Author: Jon Collins / Source: Gigaom
Densify is an analytical service company whose mission is to help organisations move their server workloads to the public cloud and to optimise workloads once they are there. While the name is new, the company has been around (previously known as Cirba) since 1999 — that is, back to times when cloud was a twinkle in the eye of ASPs.
Densify operates a subscription model, charged on a per-managed-virtual-instance basis.In terms of the offering, Densify has data gathering and analytics tool known as Cloe — “the Cloud-Learning Optimization Engine”. Cloe outputs information about specific workloads, their current performance, and how they might be better sized, scaled and priced in a cloud environment. In other words, Cloe automatically balances application demand with cloud supply. Cloe’s outputs are interpreted by Densify experts — called “densification advisors” — who work with customers to set priorities and propose alternative targets for the workloads concerned.
Given that I’ve long taken the stance that no wholesale “move to cloud” exists, I was keen to catch up with Ayman Gabarin, EMEA VP and find out more about the Densify approach. Note that I am taking Densify’s approach at face value — that is, I am thinking about the challenge it seeks to address, whether it is good at what it does or not (feel free to check out Densify customer stories).
1. Why isn’t it as simple as “moving to the cloud?”
The answer is that there is no one size fits all. When instances are defined they are often over-specified, hindsight can find them too big or too small for the workloads. This is hard to get right — for example, AWS has over three million combinations of infrastructure and services so it is no surprise that customers err on the side of caution.
If they have a large virtual machine and they want to move it into the cloud environment, they will probably select an M3 instance, but can then find they are only using it for two hours a day, but still pay for capacity they are not using. The result is lots of potential dead wood.
The challenge is exacerbated by use of reserved instances, i.e. instances that are locked down over a year or more. These offer guarantees that prices will not go up, but at the same time, customers can find they are locked into costly, over-provisioned infrastructure.
2. So what does Densify bring to the party?
We offer technical, business and governance analysis. Densify’s heritage is in understanding server-based physical and virtual environments — we brought in analytics to help reduce server…
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