Virtana Launches First Unified Platform for Migrating, Optimizing, and Managing Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments

Artificial intelligence enables a “know before you go” approach, which can deliver a return on investment of up to 145%

Virtana announced the industry’s first unified platform for migrating, optimizing, and managing application workloads across public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Using artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) technologies, including machine learning and advanced data analytics, the cloud agnostic Virtana Platform solves the most difficult challenges facing enterprises as they seek to leverage public clouds. The platform enables a “know before you go” approach by providing intelligent observability into which workloads to migrate. It also ensures that unexpected costs and performance degradation are avoided once workloads are operating in the cloud.

With the Virtana Platform, enterprises can make data-driven migration decisions to get it right the first and every time workloads are migrated. The unified platform also dramatically simplifies optimization and management of workloads regardless of their location in an increasingly complex IT infrastructure. The hybrid infrastructure optimization capabilities of the Virtana Platform can deliver a return on investment (ROI) of as much as 145% over a three-year period. The ROI benefits are the conclusion of a Total Economic Impact Study, commissioned by Virtana and independently performed by Forrester in July 2020.

“The industry is starved for comprehensive solutions that support simple, cost-effective, seamless migrations from the traditional data center to modern multi-cloud hybrid estates,” said Michelle Curtis, VP of Emerging Solutions for Presidio, a leading IT solutions provider and long-time Virtana partner. “The new Virtana unified hybrid and multi-cloud optimization platform serves as rocket fuel for the Presidio cloud and digital infrastructure portfolio, ensuring that Presidio and Virtana is a winning combination for our clients.”

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“Enterprises recognize the value of public clouds,” said Kash Shaikh, President & CEO of Virtana. “Many are already moving workloads to one or more public clouds. COVID-19 has accelerated their interest. But we are still in the early innings of public cloud adoption. Many tell us they moved some of the workloads back. When we ask why, enterprises say they do not know where to start, lack tools and visibility that can help them plan and execute migrations, and find managing workloads across hybrid environments complex.”

“With the Virtana Platform, we are doing the hard work of simplifying cloud migration and hybrid cloud management,” added Shaikh. “The Virtana Platform provides intelligent observability with data insights to empower enterprises to know before they go.”

The Virtana Platform: Intelligent, Unified, Flexible

The Virtana Platform builds on more than 15 years of combined innovation and expertise in optimizing and managing hybrid IT infrastructures. Virtana already provides industry-leading, standalone solutions to more than 250 Global 2000 companies seeking to migrate, optimize, manage, and validate workloads in public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. With the new Virtana Platform, enterprises gain the benefits of a single intelligent, unified, flexible platform.

• Intelligent. Leveraging machine learning and advanced data analytics, the Virtana Platform provides enterprises with intelligent observability of application workloads before they are moved to the cloud. Insights about workloads include application dependencies, how they will perform in various cloud environments, and their underlying IT infrastructure requirements. This embedded intelligence enables enterprises to make data-driven decisions about which workloads to move and where to place them to meet performance and cost requirements. Once workloads are moved, the platform enables ongoing optimization and management by providing real-time visibility and tools for taking action.
• Unified. The Virtana Platform is cloud agnostic, extending the company’s unique ability to unify workload migration, optimization, and management across all the leading public cloud providers. These include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle, and VMware on AWS. This cloud agnostic approach gives enterprises the freedom to choose cloud providers based on the performance and cost requirements of their workloads. It also ensures that enterprises can leverage their investment in Virtana across future public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
• Flexible. Specific capabilities of the Virtana Platform are delivered in modules, making it easy to cost-effectively add more functionality to the platform as needed. As new modules are delivered, the Virtana Platform provides a consistent experience and seamless integration of capabilities. Over time, all existing Virtana standalone products, including VirtualWisdom, CloudWisdom, WorkloadWisdom, and Cloud Migration Readiness will be incorporated into the platform. Multiple deployment options will include SaaS, managed service, and on-premises. These options let enterprises choose how and where to deploy modules based on their performance, cost, and security requirements.

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Andrew Buss, IDC Research Director for Enterprise Infrastructure, said, “There is a huge focus right now on building modern ‘cloud native’ applications, based on containerization, microservices, and orchestration. But when we look more closely, we see that most companies need to also continue hosting many applications in a private cloud alongside those that they choose to run in a public cloud. What we see from IDC 2020 research is less than 20% of applications have been migrated to public cloud to date. What enterprises need is to have true visibility across all their cloud environments in order to meet their organization’s strategic goals.”

Virtana Platform Modules for 2021

Virtana platform modules for delivery in 2021 include Migrate, Optimize, Manage, and Validate, starting with Migrate. The Migrate module accelerates and de-risks the migration of existing application workloads to public clouds. With Migrate, enterprises can:

• Know before they go. Application discovery and mapping capabilities enable enterprises to capture existing application infrastructure sets along with key performance and operational metrics. This enables enterprises to fully understand their application workloads before migrating them to public clouds.
• Prioritize intelligently. The platform uses machine learning and advanced data analytics to ensure consistent performance, reduce risk and cost, and accelerate migration efforts. This intelligence enables identification of groups of workloads that have similar resource requirements or deep interdependencies and should be or need to be migrated together.
• Select and configure for efficiency. Rightsizing and cloud cost optimization capabilities enable enterprises to select public cloud providers that are right for their needs. They also ensure the most efficient configurations based on risk tolerance, performance requirements, and resource consumption.
• Operationalize optimization. Process tracking and reporting lets enterprises maintain full visibility as part of their standard IT operational activities. This enables continual optimization as additional transitions between public cloud providers, zones, and physical locations are required.

A survey of IT decision makers in the United States and UK, commissioned by Virtana and fielded by Arlington Research in November 2020, confirmed that of enterprises that moved workloads from on-site data centers to one or more public clouds, 72% subsequently moved some of them back. Top reasons cited were the applications should not have been moved to a public cloud in the first place (41%), technical issues associated with public cloud provisioning (36%), degradation of performance (29%), and unexpected cloud costs (20%).

“The growing complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments is hindering digital transformations,” said Shaikh. “With Virtana, enterprises can be assured that expert guidance and the Virtana Platform will be with them every step of the way.”

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