Abiquo delivers Hybrid Cloud mobility with Abiquo 3.6  

Abiquo launches the latest version of its cloud management platform – Abiquo 3.6. Many businesses still remain hesitant about cloud adoption, despite being aware of all the benefits it can provide. This is mainly due to the concerns around lack of speed, visibility and control required to rapidly migrate server workloads into the cloud. Abiquo’s new features, however, help to increase the simplicity with which businesses can move workloads between on-premises and public cloud environments, and in turn helps them to regain control of existing public cloud deployments.

Abiquo 3.6 introduces two new major features to its platform:

Mobility
In Abiquo 3.6, hybrid cloud features have been added to deliver cloud mobility, an emerging trend aimed at making workload migration across platforms seamless, as well as making the management of private-cloud deployments efficient and cost-effective. Abiquo already featured migration between hypervisor types in the same data centre; this upgrade to the mobility feature enables users to move a machine image to a different private data centre or compatible public cloud.

This new enhancement enables users to export multi-disk templates to other datacentres managed by Abiquo, as well as single-disk templates to public cloud regions in Amazon Web Services and Azure. As with all other Abiquo features, this is controlled by a comprehensive set of privileges, and is available through the Abiquo API for full automation if desired.

Onboarding
The new onboarding cloud feature in Abiquo 3.6 delivers the ability for users to “capture” a set of elements from the public cloud into Abiquo’s virtual datacentre, including virtual machines and network, firewall and load balancer configurations. This gives users and CIOs the opportunity to get control of a wide range of disparate cloud types, and is a key function to help business bring all their cloud resources into a single hybrid cloud platform.

These are in addition to existing features including a revolutionary plugin that works with Docker containers; this plugin helps companies to manage multiple real production workloads running in Docker containers with the same level of control, security and auditing they expect from their hypervisor infrastructure.

Other enhancements include improvements to user workflow, improved performance and access to additional regions when using Azure, support for Clustered Shared Volumes with Hyper-V and more.

Ian Finlay, COO of Abiquo comments: “Many businesses are sceptical of cloud adoption due to some of the myths associated with it, such as needing a whole new infrastructure and team to run it. In fact, businesses experience a reduction in costs by moving to an Abiquo hybrid cloud platform. It also acts as an enabler so ultimately can free up time for the IT department and increase the responsiveness of the team and deliver extra business flexibility. The hybrid cloud features within Abiquo 3.6 allows you to take control; you pick the relevant parts for your business and manage it all through one orchestration platform, rather than multiple platforms. Instead of having more to manage, everything will be under the one system.”