Because the future is hybrid and heterogeneous, RackWare offers management across deployment options
RackWare offers a management and automation platform that enterprises use to manage their computing resources to more closely follow demand. RackWare’s core proposition is that its management suite delivers cost savings to customers of a suggested 40 to 50 percent. Additionally, RackWare promises to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability to their customers.
The company today released a new take on its management suite that aims to extend the existing core RackWare offering. The new platform promises to offer enterprises a single solution (they refrained from calling it a single pane of glass) to move applications, protect those same applications and manage all the different applications across the totality of their infrastructure. Justifying the move, RackWare points to a recent IDC report that suggests 70 percent of heavy cloud users are considering a hybrid cloud strategy.
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RackWare is thus talking a strong hybrid story while promising to readily enable the movement and management of complex and legacy applications to the cloud. The company suggests—in something that might just be anathema to a large number of vendors out there that also purport to offer this value proposition—that prior to RackWare, enterprises were burdened with multiple tools to handle specific needs around migration, disaster recovery, backup and application management.
The company further tries to justify its hybrid credentials by claiming existing tools tend to be specific for physical or virtual environments, thus further adding to the complexity of managing workloads in the data center. I’d say that while that may have been the case a handful of years ago, most infrastructure management tools today—from either legacy or new-age vendors—are hybrid-enabled from the get-go.
Anyway—not letting market reality get in the way of claiming something novel, RackWare continues to articulate a value proposition that, while valid, has been articulated by many others for years.
“Our core vision is enabling hybrid cloud adoption for the enterprise,” said Sash Sunkara, founder and CEO of RackWare. “RackWare RMM 6.0 solves some of the most challenging problems facing cloud computing. From a single platform, physical and virtual applications can be cloud enabled, protected in the cloud, and cost-effectively managed in the cloud. With RMM 6.0, IT departments can now reduce the number of solutions they need to protect, manage and migrate their hybrid cloud workloads.”
Workload portability
Similarly going out on a limb that was seen as conceptually valuable a handful of years ago, but has since been largely forgotten, RackWare articulates a “workload portability” proposition. The company rightly points out that application mobility is a serious challenge for enterprise managers, then seriously gilds the lily by suggesting its solution removes the shackles from virtually any application, providing mobility in an automated, cost-effective manner that reduces time, resources and risk.
I’ve got a bunch of enterprise CTO friends who would argue this point with RackWare, dismissing broad application portability as something akin to a “unicorns and rainbows” pipe dream.
Obviously, justifying the no-doubt significant spend that RackWare’s analyst relations and marketing team have made with them, one analyst firm attempted to defend the company’s assertions.
“The market is full of point products that provide limited functionality,” said Edwin Yuen, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “RackWare is not one of them. RackWare’s cost-effective hybrid cloud management platform covers a broad set of technologies for the enterprise data center. RMM 6.0 offers an intuitive approach to application management and provides IT departments with even greater functionality for leveraging private, public and hybrid cloud environments.”
My POV
Sorry, but I’m not seeing much value here. That’s due in part because the very idea of general application portability has been largely debunked—partly because of the technology hurdles but also because moving applications without rearchitecting to take advantage of the core benefits that the cloud delivers is simply dumb.
On top of that, the fact that virtually every infrastructure management solution under the sun offering hybrid cloud functionality leads me to believe that while RackWare’s PR folks do a great job crafting press releases, they do less of a good job at assessing the competitive landscape.
