HotLink Corporation the market leader in transformation solutions for hybrid IT management, today announced major enhancements to its HotLink Hybrid Express and HotLink DR Express solutions. Leveraging patented transformation technology, HotLink’s latest product releases enable easy deployment of hybrid production workloads at scale, provide advanced analytics spanning on- and off-premise resources, and deliver even tighter integration between VMware vCenter and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a dramatically simple and cost-effective administration and management infrastructure for enterprise-class hybrid IT deployments.

According to Gartner, 74 percent of enterprises are now pursuing hybrid IT strategies. HotLink technologies are built from the ground up to simplify the complexity of managing hybrid IT with the only solution that transforms VMware vCenter into a hybrid IT management hub spanning VMware vSphere, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (KVM). With HotLink, enterprises seamlessly extend their existing VMware vCenter infrastructure, workflows and tools to cross-platform workloads without deploying additional consoles or sacrificing key administration or management features. This unified, transformative approach is critical for deployment of complex, multi-tier production applications in a hybrid IT environment, whether the hybrid platforms are on-premise or combined with public cloud services.

"Production and scale-out use cases are mandatory for broad enterprise adoption of hybrid IT, but management complexity can quickly erode the benefits. Our solutions were purpose-built for the transformation needed to administer, deploy and manage blended infrastructure in a holistic and agile way," said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of HotLink. "With HotLink, customers benefit from the robust administration and management capabilities of VMware vCenter across the spectrum of hybrid platforms without an expensive systems integration project." 

IDC Research Director Eric Burgener said, “The use of hybrid clouds in enterprise computing workloads is a matter of when, not if. HotLinks patented Transformation Engine enables a single administrative console to be used to natively manage multiple heterogeneous virtual environments. This management model — the ability to manage infrastructure across traditional, private cloud, public cloud and virtual private cloud — is a game changer that nearly all IT environments will move to over time.”

HotLink Hybrid Express is an easy-to-implement, intuitive plug-in to VMware vCenter for deploying, administering and managing hybrid on- and off-premise resources side-by-side with VMware vSphere.  Key enhancements include: 

• Multi-hypervisor support – Expanded platform support beyond AWS to include Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat KVM, providing comprehensive on- and off-premise platform choice in a single HotLink product
• Software defined hybrid networking – Auto-discover and unify administration and management of multi-hypervisor and AWS networking in VMware vCenter with the addition of HotLink CIMple SDN

HotLink DR Express enables low cost, comprehensive VMware data protection in AWS, including backup, replication, disaster recovery and business continuity. New enhancements include:

• Protection dashboard and analytics – Provides a consolidated view of all protected virtual machines (VMs) and their status, as well as detailed data for download and analysis
• Flexible storage reconfiguration– Reconfigure and reduce on-premise storage needed for hybrid computing and data protection
• Restore point rollback – Rollback the replication baseline of future restore points to any prior successful seed or delta 
• File server replication – Automated, continuous bi-directional replication of large file servers between on-premise and Amazon S3 
• Database server replication– Automated, continuous bi-directional replication of large database servers (virtual or physical) between on-premise and Amazon EC2

Additional capabilities for both HotLink Hybrid Express and HotLink DR Express include: 

• Multi-disk and large disk support – Automatically import virtual machines to Amazon EC2 with complex multi-disk architectures and disk sizes up to 1 TB
• EC2 disk creation and configuration  – Easily add disks on demand, eliminating manual steps to create and attach additional volumes to EC2 instances
• AWS security group manager – Extends VMware vCenter capabilities to include viewing, creation and modification of AWS security groups
• Hybrid performance dashboard and analytics – Review or download detailed performance data on VMs, application stacks, hybrid tasks and bandwidth usage for monitoring, planning and troubleshooting
• Expanded monitoring and alerting options – Receive real-time alerts on critical hybrid tasks via smart devices for convenient monitoring and change management
• Automated infrastructure diagnostics – Verify hybrid infrastructure and configuration accuracy of networking, firewall rules, storage and connectivity through automated testing

Availability

The new versions of HotLink Hybrid Express and HotLink DR Express are available immediately.