CloudSwitch makes cloud easier to manage, by lying to it

CloudSwitch is a software vendor that sells what company co-founder and CTO John Considine

describes as a hypervisor for clouds.

Rather than sitting between the hardware and the operating system, lying to both so that neither knows there is more than one OS and application stack on the server, CloudSwitch built a layer of software designed to convince applications and operating systems they're still running as virtual machines on the home network, rather than on cloud services from Amazon, Microsoft, Teramark or others.

"We are basically lying to everything – lying to the cloud so it thinks the operating systems are runnig just on it, lying to the apps and operating systems so they think they're still on the enterprise network, and to the virtualized infrastructure to tell it the cloud is just another part of the enterprise," he said.

CloudSwitch works with any major hypervisor or virtualization infrastructure, and allows existing network management, systems administration and other tools to work on the new platform as well as the old.

That eliminates most of the headache of using and integrating cloud computing services as an adjunct to enterprise systems – the inability to control all that data and software once it gets raptured into the cloud.

The software costs $25,000 per year for a license allowing 50 virtual servers to run concurrently, with per-server pricing above that.

"As far as anyone can tell, the cloud just becomes another part of the enterprise," Considine said of his company's attempt to strip the gloss and new-data-center smell away from brand, shiny new cloud servcies.

"That's true," he said. "We made cloud boring. You get the adaptability and ability to pay only for what you use, but it looks like just another data center. "