Avnet VM rightsizing tool lands Down Under, via Queensland

CloudPhysics, a tool designed to analyse and right-size VMware environments, has landed in Australia via Avnet.

The distributor announced the partnership in February, having first crossed paths with CloudPhysics at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference last year in Toronto. The tool was revealed to an audience of partners in Sydney on Friday.

CloudPhysics may be a Silicon Valley-based software-as-a-service vendor, but it comes with a distinctly Australian twang; the global CEO, Richard Sexton, is a Queensland native.

Sexton, who joined CloudPhysics after a career that included a long stint at Symantec, told the lunch how the tool could quickly identify rogue virtual machines or unused VMware licences to help customers right-size their environment and cut wasted spend.

The company is 100 percent channel, and Sexton stressed that partners could profit even while reducing client spend, especially through netting new customers. While using the CloudPhysics assessment tool might see customers spend less than they budgeted, “if you do right by the customer, it will pay off”, he said.

It’s a strategy that works for Amazon Web Services, which has been known to proactively inform customers when they could reconfigure their AWS environment to reduce their spend.

CloudPhysics is a 30-staff company based in Santa Clara, California. Its backers include Diane Greene, the VMware co-founder who now runs Google Cloud Platform.

CloudPhysics, which plays in the same area as first-party VMware solution vRealize as well as third-party offerings such as Turbonomic, can be used to compare a customer’s current on-premises environment versus running the same workloads on Amazon Web Services or Azure.

During a demo in Sydney, Chris Farrow, Avnet ANZ’s principal technologist for cloud and digital, showed how the outcome of these usage assessments could, in some cases, prove on-premises as the better option, steering the conversation back toward traditional sales.

Farrow also demonstrated how an assessment could turn up outdated versions of VMware ESX, and even indicate where a hypervisor upgrade would require an investment in new infrastructure, which could drive a hardware refresh.

A key use for CloudPhysics is to assess the “archaeological layers” of ageing VMware environments that are not “pristine” and which can be reconfigured for peak performance or to prepare them for a cloud migration, or just to find cost savings.