Public cloud solutions, as rolled out by Amazon AWS, Google AppEngine and Microsoft Azure have proven that capacity-on-demand is good ROI. There is real dollar value in migrating certain types of applications to cloud clusters. Though not every application is ready for migration to these public clouds due to legal and privacy reasons.

To address privacy and compliance requirements, virtualization vendors – led by pioneer VMware, started offering in-house cloud solutions. vCloud product leverages VMware’s lead in virtualization and extends that advantage in variable capacity management. vCloud APIs will be available very soon.

This led to interesting problem for enterprises – how to migrate internal applications without sacrificing years of compliance and policy based resource provisioning. To address this problem, couple of startups have emerged. Elastra is one such start-up. ( Kaavo is another startup in this space.)

Elastra, San Francisco based startup, recently rolled out public beta of its Elastra Server Cloud 2.0, which company see as the broker between public compute clouds and in-house compute clouds.

What makes this company really interesting is their promise of bi-directional migration support between public and private clouds. Elastra abstracts out application configuration, provisioning rule, usage policy and other stack properties – and makes it ready for cloud migration and management.

This kind of solution will create interesting possibilities for Cloud Interoperability. Once companies start storing application deployment meta data in portable cloud management systems – cross cloud interoperability will naturally evolve from it.

Elastra received $12 million funding last year, backed by cloud pioneer Amazon and couple of top tier venture firms.

Here is Elastra CEO, Kirill Sheynkman, talking about Cloud Computing for the Enterprise market:

Watch Elastra on Startup City  |