Unitrends, which also offers cloud backup, recently announced Boomerang, a virtual appliance that moves VMware VMS to AWS.
This technology isn’t just about migration. If you can easily move VMs to AWS, it can support what is known as ‘cloudbursting’. This is where you have a private cloud in your shop, and when you run out of capacity, you can move workloads to the cloud. Often these workloads are only temporarily in the cloud and move back to the data center when computing demands fall back in line.
Boomerang is based on technology Unitrends acquired when it bought Yuruware earlier this year
“Virtualization and cloud computing have disrupted the data protection landscape, and Unitrends believes companies of all sizes should be able to take advantage of these technology advances,” said Dr. Anna Liu, director, research and development, Cloud Products and general manager, Unitrends Australia. “With Boomerang, even the smallest organizations can leverage AWS for load balancing, disaster recovery and migration. Being able to adapt data protection strategies to meet evolving data center requirements is no longer a benefit reserved for large enterprises with massive headcounts and budget.”
Like many third party tools, Amazon has its own solution, and is not shy about competing with its technology partners. “VM Import/Export enables you to easily import virtual machine images from your existing environment to Amazon EC2 instances and export them back to your on-premises environment. This offering allows you to leverage your existing investments in the virtual machines that you have built to meet your IT security, configuration management, and compliance requirements by bringing those virtual machines into Amazon EC2 as ready-to-use instances. You can also export imported instances back to your on-premises virtualization infrastructure, allowing you to deploy workloads across your IT infrastructure,” Amazon described. “VM Import/Export is available at no additional charge beyond standard usage charges for Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.”
