HyperGrid Brings Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Containers To The Cloud

Hyper-converged infrastructure technology developer HyperGrid is moving its offering to the cloud, giving partners a platform for running applications in private and public clouds.

HyperGrid Tuesday unveiled HyperCloud, which provides containerization, scale-out cloud, seamless workload migration and other cloud functionalities built around a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance with integrated compute, storage and networking capabilities, said Manoj Nair, chief product officer of the Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor.

HyperCloud is a hybrid cloud offering with Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and application services built in, Nair told CRN.

[Related: 23 Powerful Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Products]

"It's an entire stack that lets IT transform existing applications and containerize them, or take advantage of new applications like Splunk as a service," he said.

The genesis of HyperCloud stems from the former Gridstore's July acquisition of DCHQ, a small developer of technology that turns hyper-converged infrastructure into a service. Gridstore renamed itself HyperGrid after the acquisition.

Prior to that, Gridstore focused on selling hyper-converged infrastructure appliances, but last spring switched its focus to hyper-converged infrastructure as a service.

HyperCloud is the next step in the evolution of hyper-converged appliances, Nair said. "You can use it in a private cloud, or in one of over 18 public clouds," he said. "We provide the governance and security. You pay for what you use. If you use 100 VMs [virtual machines], you pay for 100 VMs, even if it's deployed in a data center."

HyperCloud provides all the necessary compute, storage and networking capabilities needed to build a hybrid cloud, Nair said. "We want to get IT teams in the mode of consuming IT, not building it," he said.

The offering allows channel partners to help customers migrate much of their environment to a service, including hyper-converged infrastructure, VMware, Microsoft SQL, Splunk, containers and more, Nair said.

HyperGrid is using HyperCloud to bring cloud economics to hyper-converged infrastructure, said Ron Salazar, general manager at MR2 Solutions, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider that just recently signed with HyperGrid.

Regardless of whether a customer implements a hyper-converged infrastructure or a traditional data center solution, it is difficult to size the solution for future growth, MR2 Solutions' Salazar told CRN.

"The conventional way to size the solution is to look at where the customer is today and where it will be in three or five years," he said. "We look at what workloads will be used. The traditional way is to provision for five years, and start at 30 percent utilization. If they underprovision, they will need to find more budget. If they overprovision, they've spent too much."

HyperCloud solves that issue, Salazar said. "It's the same hyper-converged infrastructure offered by companies like Nutanix, but is offered as a cloud," he said. "Right off the bat, customers can be at 85 percent utilization while being ready to burst to the cloud for a short time."

That is an attractive proposition for customers, Salazar said. "It will change the model of how customers provision their data centers," he said. "Today, it's all about the SLA [service level agreement]. Go to Amazon, and no on cares what's under the hood. They just want their SLA."

Sabur Mian, vice president of technology at Cancom HPM Networks, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based solution provider and HyperGrid channel partner, said HyperCloud is a good way to help a large part of his company's customer base to move to the cloud.

"Two or three years ago, a lot of our SMB and enterprise customers tried to go to public clouds, and we lost business," Mian told CRN. "HyperCloud gives customers a fully baked hyper-converged infrastructure solution that bursts to the public cloud while keeping costs under control."

Customers with a DevOps focus can use HyperCloud for development, and when the application is ready for deployment can press a button to move it to the cloud, Mian said.

"We haven't really seen a product that can do this," he said. "We have a lot of customers in DevOps. And if they're not in DevOps, they're moving to DevOps. We provide the infrastructure for such customers to help them with fast deployments and teardowns."

HyperCloud also makes it easy to provide containers as a service, Mian said.

"The majority of my customers have heard of containers but don't know how to get there," he said. "HyperGrid makes it simple. We can use HyperCloud to walk customers through the process and do the modeling."