RightScale Unveils Universal Cloud Appliance

Improve Internet Performance by Diversifying Your Cloud Portfolio

As a provider of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that has been widely used to manage VMware environments, RightScale has provided a mechanism through which IT organizations could more easily manage virtual machines that tend to be highly distributed across multiple data centers. Starting today, RightScale is now extending that capability to any virtual machine, bare-metal server or cloud service.

With the launch of the RightScale Universal Cloud Appliance (UCA), the company is making available a software appliance that can now be deployed anywhere. Kim Weins, vice president of marketing at RightScale, says that as hybrid cloud computing continues to evolve, IT organizations now need to manage multiple types of deployments. VMware may still be the dominant platform, but just about every IT organization is either dealing with multiple types of hypervisors or cloud computing services or soon will be, says Weins.

In addition, Weins notes that in the future, IT organizations may actually also wind up deploying more bare-metal services to support applications based on containers.

As the IT environment grows more complex to manage, RightScale is making the case for a SaaS application that enables IT organizations to manage multiple scenarios using software appliances that Weins says provide a frictionless way of dynamically adjusting to changes in the IT environment.

Of course, most IT organizations already have some sort of management framework in place that they are naturally looking to extend. The challenge they face, however, is that right now no one is quite sure how long it might take to actually make that extension, much less what direction that extension might need to be in.