KRYSTALLIZE Technologies: Optimized Cloud Migration and Performance

Clinton France, Founder & CEO

With a promise to resolve the IT infrastructural challenges that have kept the business leaders on their toes for the last 25 years, cloud technology is bringing a new wave of disruption across industries. Buoyed by the head start that the cloud guarantees—through scalability features and an opex model— businesses today are more eager than ever to compete with the industry leaders. However, to reap the advantage of the cloud to the full extent, organizations need to ensure they have done the necessary homework. “Many organizations are trapped in migration pitfalls where they struggle to have a well-defined blueprint to align their application workloads with the available cloud resources,” begins Clinton France, Founder, and CEO, Krystallize Technologies. To transform cloud aspirations into favorable business outcomes, organizations need to take an optimized approach to cloud migration and performance management subsequently. “Our ability to remove the blind spots in cloud migration and performance makes us the go-to partner for cloud transition.” Krystallize Technologies aids cloud consumers to optimize cloud migration and help cloud service providers (CSPs) improve the value of their cloud products and services by measuring their performance. “Our comprehensive solutions portfolio ensures that cloud customers can enjoy consistent, predictable, and reliable services every day in the cloud. Bringing great value to the entities on the other side of the spectrum, their solutions empower CSPs to enhance their performance, which in turn maximizes customer experience and retention,” says France.

“What we effectively tackle is cloud variability,” he adds. Most organizations are aware that there is variability in the cloud service capabilities, but they are in a constant battle to get a clear picture of that variation. Krystallize offers them the insights to make sound, data-driven cloud decisions. France explains that the CIOs need an efficient solution for cloud benchmarking, profiling and on-going optimization, and performance monitoring. Krystallize’s flagship offering, the CloudQoS suite, provides cloud users the necessary insights and transparency to manage cloud variability, reduce total cost of ownership, and drive performance. The built-in intelligence and the analytical capabilities of the solutions help customers optimize their shift to the cloud.

Apt Solutions for Cloud Reliability

Krystallize’s patented CloudQoS suite of performance management solutions is the fulcrum that drives a business’ ability to meet their IT infrastructure management goals in the cloud. CloudQoS measures the quality of cloud platforms leveraged by a company to ensure reliable, constant, and calculable services while creating an alert for under-performing services.

Our ability to remove the blind spots in cloud migration and performance makes us the go-to partner for cloud transition

France informs that CloudQoS is a bundle of three dynamic solutions—CloudQoS Index, CloudQoS Workload Profiling, and CloudQoS Assurance. The Cloud Quality of Service (CloudQoS) Index enables Krystallize to test and sample the top CSPs and assess their overall service capability. This cutting-edge technology distinctly specifies the number of transactions the cloud can execute for a given application workload within a second, using the available computing capability, network, memory, and storage.

“We start the client engagement process with CloudQoS Index where we offer an educational session to demonstrate the service variability in a particular cloud,” mentions France. CloudQoS Index outlines every workload that can be tested in the cloud before they make a cloud transition. The solution not only gives a clear picture of the cloud service variability but also demonstrates how it affects price/performance, which is indicative of the service cost in the cloud.

Once a cloud customer decides upon a cloud service for their workload requirements, Krystallize brings to the table, another solution, CloudQoS Workload Profiling, to build a synthetic workload that generates the same demand. “Built to glean all the concurrent resources and statistics of a native workload, the synthetic workload is used to find the ‘best fit/best cost’ cloud solution,” says France. CloudQoS Workload Profiling saves customers from buying too much or too little space for their workloads. Clients can then use CloudQoS Assurance, a lifecycle management solution, to continuously and dynamically adjust cloud resources to match their increasing or decreasing workloads over time.

The solutions built into the CloudQoS are available as standalone products. Therefore, customers can buy CloudQoS Index and use it to leverage procurement tools SLAs. Other customers have already moved into the cloud, but after realizing that they are paying more, they implemented Krystallize’s Service Assurance solution to optimize their workload. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) leverage the Workload Profiling solution to help their customers adopt the most suitable cloud service. “Customers can use the entire portfolio as a single package, or choose any of the three services depending upon their requirement,” says France.

Transparency and Insights in Cloud

“As an independent third-party solution provider, Krystallize offers the transparency and smart insights through CloudQoS that benefits both the CSPs and the cloud consumers, equally,” stresses France, outlining that they perform workload profiling while helping the cloud providers to move their customer into the cloud, cost-efficiently, and predictably.

The company provides its clients a sample of 160 different cloud systems, across the top four cloud providers, every month.

By sampling these systems, Krystallize not only shows the variability across cloud providers but also demonstrates it within each of these cloud services. For instance, the company generated a sample report from October 2017 to December 2017 for AWS. In October, the average service capability was 170 thousand operations per second. However, by December, the average score for the 10 sample systems had gone downhill to 110 thousand operations per second due to overutilization of the regime by Amazon itself, alongside its usage by other e-commerce sites. The report was an eye-opener for customers who were paying the same price for 30 percent less performance; and if they needed the same performance that they got a couple of months ago, they had to abort 30 percent of their systems from the cloud. Providing these reports in the form graphs, the company is helping cloud providers to perform better and accelerate customer experience.

France illustrates another instance where one of their clients wanted to shift from the Oracle cluster to the Oracle virtual space. However, they were not ready to move from Oracle on-premise to Oracle on virtual instances implementing the Apple-to-Apple methodology. The reason is that the customer had 16 core, 257GB system on-premise, and three system cluster, but when they tried using this technique the client did not find an exact match; instead, they were offered a 32/257 configuration. Moving to the cloud with this configuration, the client could have saved up to 12 percent, but as this was not their exact need, the client had to pay more for the unnecessary compute cycles. Unable to find a perfect fit, the client approached Krystallize. By building a synthetic workload for the client, Krystallize was able to identify that 16 core, 257GB configuration was possible with storage virtualization. The workload profiling helped the client meet their need accurately at 45 percent less cost as opposed to the 12 percent through the Apple-to-Apple migration.

"We are paving a path that helps both the parties adopt cloud in a safe, secured, reliable, predictable and consistent fashion"

As Krystallize progresses in this journey of optimizing cloud performance, it has achieved various milestones along the way. Recently, the company has joined hands with the second largest MSP and signed up with three of the top four cloud providers, while working on its Halo account. That said, it’s evident that the company desires to continue its focus on helping MSPs grow and assist enterprises to move their workloads into the cloud by building optimal cloud solutions. Krystallize aims to help them integrate the cloud performance management functionality as a differentiator in their offerings. “We have been an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) oriented company, but moving ahead, we are working to become a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) firm to respond to the growing demand,” says France. Krystallize is also building an app and many database-as-a-service offerings to make its solutions more accessible. Having an in-depth experience in the industry, France states that cloud providers face the same realities as every enterprise CIO does, which is to maximize their performance in the cloud. “Keeping that in mind, we are paving a path that helps both the CSPs and the consumers grow in a safe, secure, reliable, predictable, and consistent fashion,” concludes France.