Q&A: Interview with HotLink, Talking Hybrid IT and Cloud Management Solutions

Three years ago, HotLink jumped into the scene with a new way of managing hybrid virtualization environments.  The company launched out of stealth mode with a mission to simplify IT management complexity with its transformation platform for heterogeneous and hybrid computing infrastructures.  And if you've been following the company, you'll know they've expanded their coverage from virtualization into the cloud.
VMblog recently sat down for an interview with Lynn LeBlanc, the company's CEO and founder, to find out more.

VMblog:  Can you provide readers with a little background on HotLink? How did the company start? What is the company's focus within the virtualization and cloud management industry?

Lynn LeBlanc:  HotLink was started in 2010 with a mission to dramatically simplify the management of heterogeneous and hybrid virtual environments. The fundamental idea was to build the core technologies that enable existing virtualization management consoles, originally designed for specific hypervisors, to natively support other virtual infrastructures and allow the identical administration and management capabilities to be extended cross-platform. This is exactly what we have done. HotLink solutions provide the industry's simplest, most robust, flexible, agile and affordable method to manage disparate resources, both on- and off-premise -- fully eliminating the complexity associated with deploying and operating multiple management platforms.

VMblog:  Recently, you launched a new version of the hybrid IT management solution, HotLink Hybrid Express. Could you provide us with a few details on this announcement?
 
LeBlanc:  Originally launched at VMworld 2012, HotLink Hybrid Express is the award-winning management plug-in that extends VMware vCenter to natively support Amazon EC2 resources, allowing IT to deploy, administer and manage public cloud accounts and instances seamlessly alongside on-premise hosts and virtual machines. The recent version of HotLink Hybrid Express, launched in April, provides that same Amazon EC2 plug-in capability for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) users. Now Microsoft-centric IT shops can easily administer and manage Amazon resources in a unified pool with Hyper-V, using the same console they use today and with the same level of robustness and granularity used to manage on-premise virtual machines. Best of all, we also announced new free editions of the HotLink Hybrid Express technology for both VMware and Microsoft environments. 

VMblog:  Who uses hybrid cloud management solutions?  And what are some of the challenges they face?
 
LeBlanc:  Business units, engineering teams, individual developers and remote sites are frequently utilizing public cloud resources to augment or replace on-premise computing resources. With very low financial barriers to accessing a broad menu of capabilities, end users have independently and aggressively embraced public cloud services, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), at a lower budgetary cost and much more quickly than if the same resources were procured from corporate IT. In the interest of innovation and time to market, most enterprises look the other way until one of several things happen: (1) the aggregate costs become large and finance takes notice, (2) the expense volatility sounds a budget alarm or (3) a security or compliance breach becomes publically visible.  At this point, hybrid IT management usually becomes an enterprise priority. However, hybrid management projects have historically involved integrating tools that aren't designed to work together, rebuilding scripts and templates, new workflows, creating service catalogs, managing multiple databases and consoles, significant professional services engagement and challenging economics. Many vendors refer to this as a "journey to cloud."

VMblog:  What's unique about HotLink's approach to hybrid IT management?  And how would a company use HotLink Hybrid Express to manage its hybrid cloud environment?
 
LeBlanc:  HotLink Hybrid Express is the only solution to natively extend on-premise virtualization management consoles to public cloud resources like Amazon EC2. HotLink's patent-pending transformation technology abstracts public cloud platforms and workloads so on-premise management consoles, including VMware vCenter and Microsoft SCVMM, treat them just like on-premise hosts and virtual machines - fully integrated and managed as a unified pool of resources without the need for separate management consoles or complex integration projects. Customers can implement hybrid clouds in just a few hours as opposed to weeks or months.
HotLink Hybrid Express is not another console; it is a simple, intuitive plug-in that uses the existing administration and management infrastructure of VMware vCenter or Microsoft SCVMM -- full featured, not just a basic set of overlay operations. With HotLink Hybrid Express, IT can administer, clone, snapshot and migrate cloud instances in the same way as on-premise virtual machines, utilizing the same management infrastructure and techniques across hybrid resources. Administrators administer manage all resources, both on-and off-premise as a unified pool, represented in a single inventory tree -- Amazon EC2 accounts and instances are treated just like on-premise hosts and VMs. HotLink's integrated, bi-directional workload conversion enables seamless migration to and from Amazon EC2, and users can even deploy cloud instances from existing on-premise templates. Because HotLink Hybrid Express is a plug-in technology, users have the familiar deployment and management interface of on-premise, with hybrid cloud flexibility and agility.

VMblog:  So tell us, why did HotLink decide to focus on Amazon EC2?  And will you be extending support to additional public cloud platforms in the future?
 
LeBlanc:  We chose to focus on AWS because of its dominant market position and the level of customer demand, particularly in the enterprise. We will continue to announce support for additional public cloud platforms as other providers secure larger market footprints, increase enterprise deployments and drive customer requests.

VMblog:  Shadow IT is a growing concern for many enterprises.  What are the main issues you hear about?  And how can corporate IT leverage HotLink technology to address the shadow IT problem?
 
LeBlanc:  Enterprise business units and developers looking for agility and speed are broadly turning to public cloud platforms like AWS to avoid the typically laborious and protracted corporate process to procure internal IT resources. In fact, the ease with which public cloud resources can be accessed has led to broad proliferation of loosely managed or unmanaged Amazon EC2 accounts in many enterprises. Non-IT professionals are often building out sizable computing environments that are outside of any management controls and are completely non-standard with respect to procedures that corporate IT follows to ensure enterprise-compliant computing. While IT processes may seem bureaucratic and slow to hard-charging and independent business units, oversight and reasonable standards play an important role in the effective and responsible use of public cloud in the enterprise.  The problem is, end users typically do not have the tools or the IT experience to operate sizable compute infrastructures.
HotLink Hybrid Express provides a very simple approach for corporate IT to extend existing on-premise virtual infrastructure management capabilities to these distributed Amazon resources and also provide an easy on-ramp for new Amazon users. In less than three hours, existing on-premise virtualization management platforms such as VMware vCenter and Microsoft SCVMM can be extended to support public cloud accounts and instances.
This allows IT to leverage existing infrastructure and processes built around the on-premise virtualized resources for public cloud services without building out disparate management infrastructure.  End users have the independence and flexibility that lures them to AWS in the first place, but workloads are deployed with enterprise-appropriate management and standards. Existing on-premise virtualization management is very rich in capabilities for monitoring, tracking, reporting and many other capabilities from which end user management can significantly benefit to keep public cloud costs low and their budget in check. In this way, both corporate IT and end users benefit from a holistic approach to hybrid management
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VMblog:  HotLink recently launched a free edition of Hybrid Express.  What's included in that product?  And is it a trial or is it really a free version?
 
LeBlanc:  The free version of HotLink Hybrid Express is the full-featured edition of HotLink's enterprise product, which provides the ability to deploy, administer and manage Amazon EC2 instances with VMware vCenter or Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. The free edition supports up to 10 simultaneously powered-on Amazon EC2 instances. If companies need to manage additional instances, they can easily upgrade to a larger, fee-based configuration. The free version is designed to allow companies to immediately benefit from the HotLink capabilities of hybrid administration and management and see how easy it is to extend their on-premise management to Amazon.
At the HotLink website (www.hotlink.com), potential users can sign up for HotLink Hybrid Express webinars, download white papers, and see videos of the technology. Anyone interested in downloading the free HotLink Hybrid Express can find the links on the "Technology" tab of the site.

VMblog:  And finally, what can we expect from HotLink in the future regarding hybrid cloud management?

LeBlanc:  HotLink will continue to expand the number of management plug-ins we offer as well as the public clouds we support. We will also have some very exciting hybrid IT announcements in August, right before VMworld. In the meantime, everyone should try the new free edition of HotLink Hybrid Express and let us know if you like it!