Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation is a Virtual Infrastructure Optimization Solution designed to improve the economics of virtualized data centers with an intelligent software platform, which increases performances and decreases costs.
Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation works on top of a virtualization platform, and uses the exposed API to connect to the platform and optimize the workload placement in a virtual farm in order to make it more…
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Infrascale
Score10 out of 10
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The Infrascale Platform is the flagship cloud storage, data protection, and disaster recovery platform from the California based company, Infrascale.
Eco4Cloud is well suited in VMware farms that have standard VM deployments, especially with small VMs, with nothing blocking vMotion and hardware fully compatible with IPMI 2.0 (minimum). It doesn't work well if many VMs are nodes in a Microsoft cluster because they would be unmovable and therefore their host would never be put in stand-by mode. If every host in the cluster has at least one guest VM that is a node of a Microsoft cluster, no host in the cluster will ever be put in stand-by mode.
The Infrascale Platform solution we have in place is certainly not cheap - I believe we are paying about $2800/month for it, though it is quite robust. We have 18TB of on-site storage available, with the same available in a secondary - remote - device for replication. They do have a wide range of products available to any size business though, so I'm sure they have cheaper offerings as well. The on-site appliance is fantastic - in that in houses your backups, but can also be utilized as an emergency piece of hardware to spin up a backup and run it in the event of your primary hardware failing. You can also traverse full backups to grab single, contained, files if you so choose. We love that feature as we must perform file recovery monthly for audit purposes.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It consolidates workloads in VMware clusters using an algorithm that seems to work better than VMware DRS. It keeps headroom for workload peaks and to withstand the number of host failures set for the cluster in vCenter.
If the workload is very variable, Eco4Cloud will not continuously turn a host on and off but it will settle to keep the host running. It sort of "rightsizes" the cluster keeping only the right number of hosts running. This is another main difference when comparing Eco4Cloud with VMware DRS/DPM which strictly follows the workload and sometimes isn't fast enough in turning on the hosts when the workload is ramping-up.
To do a good job Eco4Cloud needs to analyze the hosts and the VMs. Therefore, the troubleshooting component of Eco4Cloud can figure out if there are problems in the configuration of the hosts (e.g. vMotion settings). It can also determine if a VM is stuck and can't vMotion (e.g. using the physical CD-ROM) or if it's oversized or undersized.
Something Eco4Cloud has and others don't is a technology named Smart Ballooning. With Smart Ballooning Eco4Cloud recovers unused RAM from the VMs and gives it back to the host way before the host goes over the 94% RAM threshold. This allows us to reach higher levels of overbooking.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It is one of the best cloud back up data protection software and software platforms on the entire market for MSPs. There are not many other solutions that offer this level of customization and execution in the data protection and disaster recovery arena better than Infrascale. I highly recommend it for any MSP.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We compared the consolidation feature and we obtained exactly the same amount of servers in stand-by. The main difference was that Eco4Cloud turned off the unneeded hosts in 2 days while VMTurbo Operations Manager required one day per host. This behavior is caused by the different algorithms implemented by these two products. Compared to Eco4Cloud, VMware DRS/DPM was very aggressive (we tried it in vSphere 5.0). We haven't tested it with vSphere 6 yet.
Infrascale Platform is the most modern backup service/device we've utilized. EaseUs and Ghost were just software that would run within a Windows environment (at the time) and backup to a device that we kept on-site. EaseUs would fail quite often with Incremental backups - so I would spend a lot of time re-running full backups to ensure we didn't experience data loss in the event of a crash. Ghost was used when I was first hired at this district - so I didn't have much hands-on experience with it. But I know it was a bundled offering with Anti-Virus back when we utilized it ('07-'09ish).
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Peace of mind: our entire virtual environment is backed up both onsite and offsite
As stated, it is pricey. Since we haven't needed to do anything more than basic file restores, ROI is hard to measure. A full restore of a virtual server immediately would be priceless. So, on that note, ROI is good.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
