Maestro promises a dynamic performance

Q

Please can you provide some background on the company –
when/why formed?

A
CloudFabriQ was founded in 2012 and is a British ISV and provider of automated cloud infrastructure management solutions. CloudFabriQ addresses the virtualisation technology adoption needs of IT departments, which include integration, automation, and energy efficiency across the data centre by enabling efficient operations through flexible, dynamic, scalable management and automation of cloud infrastructures.

Q
Who are the key personnel involved?

A
CloudFabriQ’s senior executives each have between 25 and 40 years industry experience: John Parkinson is Chairman, and Kenneth Tan is CTO and Executive Director.

Q
What does CloudFabriQ bring to the virtualisation/Cloud market
that distinguishes it from the (many) other players?

A
CloudFabriQ’s V-Maestro software is platform independent, vendor agnostic and highly scalable with automated Virtual Machine provisioning. No other competing solution brings this blend of features to the table at the moment.

Q
Specifically, can you talk us through CloudFabriQ’s technology
and the V-Maestro product?

A
CloudFabriQ V-Maestro offers a new level of versatility not found in existing cloud infrastructure management solutions; being platform agnostic and offering complete hypervisor independence, it enables end users to scale physical machine management from just a few to 100,000 units. This kind of data centre automation, VM orchestration and rebalancing means increased business agility which in turn reduces facilities costs and carbon footprint. Combining all of the above with resilience, intuitive automation, rapid deployment and an easy-to-use interface, V-Maestro directly addresses the needs of organisations seeking a cost-effective, automated cloud infrastructure management solution.

Q
What success have you had to date in terms of customer wins?

A
The V-Maestro product is in beta testing this October.

Q
What success has CloudFabriQ had in terms of bringing the
V-Maestro product to different markets and geographies, with
or without the channel?

A
CloudFabriQ’s strategy is a 100% partner-centric business model and we are currently reaching out to Open Source and Linux centric ISVs, server systems vendors, SIs, and data centre-focussed VARs which offer systems management automation and optimisation solutions. The most suitable environments for deployments of CloudFabriQ V-Maestro are power-constrained data centres and sprawling virtual machine estates. CloudFabriQ has already identified a number of vertical market opportunities.

Q
You characterise CloudFabriQ as a Virtual Infrastructure
Management (VIM) company. What’s unique about this new
sector when compared, say, to Orchestration and DCIM?

A
CloudFabriQ is an analytic, automated cloud infrastructure management solution uniquely positioned to rightsize physical server estates with virtual workloads. Orchestration and DCIM are “static” in comparison to CloudFabriQ’s dynamics.

Q
How can VIM help companies with both their virtualisation and
cloud strategies?

A
VIM reduces risk and energy consumption whilst increasing business agility and asset utilisation. This is achieved by reducing the number of physical servers needed for off-peak workloads and maximising productivity/workloads of remaining compute platforms. It also enables rapid self-provisioning.

Q
In more detail, how does CloudFabriQ fit in with the current
OpenStack focus?

A
V-Maestro and OpenStack together provide a very robust and easy-to-use interface for automating heterogeneous hypervisor estates.

Q
How does it contribute to the desire for companies to achieve
some kind of Cloud integration?

A

In terms of its unrivalled flexibility; CloudFabriQ V-Maestro is designed to manage all cloud workloads and is not constrained by physical location. It also provides a homogeneous and intuitive interface for ease of deployment.

Q
Help end users avoid the problem of Public Cloud lock-in?

A
OpenStack is supported by most major cloud service providers.

Q
Where does CloudFabriQ fit in the current move towards the
Software Defined Data Centre?

A
CloudFabriQ’s V-Maestro software is a vital component as an intelligent and automated VM manager, which enables an organisation to take full advantage of virtualisation; for instance, provision for changing workloads across the IT environment and cater for the varied requirements of different applications, security levels, compliance and other factors which software defined data centre will allow.

Q
Is this objective achievable/desirable?

A
Software defined data centres are undoubtedly desirable but there is still a long way to go. This will be an evolutionary process as distinct from a revolutionary approach. Today, CloudFabriQ is in the vanguard of one manifestation by enabling virtual servers to be dynamically and automatically provisioned and hosted, fully tuned to workload patterns.

Q
Sustainability is another data centre key issue right now. Does
CloudFabriQ have a play in the green data centre debate?

A

Absolutely; V-Maestro includes the option to power-down and power-up physical machines matched to workloads and the constraints engine.

Q
It often seems that VMware is the only virtualisation game in
town – is that fair, and what is CloudFabriQ’s take on the
various virtualisation flavours available right now?

A
Clearly VMware is the leading vendor but others account for circa 30% of the market. However, there are significant non-VMware deployments e.g. KVM which is widely used in the cloud service provider sector.

Q
There’s been much hype surrounding virtualisation to date –
what is CloudFabriQ’s view on where most end users have got
to, what benefits they are really obtaining and, how far
virtualisation can go?

A
Server virtualisation has been around for more than ten years. In fact it has been around for more than fifty years if we include IBM’s widely adopted mainframe VM operating system. It works
“as advertised” and is commonplace across the enterprise space.
In the data centre there are a small number of mainstream
hypervisor platforms and some shops increasingly take a
dual-vendor approach.

The benefits are widely understood and accepted including: asset utilisation, business agility, space saving. Virtualisation also extends to storage and networking thereby spanning the three primary infrastructure pillars. What’s needed now is to take it to the next level, especially interoperability e.g. portability of cross-platform workloads and heterogeneous/open automation tools.

Q
Similarly, if the hype is to be believed, everyone is piling into
some form of cloud. Is that right, or are we still in the very early
days and what are the pluses and minuses of which end users
need to be aware?

A

We need to look more closely at cloud adoption. For example those enterprise end users who have clouds tend to be private on-premise deployments. Wholesale cloud deployments appear to be some years away should they materialise. Challenges and concerns for end users include cloud vendor lock-in and portability, data security and service management/continuity.

The upside is that cloud plays to the utility compute model and has a beneficial impact on corporate balance sheets. Furthermore, for a completely open approach, OpenStack offers a proven way to migrate workloads.

Q
What can we expect from CloudFabriQ in the coming months?

A
CloudFabriQ will be focussing on building its customer and partner base over the next 12 months and gaining much greater visibility. The cloud and virtualisation markets are growing significantly and this development keeps on creating new challenges.

CloudFabriQ is going to take advantage of the need to easily manage these environments by bringing to market solutions that are designed from the ground up with these requirements in mind.