO.

AppZero’s Virtual Application Appliances (VAAs) consist of the application and all its dependencies, but no operating system. Creating the virtual appliances can take as long as two hours, but once created they are portable and easily moved from the data center to the cloud.

AppZero, formerly known as Trigence, showed the DEMO audience how to move a VAA from a private data center to Amazon Web Services, and then to GoGrid, another cloud hosting service. It’s a simple mouse click-and-drag operation, like moving files in Windows Explorer. It took just a few seconds to move the application from a private data center to Amazon, and a minute or so when moving the workload from Amazon to GoGrid.

AppZero VAAs are ideal for middleware applications from the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and MySQL, the company says. The VAA toolset is available immediately, starting at $500. A few pre-built appliances are also available.

AppZero says its product complements hypervisor technology from virtualization vendors such as VMware, which is also talking about the idea of joining private data centers to public clouds. VMware last month said its forthcoming Virtual Datacenter Operating System will connect customer data centers to those of external cloud providers, letting them provision and manage all internal and external virtualized resources within the same software console.

AppZero’s attempt to make applications portable across multiple cloud services is also reminiscent of work being done by the Open Cloud Consortium, a group of universities that is promoting open frameworks that would let clouds operated by different entities work seamlessly together.