Hybrid Cloud solutions are coming more and more to the fore. They provide on-demand performance, capacity, and compute resources, allowing to expand applications to a cloud whenever it’s needed. This results in faster go-to-market when there is a need to test a new concept or role out a new service. Instead of buying extra hardware, you can simply provision resources in a cloud. This leads to lower cost of running IT since you can validate concepts without additional expenses. To say more, it gives improved business continuity as you automatically get a disaster recovery location.
Despite all these benefits, there are still certain problems with typical hybrid cloud solutions. First of all, high price and point of entry. For instance, to start using Microsoft Azure Stack, you have to swap out the existing configuration, buy new hardware and set it up from scratch. Then, you have to adapt to new management, which takes additional time to start using a hybrid cloud. Another problem is that typical hybrid cloud solutions do not provide high availability for VMs and applications since they don’t give the ability to live migrate them.
What we offer, is a mix of StarWind, 5nine, and the existing Hyper-V infrastructure combined with Azure, which brings a hybrid cloud functionality to the existing infrastructure. This solution is called StarWind Hybrid Cloud.
It simply deploys on the existing hardware and the problem of management complexity is completely eliminated thanks to 5nine Manager serving as a single-pane-of-glass for administrating the whole configuration. StarWind Virtual SAN replicates the storage between the nodes and provides the Software-Defined Storage layer for the cluster. This paradigm is further expanded to Azure allowing to migrate workloads and create a Highly Available cluster between on-premises and Azure.
Moreover, StarWind ProActive Support allows preventing failures in local infrastructure. Its Health Service monitors failure patterns and automatically submits support tickets, allowing to resolve issues before they are even there.
Important notice: During the development process, the feature name was changed from StarWind ProActive Support to StarWind ProActive Premium Support. Please, take into consideration that the old name remained in the video materials.