cloud management software – Cloud Computing Today

Rackware today announced the finalization of $2.3M in funding that brings the total capital raised by the Santa Clara-based cloud management company to $7M. Today’s funding round was led by existing investors Kickstart Seed Fund and Osage Venture Partners. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand Rackware’s sales and marketing operations, including increased expansion to Europe, Middle East and Africa. The company’s Rackware Management Module allows customers to move physical workloads from datacenters into the cloud, or alternatively to move workloads between cloud vendors. Additionally, the platform delivers autoscaling functionality for on premise infrastructures that empowers customers to extend their datacenters to the cloud as needed. The current roster of cloud platforms supported by Rackware includes Amazon Web Services, NTT, IBM’s SoftLayer, CenturyLink, OpenStack, SunGard, CloudSigma, Rackspace and VMware. Rackware’s platform delivers an automated, push button approach to the migration of workloads to and between cloud platforms in ways designed to enhance IT infrastructure mobility and elasticity. As cloud adoption accelerates, particularly amongst enterprises that find themselves forced to confront the challenge of migrating legacy applications to the cloud, technologies such as Rackware’s are likely to encounter increased demand as organizations require and demand automated solutions for migrating workloads to and between cloud vendors.

Egenera, a Boxborough, MA-based company specializing in cloud infrastructure management, recently announced a new release of its Egenera Cloud Suite platform for provisioning “physical, virtual, and public cloud resources” from within the purview of a single management interface. The new release serves the needs of both enterprises and cloud service providers that face the challenge of managing workloads within public cloud infrastructures and on premise environments. Enhancements to the Egenera Cloud Suite platform, which combines the PAN Cloud Director, PAN Manager and PAN Domain Manager, include support for Microsoft Hyper-V and Active Directory, more granular role-based access controls and improvements to billing and templating that streamline and automate workflows.

Given that enterprises increasingly leverage combinations of on premise and public cloud environments to differentially accommodate the needs of test, development and production environments, the ability of the Egenera PAN Manager and PAN Cloud Director to comprehensively manage varied hosting infrastructures positions it strongly to manage hybrid clouds, the most common use case for cloud deployments since comparatively few organizations pursue a “cloud only” solution. Egenera’s recent release builds on this summer’s integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), whereby AWS is now part of the standard service catalog within its Pan Cloud Director service catalog. Meanwhile, this week’s release marks a significant breakthrough for Egenera, which now expands its purview to virtualized environments supported by the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor due to requests from many of its customers, as noted in an interview with Cloud Computing Today.