Q&A: Gale Technologies Talks about its GaleForce Turnkey Cloud Solution

Q&A: Gale Technologies Talks about its GaleForce Turnkey Cloud Solution

I recently had the chance to speak with Scott Powers, Director of Products at Gale Technologies, to find out more about the company and their latest solution, GaleForce Turnkey Cloud, which allows customers to convert their existing IT infrastructure into a private or hybrid cloud environment in a few simple steps and in a short period of time. Here is that conversation:

VMblog:Tell us a little bit about Gale Technologies and how it all came together

Scott Powers: Gale Technologies, headquartered in Santa Clara with offices in North America and Asia, was established in June 2008 with assets from EdenTree and QuikCycle. With over 100 live deployments powered by its products, Gale Technologies is a trusted provider of advanced software solutions that automate and orchestrate IT resources - allowing organizations to accelerate and streamline the delivery of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and cloud computing environments. Gale enables thousands of users to reserve, schedule and execute workloads on a shared, heterogeneous, dynamic environment using its innovative solutions for fine-grained resource provisioning and workflow scheduling and automation across bare metal, networking, compute, storage, and virtualization technologies.

VMblog:What has been your sweet spot, and where do you see future growth?

Powers: Gale Technologies is focused on helping enterprises build private or hybrid clouds by offering cost-effective and highly extensible solutions. Our flagship product GaleForce is the only product on the market to offer composite automation and orchestration that allows provisioning of bare metal as well as virtual resources, enabling organizations to run all of their applications, virtualized or not, in the cloud. Using a secure Web portal, staff across multiple departments and geographies can request and access physical and virtual resources 24x7 from anywhere in the world.

The GaleForce Turnkey Cloud solution, our brand-new offering, allows customers to convert their existing IT infrastructure into a private or hybrid cloud environment in just two steps and as little as two weeks. Scenarios that will see the fastest ROI with the Turnkey Cloud include environments with frequent buildup and teardown of infrastructure, including data center staging and QA environments, training clouds, sales demonstration and proof of concept clouds, development and test environments, and disaster recovery test environments; and environments that require frequent and fast delivery of cookie cutter workloads. These scenarios have been our sweet spot for many years and we expect to see continued growth in these environments.

VMblog:You talked about composite automation and orchestration, can you explain a bit more and tell us whyenterprises should care?

Powers: Most cloud solutions provision and orchestrate the software and virtual layers only, whereas Gale automates the entire infrastructure needed to run a workload. GaleForce dramatically improves utilization of resources by provisioning and automating composite resource stacks that consist of bare metal hardware, virtual and software resources. Composite automation and orchestration allows enterprises to run any workload, virtualized or not, in the cloud built by GaleForce. In addition, GaleForce builds a cloud out of the existing resources in an environment, removing the need to buy new IT equipment and complex tools in order to build a cloud.

Enterprises are interested in composite automation and orchestration because, by using a solution like GaleForce, they can dramatically increase the utilization of resources they already own, typically from under 10 percent to over 95 percent, reduce capital and operational expenditures, and do more with fewer physical, virtual and human resources.

VMblog:What best practices can you offer our readers or types of workloads that should consider HW provisioning and automation?

Powers: Performance-intensive and IO-centric workloads are very good candidates for HW or bare metal provisioning and automation. The infrastructure for these workloads is traditionally configured for peak capacity, thus wasting precious resources. Clouds enabled by GaleForce are able to dynamically allocate appropriate resources to performance-intensive and IO-centric applications as and when needed, removing the need to dedicate resources to these workloads configured for peak loads. Our best practice recommendation for performance-intensive and IO-centric workloads is to consider composite automation and orchestration solutions to maximize resource utilization without sacrificing application performance.

VMblog:What should enterprises be thinking about in terms of moving their existing infrastructure to the cloud?

Powers: Moving its stable pre-existing infrastructure to the dynamic cloud can seem like a frightening task to an enterprise, but today's technologies can make it an easier, more predictable prospect. One key is to implement trusted solutions that simplify the provisioning and orchestration of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which can help companies achieve the difficult balancing act of effectively cutting costs with a shared dynamic environment while continuing to sustain the workload performance one would expect in a dedicated environment. Additionally, they should look for software that will seamlessly integrate with their existing technology and support legacy and heterogeneous environments without requiring the expense and complexity of new hardware and tools.

VMblog:How does Gale Technologies help enterprises build private and hybrid clouds?

Powers: With Gale Technologies' latest product, the Turnkey Cloud, organizations gain an easy, straightforward way to quickly and effectively build and deploy the cloud they need.

To build a private or hybrid cloud in two steps, operators first populate the GaleForce inventory with the IT resources that will be managed by the out-of-the-box GaleForce resource adaptors, and then select the appropriate service templates from the predefined templates list to populate the self-service portal. With these two simple steps the cloud is ready to use.

The GaleForce Turnkey Cloud solution guarantees that resources are available for workloads, as and when they are needed, in a shared IT environment. It also provisions and configures the appropriate resources as workload reservations become current. When the reservations expire, the resources are returned to the pool, freeing up capacity that can be reused for other workloads.

Thanks again to Scott Powers from Gale Technologies for taking time out to speak with VMblog.

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