RightScale Launches MultiCloud Marketplace
RightScale this week kicked off its MultiCloud Marketplace, aimed at providing a repository for buying and selling cloud management solutions.
The goal is to provide predefined cloud deployments, while offering the ability to customize them, the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company said. Some of the solutions will be free, others available to RightScale subscribers and yet others for sale by partners. Enterprises can also create their own walled-off version of the marketplace to share their own pre-defined cloud deployments.
The marketplace is a clearing house for what RightScale calls ServerTemplates, which allow the server to dynamically configure itself to whatever role it's supposed to be in relation to other servers in the cloud. For example, you can have a Web server launch to absorb higher loads and it can automatically detect which load balancer it's supposed to be working with, which application server, which database and so on, explained RightScale CEO Michael Crandell.
"It's really a key part of automation," he told me. "It also makes launching more predictable and reliable because every time you launch that server, the same template is at work, and you only can change a few variables. You're not going to get different results on the fourth launch from the first one. So the reliability goes up and IT departments like it because the governance and control goes up because they know exactly what's running when a user runs a server."
The marketplace provides the ability for partners to offer their own solutions in the form of ServerTemplates. "The other thing that's new and unique in the cloud space is that these ServerTemplates, if you design them correctly, run across multiple cloud infrastructures, hence the name MultiCloud Marketplace," Crandell said. "That's very powerful because at the end of the day it returns freedom of choice back to the end user to choose which cloud infrastructure they want to use for their own reasons, at any given time."
Among the cloud providers RightScale supports are Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Hosting, Eucalyptus and Cloud.com. RightScale intends to support Microsoft's Windows Azure once a forthcoming release of its VM Role is made available.
Some partner ServerTemplates in the marketplace include IBM's DB2 database and WebSphere Web Server, and Zend has a collection of ServerTemplates that run a full PHP scalable Web site using Zend's PHP accelerator.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/01/2011 at 1:14 PM