HyTrust, Inc. today took the first major step toward building a vibrant new community, united by a common goal: Virtualization Under Control. Key to delivering on that vision, HyTrust announced immediate availability of HyTrust Appliance Community Edition, a free product that delivers a central point of control for management and visibility of virtualized environments. HyTrust Appliance Community Edition features the same functionality, features, and benefits as the company’s Enterprise Edition but is limited to three protected hypervisor hosts. HyTrust also announced that it has built and made available a new online community to support this strategic vision and provide a central repository for sharing information, gathering feedback and fostering interaction among community members.
One of the key drivers behind Community Edition is to enable small and medium businesses to cost-effectively gain the same features and benefits for their virtualized environments as their counterparts in the largest enterprises. Said Gordon Wingate, CEO of SynchroNet, a firm that specializes in providing virtualization and data center solutions for the mid-sized enterprise: “A small but rapidly growing portion of our business revolves around providing our customers cloud computing services based on VMware infrastructure. HyTrust Appliance Community Edition is a perfect fit for our current environment. The solution allows us to easily architect best practices into our virtual infrastructure, such as access control, audit logging, data separation, and consistent configuration, without a considerable upfront investment.”
Wingate continued: “HyTrust not only helps ensure a secure environment and allows us to demonstrate compliance for our customers, but also provides us with the ability to differentiate on some key capabilities, relative to our competitors. We see this as an effective way to build the confidence of our customers and encourage them to utilize even more cloud-based services.”
“Organizations of all sizes confront similar issues when it comes to virtualization: management complexity, security and, in some cases, even compliance,” said Renata Budko, vice president of Marketing at HyTrust. “HyTrust Appliance Community Edition provides a cost-effective way for small to medium-sized organizations to address these issues just as effectively as large enterprises do by providing them with a free solution for control, visibility, consistency and automation for their virtualized environments. As these companies and their virtualized environments grow, HyTrust will be there to keep them in control and compliance, and grow along with them.”
In addition to serving the needs of the SMB market, HyTrust aims to build a community of professionals who are committed to growing the reach of cloud-based computing services and expanding the use of virtualization throughout their organizations. Community Edition enables large enterprises to quickly and easily evaluate HyTrust Appliance capabilities in their environments. Most importantly, HyTrust is now able to widely disseminate its product and gain valuable insight directly via Community feedback. This will lead to more rapid product development and innovation, allowing HyTrust to respond quickly to an already dynamic and rapidly changing marketplace.
“The potential for the HyTrust Community is unbounded,” said Eric Chiu, CEO of HyTrust. “We see this not only as a terrific opportunity for HyTrust to meet currently unmet needs of the market, but also as a great way for HyTrust to harness the power of distributed peer review. We’re extremely confident in our offering and we look forward to providing even greater transparency in exchange for participation by the HyTrust Community.”
Pricing & Availability
HyTrust Appliance Community Edition is now available for download as a pre-built, VMware-compatible virtual appliance to members of HyTrust Community. To join the community free of charge, go to http://www.hytrust.com/community/register. Support for Community Edition is provided by the Community via online forum participation and direct community member interaction.