Q&A with Garima Thockchom of Gale Technologies

VSM: There has been a distinct shift from outsourcing clouds to building on-premise clouds. Why do you think that is, and are there certain types of enterprises that prefer an on-premise cloud?



GT: The shift to hosting an on-premise cloud gives enterprises the sense of greater control and security they desire. Organizations are used to having control of all aspects of their datacenters, so outsourcing data to a cloud can be a frightening prospect. On-premise clouds also can enable users to realize instant efficiencies from their existing resources without the overhead of integration, professional services, and complex deployment schedules.



Although many enterprises are making the transition to the cloud, there are still many enterprises that would be more comfortable with an on-premise cloud because they are in charge of their data plus private customer information. For example, many healthcare and financial services organizations often feel more secure with this style of cloud computing.



VSM: What cloud challenges are users still facing?



GT: As well-known as cloud computing has become, users are still facing challenges that make them hesitate to move their existing infrastructure to the cloud. Many shy away from the cloud because they do not know how their infrastructure will perform once it is moved into a cloud. It gets even more complex when you add in concerns around workload performance in a shared environment, uncertainty about the equipment needed or the potential cost, and the fear of getting locked into a specific vendor platform that may not easily integrate with their existing technology infrastructure. That’s enough to make anyone a bit gun-shy and question whether it is worth moving to the cloud. In an era when IT administrators have to do more with fewer resources, these challenges can be daunting.



VSM: How does your latest technology help users overcome these challenges?



GT: The GaleForce Turnkey cloud was designed for the everyday organization that wants to leverage its existing infrastructure investment but gain the benefits of the cloud in a quick and seamless manner. The GaleForce Turnkey Cloud allows customers to convert their existing, static IT environment into a dynamic private or hybrid cloud in only two steps and as little as two weeks, without requiring expensive and complex hardware or tools. Self-service access to cloud resources also provides greater agility and ease-of-use.



Taking into account equipment usage and cost, GaleForce dramatically reduces CAPEX and OPEX. By reducing CAPEX, fewer machines and licenses are needed through optimization of resource utilization (physical and/or virtual) and by reducing OPEX, it allows for an improved ratio of people to equipment through dynamic, automated setup of workloads on the cloud, therefore reducing cost. By focusing on composite automation and orchestration in a solution like GaleForce, users can dramatically increase the utilization of resources they already own, typically from under 10 percent to over 95 percent and do more with fewer physical, virtual and human resources.



VSM: The cloud is a noisy space. How do you differentiate yourselves?



GT: The noise is deafening, with new technologies and cloud companies coming out daily. Gale Technologies is different in that we began by doing scheduling and on-demand automated provisioning of physical resources – including bare metal, server, network, and storage equipment from shared pools of resources. And, we were doing so in the demanding environments of service provider labs. That was the hard part, and when we added support for virtualization, it was relatively easy, by comparison. So we have been doing what we now call private cloud for many years, before it was even called cloud.



This composite automation of heterogeneous physical and virtual environments is definitely a differentiator from the pack of virtualization-only cloud vendors. Virtualization in itself is not cloud. Organizations today want to run all of their application workloads, virtualized or not, in the cloud, and GaleForce gives them the ability to do that.



The focus on scheduling and allocation of resources for a workload is another differentiation. With a true deterministic scheduling algorithm, GaleForce is able to accurately reserve the correct amount of physical capacity needed to support virtual workloads and thereby guarantee availability of the resources. And by being able to spread lower priority workloads over time, or share resources across time zones, it enables a very high asset utilization profile.



Another major differentiator for Gale is that GaleForce is a real-world cloud computing solution with an impressive number of live customer deployments – more than 100 worldwide.



To summarize our differentiators - GaleForce allows you to build a cloud out of your existing infrastructure resources on which you run all of your workloads, virtualized or not. It also allows you to build a cloud out of your infrastructure in two steps and as little as two weeks.



VSM: Your motto with your latest product, the Turnkey Cloud, is "Build a cloud in 2 steps in 2 weeks." Why was that your focus? Do you think cloud computing had gotten too complicated?



GT: In short, yes. There are many different cloud computing vendors on the market offering products that are too complex or insufficient for the average business. Organizations were lacking an easy, straightforward way to quickly and effectively build and deploy the cloud solution they needed and to manage both their physical and virtual resources. We designed the GaleForce Turnkey Cloud solution to simplify moving an enterprise’s existing infrastructure to the cloud.



To take advantage of the cloud, all an organization has to do is populate the GaleForce inventory with the IT resources that will be managed by the out-of-the-box GaleForce resource adaptors and then select the appropriate service templates from the predefined templates list to populate the self-service portal. The cloud is then ready to use.



Organizations that will see the fastest ROI with the new turnkey cloud solution have environments with frequent buildup and teardown of infrastructure, including data center staging and QA environments, training clouds, sales demonstration and proof-of-concept clouds, development and test environments, and disaster recovery test environments; or environments that require speedy and frequent delivery of standard workloads.



VSM: Is there anything else you’d like to share with VSM’s readers?



GT: Gale Technologies is a trusted provider of advanced software solutions that automate and orchestrate IT resources – allowing organizations to accelerate and streamline the delivery of infrastructure as a service and cloud computing environments. As a pioneer of innovative solutions for fine-grained resource provisioning, and workflow scheduling and automation across networking, server, storage, and virtualization technologies, Gale allows thousands of users to reserve, schedule and execute workloads on a shared, heterogeneous, dynamic environment with unprecedented flexibility.