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CloudSwitch Inc. has been in business for two years, and already has $15.4 million in venture financing and a big-company CEO. Until now, the Burlington company hasn’t said much publicly about what it is doing, except that the product it is developing will allow businesses that have data centers to use cloud-based computing infrastructure.
Founded in 2008 by former Netezza marketing head Ellen Rubin and Pirus Systems vet John Considine, CloudSwitch is now on the cusp of moving its product out of beta. Recently, CEO John McEleney, the former SolidWorks Corp. CEO who joined CloudSwitch last year, sat down with MHT reporter Galen Moore to share some of the details, including how the software could help compute a way to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Mass High Tech: What’s the problem you’re trying to solve for companies that want to use cloud-based infrastructure?
John McEleney: We’re targeting companies – enterprises – that have existing applications that want to take advantage of the cloud dynamics of being able to add more machines, shut down machines, expand it when they need it.
MHT: Can you give an example?
JM: I can posit a scenario. I just was on the phone with a CIO from British Petroleum. So imagine all of a sudden you have a bunch of engineers that were trying to fix this problem that we have in the Gulf of Mexico. This is me being totally hypothetical. They did not talk about this at all. They’ve got a bunch of guys that are trying to figure out, ‘OK, how do we go fix this?’ They want to run a bunch of simulations, and they need hundreds of computers to do a bunch of simulations. Let’s say they have this application today that’s working inside of their data center. They don’t have access to 100 machines inside their data center. So what do they do? They could buy a bunch of them. They could wait weeks to get the servers. By that time hopefully the problem will have been solved. But one can imagine that they could move that (application) out to the cloud.
MHT: How does that work?
JM: CloudSwitch installs our software in the data center. You can take that application move it out to Amazon (EC2). You make no modifications. Because you made no changes when you brought it out there you can bring it back down. When it’s out in the cloud, you can imagine saying I want to run 500 computers on this – just a massive simulation. And let’s say there was some very sensitive topographical data from the bottom of the ocean. They had done a bunch of sonar work ahead of time and they never want that out in the public cloud. That’s inside the data center. Our software allows them to reach back, grab whatever data they want and in a transparent, completely secure, encrypted way, run their scenarios and then shut that down.
MHT: So…how does that work?
JM: We allow people to take an application from inside the data center and move it to the cloud. You don’t have to make any changes. It’s secure in the sense that it’s completely encrypted, both in transit and at rest. Because we haven’t made any changes you can bring it back into your data center, so you’re not locked into one cloud provider.
And then finally – and this is why I was interested in the company when I joined – every vendor that’s out there that is trying to do similar things is trying to bring the cloud to the enterprise. Their perspective is, use these tools and we’ll bring the cloud to you. CloudSwitch, I think, has a different perspective. The perspective shift is we want to take you from your data center and extend you out to the cloud. Therefore a lot of the problems the other guys are going to face trying to interface in the data center, we’re not going to face at all.
MHT: What kinds of problems?
JM: They have to worry about authentication. They have to worry about all those other data center issues. Because we’re bridging you out to the cloud, it turns out that all your existing management frameworks – BladeLogic, Tivoli, everything you’ve designed and built for your infrastructure – can use the cloud. Think of the cloud as a peripheral. Think of it as more disc, more compute resource.
MHT: What exactly are you doing to make that possible?
JM: We do what’s called a bridge, so that even if you went and did network neighborhood – kind of right-clicked and looked at it – you’d see all the things that are on your existing network, and out in Amazon. We do what’s called a Layer 2 Overlay Network, and all the Cisco’s of the world and the F5 Networks of the world are like, ‘How do you guys do that?’ It looks like it’s still in your network. It looks like it’s the same IP address. Nothing changes. It’s out there running and the single biggest benefit you have is you can scale it up, you can scale it down, and you don’t change any of the tools or processes.
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