While cloud computing has captured the imagination of enterprise IT, many have voiced concern about the wisdom of a single-cloud strategy. The concern is that a single cloud or virtualization platform has the potential to become an albatross, locking an organization into a single vendor relationship or constraining deployment options. Ideally, what organizations want is a hybrid environment that seamlessly blends any combination of virtualized datacenters, internal and external clouds into an integrated fabric.

In a webinar sponsored by rPath, attendees will learn about the key use cases for hybrid compute environments and how applications can be packaged for seamless and dynamic portability across the connected fabric of a hybrid compute environment. Experts from rPath, VMware and BlueLock will provide a framework for understanding the tradeoffs between cloud options and will conduct a live demonstration of a real application moving seamlessly between BlueLock, Amazon EC2 and a VMware ESX host. The presentation and demonstration will be followed by a live Q&A session.

What:		“Blending Clouds: Avoiding Lock-In and Realizing the Promise of Hybrid Compute Environments — Today,” a webinar and live multi-cloud demonstration
Who:		Erik Troan, founder and CTO, rPath; Wendy Perilli, director of product marketing, VMware; and Pat O’Day, CTO, BlueLock
When:		Wednesday, February 25, 2009, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time (11:00 a.m. Pacific time)
How:		Register for this free event at http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=134604&s=1&k=4A8CE27A0C23FE3787BD9395E1AD83A4&partnerref=web.

In the webinar, attendees will learn:

• The tradeoffs between internal and external datacenter and cloud options
• How to build and deploy applications for portability and how to combat lock-in
• How to blend the need for speed with the mandate for control
• Innovative uses of hybrid compute environments, including dev/test, “cloud bursting,” and “capacity arbitrage” for commodity compute cycles

For more information on rPath, please visit http://www.rpath.com. For additional perspectives, please visit and subscribe to rPath RSS blog feeds at http://blogs.rpath.com/wpmu/.