I recently came across another product that, in my opinion, has the potential to blow convirture out of the water. Its called Zentific http://www.zentific.com
It is new and it seems to be under some seriously active development.
Recently, I had a chance to exchange messages with Steve, a Principal Architect at an E-commerce company that is a Convirture customer.
Please introduce your organization and the role you play there.
I’m a Principal Architect here at (a large E-commerce company.) I primarily work in Infrastructure/Systems – which include Operations.
What are you doing that needed this technology?
We have a number of E-commerce sites that need to react in real time to the environment.
We need to be able to react in real time to E-commerce markets. Sales, holidays, sport events - all trigger major changes in traffic and sales to our sites. The latest requirement is to rapidly adapt to that rapid change.
In the past we simply over-built our infrastructure to handle these events however this is obviously not cost efficient with regard to hardware and network resources.
We currently have limited virtualization and only on certain layers of the infrastructure which has dramatically improved our elasticity. In the near future we want that elasticity brought to every layer and it to be done better than the current methods. We need something to bring management to us. Convirture is very interesting because we can integrate our current virtualization (open source) and build our new infrastructure simultaneously.
What products did you consider?
We considered many different products including: VMware’s vCenter, Citrix XenServer, Eucalyptus, OpenCloud, Amazon EC2 (external), Convirture and Oracle’s VM Manager
Why did you select this product?
There were a number of features we liked including: simplicity, integration of our current Hypervisors, and its open source nature allowing us to customize it as required.
Since this product, unlike most of the other products, is hypervisor independent it allows us to do things on the hypervisor that we couldn’t normally do with other virtualization products because of the closed nature of their respective hypervisors. One example is usage of different storage techniques and technologies.
Most support HBA/Iscsi/NFS and/or their own proprietary storage. Using an open-source hypervisor, which runs on commodity operating systems, allows us to use various other distributed filesystems - the only limitation being the hypervisor capabilities.
Another important factor was the cost. The products offered by the market leader in virtualization aren’t exactly cheap. We needed more options.
What tangible benefits have you received through the use of this product?
We’ve gotten a number of benefits through the use of Convirture’s technology including:
- We were able to quickly integrate current hypervisors and guests without any time consuming migrations.
- Rapid provisioning – with the easy to use and customize template system in Convirture, it’s very easy to provision guests very rapidly.
- Consolidated consoles.
- VLAN management during provisioning is as simple as a drop down menu.
- HA – Convirture handles the high availability tasks without setting up complicated clusters. Setting up HA in Convirture is simple.
In the end, we’re sure we’ve saved time and administrative costs.
What advice would you offer others facing similar circumstances?
The advice I would offer is take time to really understand what you need before picking a product. It is also wise not to rely on vendors to tell you what you need. Don’t get locked into any one product and remember everything seems to be going cloud internal/external. The nature of cloud is flexible.
