Cloud Burst – The First Visual Collaboration Infrastructure as a Service

[Prateek Kathpal (prateekkathpal)]

Polycom today announced Polycom® RealPresence Clariti^TM, simple, powerful, and cloud-ready visual communication infrastructure software priced on a simple model based on concurrent users that offers all the necessary software components for video collaboration. Hybrid cloud burst is an optional service for RealPresence Clariti that enables customers to dynamically expand their concurrent user capacity on-demand and as needed using Polycom’s cloud-based infrastructure.

Video collaboration solutions help extend visual communications across any organization and empower users with face-to-face connections.  This streamlines everyday tasks and makes every meeting a working session by enabling all participants to easily contribute content, annotations and ideas. Today, should existing network resources become insufficient to meet day to day collaboration needs, an upgrade of infrastructure is required. Certain town hall events or larger meetings could require unplanned additional resources that can create nightmares for IT. Cloud bursting is an application deployment model in which an application runs, as normal, in a private cloud or data center, but then bursts into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes. The advantage of such a hybrid cloud deployment is that an organization only pays for extra compute resources when they are needed.

Polycom hybrid cloud burst service is the first visual collaboration Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that provides virtualized computing resources in the cloud to enable seamless connection during spikes in video collaboration usage – whether planned or unexpected. Cloud burst serves as A hedge, or insurance, against capacity constraints, and offers highly scalable resources that can be adjusted on-demand. This makes IaaS well-suited for workloads that are temporary, experimental or change unexpectedly. Customers only pay for usage.

Polycom's cloud burst service provides a seamless and consistent user experience, whether a call is landing on local MCU or is being escalated into Polycom IaaS MCU and helps augment and expand on premise capacity when the demand for VMRs, and virtual meeting resources can unexpectedly spike.

Our cloud burst service helps customers make this transition from traditional hardware to software and to the cloud seamlessly, allowing them to maximize use of legacy investments. It also offers customers a peace of mind when deciding to automatically scale from their video conferencing solution to the cloud when needed. A new auto scaling algorithm in Polycom RealPresence Clariti lets IT administrators to set up the auto-scaling & burst thresholds and configure the expansion MCUs in cloud. Once configured, MCUs can automatically get scaled into the cloud as the need occurs and scale down when the load subsides. This intelligent cloud-aware IaaS allows the flexibility to go beyond a fixed performance capacity model and ensures optimum use of resources by intelligently expanding the traffic load to additional resources available in cloud.

Expanding your resources into cloud without having access to real time expansion tracking, usage information and costs is a big challenge for IT administrators, and a key reason to adopt any IaaS. Polycom RealAccess, included with RealPresence Clariti, securely monitors capacity and performance, understanding utilization patterns to drive informed decisions. RealAccess provides IT administrators with valuable analytical information about infrastructure usage in traditional on-premises environments, and now with the hybrid cloud burst service, enables IT administrators to access the statistics on cloud bursting, analyze traffic spike situations, monitor real time call records and also view billing information.

Polycom RealPresence Clariti - the first visual collaboration infrastructure software to offer cloud bursting capability, is a first step towards a hybrid visual collaboration Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and helps adapt to changing market conditions while leveraging existing investment.

We’d love to hear your feedback on Polycom RealPresence Clariti and our hybrid cloud burst service. Does this sound like the right solution for your business?