A new company called HotLink has emerged from stealth mode with an announcement that it has secured $10 million in Series A financing.  At the same time, the company also announced a new product, the HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware, a solution that enables VMware vCenter users to deploy cross-platform infrastructure spanning Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (KVM). 

To find out more about this new company, I spoke with Lynn LeBlanc, the company's founder and CEO.

VMblog.com:  Can you tell us a little bit about HotLink and how it all came together?

Lynn LeBlanc:  HotLink Corporation is a venture capital backed company based in Sunnyvale, California. The company was started in early 2010 by the founders of FastScale Technology, Inc. (acquired by VMware), Lynn LeBlanc (CEO) and Richard Offer (VP Engineering). HotLink’s advisory board includes executives from Informatica, McAfee, E*TRADE, eBay, Polycom, Citrix, BMC and Flextronics. 

The company was formed to address problems of heterogeneity in virtualized data centers. While most large data centers deploy a range of software platforms, the founders believed there was profound lack of innovation to address the fundamental issue of incompatibility. HotLink is attacking this problem from the bottom up, delivering the first platform transformation solution that abstract virtual infrastructure and enables native interoperability of hypervisors. This transformation technology is the foundation of the company’s solutions.

VMblog:  Based on your expertise, what should enterprises be thinking about when selecting a systems management platform?

LeBlanc:  System management solutions need to be holistic to the largest degree possible, including flexibility to incorporate future requirements. Historically, the traditional data center automation companies like IBM, HP, CA and BMC provided holistic system management through complex suites of products and professional services. These solutions were then extended to accommodate virtual infrastructure. On the other hand, virtual infrastructure providers like VMware have focused on single-platform solutions, but do not have good answers when diversity is required.

At HotLink we believe that addressing holistic management through platform transformation, which we have pioneered, is a more straightforward and cost effective approach to the management complexity of diverse infrastructures. With platform transformation, the underlying software platform is abstracted so IT organizations can deploy multi-platform infrastructure but manage it just like a single platform, utilizing their existing management toolset. This bottom up approach provides dramatically better scalability, interoperability and extensibility than a top down overlay solution and much more flexibility than a single vendor approach.

VMblog:  So what are the benefits of managing various hypervisors under one management toolset?   And how will this approach to systems management allow enterprises to reduce IT costs?

LeBlanc:  Despite the fact that over two thirds of enterprises have deployed heterogeneous virtual infrastructure, historically hybrid management solutions have been limited, involving one of the following approaches.

Option 1 ¾ the ‘Single Vendor Silo.’ Standardize on a single native management toolset and related virtual infrastructure (like VMware vCenter and vSphere) for select applications and use cases. This approach has the benefit of tools designed to work together but results in higher license fees, vendor lock-in, constrained hypervisor choice and no ability to automate across silos.

Option 2 ¾ the ‘Management Overlay.’ Deploy multiple native management tools with an overlay management layer to handle basic operating functions (like Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager plus VMware vCenter managing Hyper-V and vSphere). This approach provides more hypervisor flexibility but increases the skill requirements and more than doubles the complexity of deployment, operations and ongoing maintenance.

The HotLink approach is different. HotLink provides native hypervisor interoperability so users can support other hypervisors with existing virtualization management tools like VMware vCenter. In this way, IT shops can mix and match virtual infrastructure while leveraging existing management infrastructure and skills. The HotLink platform also provides an open architecture for policy-based automation across all virtual infrastructures as well as automated conversion of workloads so users can apply the most cost effective mix of hypervisors without sacrificing the ability to interoperate and seamlessly manage across the environment. By enabling native hypervisor interoperability, for the first time enterprise IT organizations can:

• Mix & match enterprise & free hypervisors
• Extend existing management tools cross-platform
• Apply policy-based automation across all infrastructure
• Leverage existing skills
• Eliminate vendor lock-in
• Dramatically reduce infrastructure costs

The HotLink innovations give data centers the flexibility, scalability, interoperability and cost savings they have needed for a very long time.

VMblog:  How does the HotLink SuperVISOR product and transformation engine differ from other solutions that have already attempted to tackle the heterogeneous management problem?

LeBlanc:  HotLink SuperVISOR was designed from the ground up for heterogeneous virtual infrastructure. Because of the pioneering HotLink transformation technology, for the first time users can interoperate hypervisors inside their existing management console. Unlike overlay solutions that provide basic cross-platform features on top of native management toolsets, with HotLink the virtual infrastructure is abstracted and decoupled from the management layer to enable native cross-platform hypervisor support inside their current management console – no additional dashboard is required.

HotLink SuperVISOR is the only platform to tackle heterogeneity from the bottom up ¾ isolating, abstracting and automating the complexities of virtual infrastructure that resulted in hypervisor-dependent management solutions. With HotLink’s approach, users have the ability to pick the right virtual infrastructure for each use case while leveraging the management infrastructure they already have to reduce cost, eliminate lock-in and leverage existing tools and skills.

VMblog:  What are next steps for the company?

LeBlanc:  Our first product, HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware, has just been announced and will be available at the end of August. This solution extends the capabilities of VMware vCenter to support Hyper-V, XenServer and KVM. Regarding technology roadmap, our next product launch will be HotLink SuperVISOR for Microsoft, enabling native cross-platform hypervisor support inside Microsoft SCVMM.

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