There is no doubt that public cloud adoption is growing in Enterprise IT. Different customers however are in different stages of their cloud journey. As such we have seen growth of services that allow customers to move traditional applications into the public cloud. Migration cannot necessarily wait until every application is re-platformed or refactored to be cloud native.
The “lift and shift” approach of simply moving existing workloads has long criticized as suboptimal. While it may not be ideal to dump all your existing workloads in AWS or Azure and call it a day, it is a perfectly acceptable first step of a cloud migration plan that includes refactoring and/or re-platforming of existing workloads on a longer timetable. For customers who are not developing net-new applications with a cloud first mindset, there is tremendous value in being able to rehost existing applications.
The Importance of Migration Planning
For these customers, a number of options exist when it comes to the actual act of migrating to the cloud. There are off the shelf products that can enable this migration and the customer can perform the entire project themselves. For most customers though, this is uncharted territory and they are likely to seek outside expertise for project planning, management, and execution.
There are many third parties with which a customer could partner for their cloud migration project, but there are really only a few ways to actually perform the migration. When it comes time to actually move workloads, many customers working with a partner may not know which software is actually being used but for a large number of them RiverMeadow is the answer.
Migrations Powered by RiverMeadow
Founded in 2009, RiverMeadow has created an agentless workload migration product that allows customers to move applications and data between physical and virtual machines be they on premises or in the cloud. Their product works on both Windows and Linux and uses a small executable that runs in memory to open a socket allowing communication between the source host and the target host. All data extraction and copying is done using OS native tools like VSS on Windows. Using this model, RiverMeadow has successfully migrated many enterprise applications including the likes of Oracle RAC and Microsoft Sharepoint. Additionally, RiverMeadow claims their product can be used to perform in-place upgrades of the operating system for both Windows and RedHat workloads.
The product has historically been used for VMware migrations, but has recently expanded support to include AWS and Azure as well. This has led to a focus on cloud migrations for RiverMeadow. As a result of increased customer interest in migrating to the public cloud and RiverMeadow’s capabilities to enable these migrations, the company has seen continued growth in the use of their product to the tune of 40% year over year.
RiverMeadow has been around long enough that they are able to address the majority of customer use cases.
A Migration is More Than Moving Data
With these migrations there is much more to the project than simply moving data from an on-premises server to a public cloud instance. Planning and consultation are extremely important as well. Understanding how to size instances, ensuring proper networking, and understanding how to limit access are just some of the project tasks that need to be taken into consideration.
With this in mind RiverMeadow not only provides a migration product, but also works directly with customers and through partners to provide multiple services including:
- Discovery and assessment
- Cloud architecture and design
- Cloud implementation
- Testing services
With these services in place, RiverMeadow and their partners believe they are well prepared to ensure successful migrations of their customer workloads to the preferred target public cloud. RiverMeadow also plans to have costing and optimization features available soon that will leverage AWS and Azure native capabilities to further extend the capabilities of their product.
Ken’s Conclusion
As public cloud adoption has grown in the enterprise, we have seem multiple products emerge to help customers with their migration strategy. Some have been existing products that have seen new new functionality or have been repurposed to achieve this goal. Others are net new products created for the sole purpose of cloud migrations. RiverMeadow seemed be be somewhere in between to me as a product that started out focused on migrations, but not necessarily for public cloud.
With the additional features and services that the company has made however, it is clear that RiveMeadow not only has a product that is aimed squarely at cloud migrations, but that they are focused on ensuring the success of an entire migration project by including considerations such as design and testing where some products tend to fall short. Although moving data into the cloud may not be the easy part, it is certainly the thing that is most frequently addressed. By ensuring that equal attention is given to all phases of a migration project, RiverMeadow’s partners and customers are more likely to see success as they migrate to the public cloud.
