HotLink's CEO responds

HotLink took umbrage at my resent post "Software lock in - HotLink invites new players to VMware's party" and wanted to respond.  When I was contacted by the company's PR firm, I invited HotLink to respond. HotLink's CEO, Lynn LeBlanc, too the time to craft a response.

Here is HotLink's response

In response to yesterday’s blog, I would like to provide some comments on the HotLink solution and clarifications on where we are going with the company.  Our long-term objective in starting HotLink was to provide an open, vendor-agnostic platform for managing complex heterogeneous environments whether virtualized, cloud-based or physical.  My co-founders and I have a long history in working with large, complex data centers, and we felt strongly that a new kind of automation was needed to transform these environments for the future.  With that end in mind, we built the HotLink SuperVISOR platform.  The 1st instantiation of this platform enables native, cross-platform hypervisor interoperability for VMware vCenter users spanning VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat KVM.  In the future, HotLink will be launching integrations to other management environments to provide native cross-platform support, as well.

We had several important design objectives for HotLink SuperVISOR.  First, the platform must provide hypervisor interoperability inside existing management solutions.  The HotLink SuperVISOR platform was specifically designed with a plug-in architecture to extend leading virtualization management solutions including, but not limited to, VMware vCenter. A key design requirement for HotLink was to avoid introducing another pane of glass into the data center.  Rather, our approach is to enable customers to leverage and extend their existing management investment to support other virtual infrastructures natively — without adding another console.

Second, the new platform must provide full interoperability of hypervisors natively.  This means that a customer’s existing management console must not be able to distinguish between cross-platform hypervisors at the lowest level. To that end, we built the HotLink Transformation Engine.  This technology is unique to us and enables virtual infrastructure metadata to be represented in a vendor-agnostic model that is independent of the management layer.  Additionally, cross-platform workloads are seamlessly converted for migration across hypervisors with necessary metadata and data stores automatically converted across native image formats.  When combined with other platform services like HotLink’s virtual object bus and proxy engine, customers have an enterprise-class solution for holistically managing a mixed environment as easily as a single hypervisor.

Finally, the HotLink platform had to have an open architecture for easy integration with enterprise system management solutions and in-house workflows. In fact, our HotLink SuperVISOR platform has a standard native API that enables policies and automation to be applied uniformly across the entire virtual infrastructure. In the future, we expect to make this API available to third parties so they may easily add heterogeneous support to their own management solutions.

Today, our customers have a range of workloads, use cases, SLAs and economic factors to balance when making hypervisor choices.  Those same IT managers are challenged with how best to meet all those demands while simplifying management and reducing cost.  We launched the HotLink SuperVISOR platform in 2011 to provide a streamlined, scalable, cost-reducing approach to managing cross-platform virtual infrastructure.  That was our objective in launching our initial product with HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware, and we will introduce additional products for non-VMware management environments in 2012.  For the readers who have already deployed multi-hypervisor environments or are considering this in the future, we hope you will take a look at the solution we have built at HotLink.

Thanks for taking the time to present HotLink's view, Lynn. I'm sure the ZDnet readrs are thankful your response.