IBM has an abundance of cloud offerings, and one of this newest comes courtesy of its acquisition of SoftLayer.
An IBM third party hopes to help Big Blue out and at the same time get into a few companies’ good graces with a free migration service. Of course, it is a limited time only offering.
Racemi now automates the migration of workloads to an array of IBM cloud technologies, including SoftLayer. The open source SoftLayer is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) technology currently in use by some 21,000 customers.
“Working closely with IBM, we are offering customers free migrations to IBM SoftLayer’s public cloud services,” said James Strayer, vice president of product management for Racemi. “This ensures there a fast, easy way to move existing workloads to IBM’s cloud computing platforms.”
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The Racemi tool is the SaaS-based Cloud Path, and it comes as a self-service portal that lets IT pros move Linux and Windows’ server loads to public cloud services such as those offered by IBM. And with a feature called “Live Capture,” Racemi claims there is no downtime during the migration.
And the data is protected all the while through encryption and the use of HTTPS secure connections.
Racemi also uses server imaging to clone workloads so they can move to cloud services, which are almost always dissimilar compared to the on-premises infrastructure they replace. It isn’t just the data that is imaged, but all the applications, the OS and its configuration.
The company claims this cloning vastly reduces migration time, and accounts for a savings of $800 per migrated server when compared to an entirely manual process.
Racemi offers a migration wizard it says can move multiple servers at the same time. And with the scheduling tool, IT can do the migration when the network and WAN are less busy. “Simply select your cloud server size, your target data center, and a new server name, and a Cloud Path will automatically create your new IBM cloud instances and migrate your selected server workloads to them,” Racemi said.
MSP Angle
Much of what Racemi does it aimed squarely at MSPs. “For CSPs (cloud service providers), MSPs (managed service providers), and hosting providers, Racemi is the easiest, most reliable method for onboarding customers to their public, private, or hybrid cloud offering. Racemi also enables customers and partners to automate private data center provisioning by leveraging its market-leading server imaging technology to rapidly provision physical, virtual or private cloud servers in any automated use case,” the company said.
IBM Buyout
Last month, IBM bought SoftLayer for an undisclosed amount, ending a bit of a feeding frenzy. Earlier this year, SoftLayer publicly put itself on the market after hiring Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley to manage the sale.
Besides IBM, EMC and AT&T were also reportedly keenly interested. Observers thought SoftLayer would go for around $2 billion, but as we mentioned IBM never disclosed the sales price.
SoftLayer last year reported revenues of $335 million.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
