Velostrata Adds Support for Google Cloud Platform; Migrations Will Be Free For Joint Customers

Velostrata, a startup that eases cloud migration pains with unique WAN optimization capabilities, added Google Cloud Monday as a supported target platform.

As part of the new alliance, Google will entirely fund migrations using Velostrata, with no cost to joint customers, Velostrata CEO Issy Ben-Shaul told CRN.

Velostrata, based in Santa Clara, Calif., with its research and development office in Tel Aviv, Israel, was founded by a group of serial entrepreneurs and a core team of engineers who had worked together for over a decade.

[Related: Velostrata Launches Formal Channel Program To Drive Partner Enablement]

The startup came out of stealth in 2015 supporting only Amazon Web Services. The next major release added Microsoft Azure.

Along the way, based on what it saw from early adopters, Velostrata tweaked its business strategy.

The company's streaming technology was first intended to allow customers to maintain storage on-premises—users could take advantage of compute resources from public cloud providers while keeping data and boot images within their own facilities.

But customers were less interested in that kind of resource segregationand more enthusiastic about leveraging the service as a migration and application-mobility enabler, Ben-Shaul said.

In addition to shuttling data rapidly to its target destination, Velostrata allowed for workloads to seamlessly keep running in their current data centers or clouds while migrations were taking place, reducing downtime.

With Velostrata, customers don't need to run parallel workloads until completing all replication and verifying application performance in the new environment. And if problems arise, they can roll back workloads immediately, the CEO said.

The startup launched a channel program last year and has seen buy-in from three types of partners.

Those are the born-in-the-cloud partners of major cloud providers, VARs that have essentially converted to cloud services providers, and the global systems integrators that are increasingly becoming an important component of the company's go-to-market strategy.

"The way we go to market is heavily dependent on the channel," Ben-Shaul said. "We need a triangle approach—Velostrata, channel partner, cloud provider. We need all three to surround the customer."

Eric Kaplan, CTO of Chicago-based AHEAD, a cloud-focused solution provider, said the benefit of Velostrata's tool is reducing downtime for large customers, and saving time for IT staff, or consultants like AHEAD.

"The value proposition of a platform like Velostrata is all about acceleration," Kaplan said. "They can help automate a lot of the migration tasks."

Earlier this week, Kaplan spoke to a customer that's used Velostrata to migrate to AWS, and mentioned the organization was anticipating similar functionality for Google Cloud Platform.

"Customers that want to be in multiple clouds over time, they're going to need tools to help with cross-cloud migration. Tools like this will help them speed up and automate the process," Kaplan said.

Another advantage of Velostrata over other migration products is tight integration with VMware. The tool doesn't require agents on guest operating systems, just installation on vCenter, making migrations from data centers as lightweight as possible.

Support of multiple cloud platforms, WAN optimization, and automation runbooks are all differentiators, Kaplan said.

Google's decision to fund migrations so customers can use the tool without cost is a nice perk that highlights the seriousness of Google's efforts to win enterprise customers, he added.