Integrates with OpenStack and VMware vCloud Director to bring together self-service capabilities, automation and elasticity
As enterprise IT organizations grapple with decisions on how to build and manage private and hybrid clouds, IT automation rPath wants to be a top-of-mind vendor.
The company considers its automation platform, rPath X6, a cornerstone technology. As reported at the product’s launch last month, rPath X6 is aimed at helping enterprises deploy applications or stacks of applications and handle change management faster and more effectively across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
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“As it relates to cloud computing, the process of provisioning new workloads and managing change over time needs to be consistent, reliable, automated and very fast,” says Jake Sorofman, CMO at rPath.
“Historically, it would take weeks to months to construct and deploy into an execution environment. But when you start to move to a self-service model, you need to automate those processes, delegate control to internal customers and spin up new systems rapidly,” he says.
That makes automation a must, Sorofman adds.
“Not having deep automation behind a service catalog or storefront from a self-service perspective is like presenting a menu with no chefs in the kitchen,” he says.
Toward that end, rPath X6 now integrates with the OpenStack open source cloud operating system as well as the VMware vCloud Director platform for building secure private clouds.
The idea is to combine the product’s system automation and standardization features with OpenStack’s elasticity and vCloud Director’s requisition, approval and provisioning capabilities. As a result, users will get a holistic, tangible means of requesting, deploying, maintaining and dynamically scaling an IT system, the company says.
This is the same pattern — self-service, automation and elasticity — that rPath has worked toward as a founding member of the NRE Alliance, Sorofman adds. NewScale, which Cisco recently announced it is acquiring for its self-service portal, and Eucalyptus Systems, which offers private cloud software, are the other alliance founding partners.
