Hypervisor turns the public cloud into an enterprise test platform

California-based Ravello Systems has released its Cloud Application Hypervisor. It may have a name straight out of sci-fi, but this product allows enterprises to use public cloud platforms to test their in-house applications.

Differences in storage, networking and virtualization techniques have previously prevented the use of the cloud as a practical test platform. Ravello's software makes any public cloud look and feel exactly like the enterprise data center from an application's perspective.

It uses software defined networking and storage, and an application framework. This means enterprises can easily create replicas of their in-house, multi-tier VMware or KVM based applications in any public cloud without the need to make any changes. Using Amazon Web Services, RackSpace or HP Cloud they can create multiple instances of an application for testing.

Navin R Thadani, SVP of products, Ravello Systems says, "For bursty workloads like development and test it does not make economic sense for enterprises to build internal data center capacity for peak usage, since on average, resource utilization may be as low as one percent. The public cloud sounds promising but is too different an environment, and still does not solve the infrastructure automation problem. Consequently testing is still mostly on-premise. It is rarely as frequent or as efficient as it needs to be. Hence, development cycles are far too slow".

The Ravello software has been in public beta since February and more than 2,000 enterprise users have replicated over 30,000 applications in leading public clouds representing more than 1 million CPU hours deployed.

Ravello's usage-based pricing model starts from $0.14 per hour for a 2 CPU, 4GB memory virtual system. This includes the cost of the underlying public cloud making it a cost-effective solution for providing extra test capacity.

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