Virtela Cloud Accelerator Looks To Boost Cloud Performance

Virtela, a managed network services company, has announced a version of its cloud-based application acceleration Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC) product that is intended for the public cloud environment. Like the ESC service, the company claims that Cloud Accelerator can improve performance by 5 to 25 times.

The service, which the company calls a "virtual service blade" that runs on top of the ESC platform, works with public cloud vendors such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud and IBM Cloudburst. Virtela also announced a new president and chief executive officer, B.V. Jagadeesh, who has worked for vendors such as NetScaler and Citrix Systems.

Virtela's offering ties into what Leif Petersen, chief information officer at QAD, says his company is trying to achieve. The Santa Barbara, Calif.-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and development organization--which has 1,350 employees in 33 offices worldwide and customers in about 90 countries--has been using Virtela services for two years. "We're moving toward public cloud providers and looking at private cloud offerings," such as using Rackspace to host some of its infrastructure and migrating its messaging and collaboration functionality from Lotus Notes to Google Apps, he says.

The company has seen a performance increase of 5 to 10 percent on the ERP side and up to 15 times the improvement on large file transfers, Petersen says. In addition, he says that migrating to the Virtela service required less capital investment than updating its existing technology.

Organizations that are looking into public cloud services tend to have three major concerns: governance, security and performance, with the Cloud Accelerator service addressing the performance part, says Mark Weiner, senior VP of marketing for the Greenwood Village, Colo., company. Advantages of using the Cloud Accelerator server include being able to fund IT using operational expenditures rather than having to invest in capital equipment and personnel to manage it, and giving companies more flexibility in obtaining its IT services, he says.What Virtela is doing is what's needed in the market, by providing enterprises with the best possible application performance for their users, wherever those resources and users might be, says Michael Suby, VP of research for Stratecast, a Highlands Ranch, Colo., division of Frost & Sullivan. "That's the theme I see them hitting on. We think it's a favorable development." However, there are other vendors that offer similar functionality, such as the way that Citrix Systems offers its WAN optimization product in a public cloud environment, Suby says. "To that extent, I'm not quite sure Virtela is unique."

The service, which works with most major public cloud architectures and hypervisors, is expected to be available at the end of the quarter. Pricing is not yet determined, but is expected to be a monthly cost similar to the pricing for the existing ESC service, which is $5 per day per branch office. As with the ESC service, the company says, it will pay customers 2.5 times the service charge if performance guarantees aren't met.

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