iland Catalyst adds features to streamline VMware migration

iland, a provider of secure application and data protection cloud services built on VMware technology, has announced upgrades to iland Catalyst, a complementary cloud assessment tool that simplifies the journey to the cloud.

The new Catalyst features make it easier for organisations using VMware to model and right size cloud requirements for cloud backup, disaster recovery or migration without costly over-provisioning or detrimentally under-provisioning.

As more organisations migrate from traditional data centers to cloud-based infrastructures, they must optimise costs by accurately predicting the right amount of cloud resources needed based on the size and frequency at which an application is used. They must also determine if workloads are compatible with cloud services.

These factors are often miscalculated throughout the cloud journey, resulting in resources often being over or under-provisioned.

iland Catalyst ensures a proper fit at the time of purchase and throughout the lifecycle of a customer's use of iland cloud services based on individual workloads, application groups and entire production sites with pricing that is flexible and predictable. With Catalyst, iland customers can:

• match cloud resources with application requirements
   
• ensure workloads are compatible with iland cloud services
   
• determine the bandwidth needed to optimise application performance
   
• estimate service costs per month and ad hoc periods
   
• provide network analysis to ensure the feasibility of backup, disaster recovery and migration use cases while providing initial seed and ongoing data transfer times. 

"Whether it's your first time moving to the cloud or if you're adding more workloads and applications, the last thing you want to do is worry about guessing if your environment is capable of leveraging the cloud and the cost to get there," says iland senior vice president Dante Orsini.

"iland Catalyst removes that stress for customers around the world and helps our partner community right-size the cloud for their customers. And the new features we're announcing today, make Catalyst even more precise and easier to use.

A single universal tool 

Most cloud assessment tools are limited to covering specific aspects of an IT environment, requiring organisations to employ several tools to analyse compute, storage and network usage.

iland Catalyst analyses multiple requirements and platform attributes while pre-checking and validating systems to predict cloud requirements and ensure compatibility.

New features of the iland Catalyst cloud assessment tool include:

• The ability to calculate annual long-term retention objectives on cloud-based backup scenarios
   
• Mac OS support to provide Catalyst capabilities for both Windows and Mac environments
   
• A Veeam Cloud Connect Replication storage calculator to predict storage needs on Veeam-based disaster recovery environments
   
• Veeam Scale Out Backup Repository (SOBR) object storage calculator to size cloud archives
   
• Speed-test and bandwidth assessment capabilities for iland's data center in Melbourne, Australia in addition to its eight other global data centers in Sydney, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, D.C., London, Manchester, Amsterdam and Singapore.

"When working with new customers and prospects, intelligence and insights are the top competitive differentiators," says Structured Communication Systemscloud architecture vice president Chris McDuffie.

"iland Catalyst gives us the ability to know exactly what resources our customers need to make their move to the cloud a success. With Catalyst we have the ability to get it right the first time around without over or under provisioning.