Velostrata

About Velostrata

Velostrata was an enterprise cloud migration technology firm founded in 2014 by CEO Issy Ben-Shaul and Chief Product Officer Ady Degany. The company, with headquarters in San Mateo, California, and an R&D center in Netanya, Israel, was established to address the complexities enterprises faced when moving workloads to the cloud. Ben-Shaul was a serial entrepreneur, having previously co-founded Wanova Inc., which was sold to VMware, and Actona Technologies, acquired by Cisco. The founding team applied their expertise in systems and WAN optimization to develop a technology that aimed to simplify and accelerate the transition to the cloud. A significant milestone was its acquisition by Google in May 2018, after which the team joined Google's Tel Aviv office and the product was eventually rebranded as 'Migrate for Compute Engine'.

The company developed a software platform designed to migrate large-scale, virtual machine-based workloads from on-premise data centers to the public cloud. Its patented technology uniquely decoupled compute from storage, allowing applications to run in the cloud within minutes while the larger storage migration occurred in the background without performance degradation. This agentless, real-time streaming approach significantly reduced the time and complexity of migrations. The platform supported migrations from environments like VMware and Hyper-V to public clouds, initially including AWS and Azure before adding specific support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Velostrata's business model focused on serving enterprise clients in sectors such as healthcare, finance, energy, and the public sector, enabling scenarios like full data center migration, hybrid cloud operations, and disaster recovery. Before its acquisition, the company had raised $31.5 million from investors including Norwest Venture Partners, 83North, and Intel Capital.

Velostrata's core product offered a distinct solution to data gravity, the challenge of moving large data volumes. By streaming workloads and adapting them on-the-fly for cloud execution, it enabled businesses to test applications in the cloud with real data non-disruptively. Key features included live workload streaming, automated mobility, a vCenter plug-in for familiar management, and the ability to perform a stateful rollback to the on-premise data center. This functionality provided a fast, simplified, and low-risk pathway for enterprises to move complex applications, large databases, and DevOps workloads to the cloud, a capability that was integrated into Google's portfolio to bolster its enterprise migration services.