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Accelerite is updating and expanding its cloud infrastructure offering with the new Rovius cloud platform, which was officially announced on Sept. 26. Rovius enables organizations to combine on-premises private cloud deployments with public cloud capacity from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
The Rovius Cloud builds on the open-source Apache CloudStack project and Citrix CloudPlatform technologies that Accelerite acquired from Citrix in January 2016. Citrix in turn, originally built CloudPlatform with technologies it picked up through the acquisition of cloud.com in 2011.
“We had our own thesis about what we wanted to to with CloudPlatform when we acquired the technology,” Nara Rajagopalan, CEO Accelerite told eWEEK. “Over the past year we have worked with customers, learning from them what their needs are.”
The Citrix CloudPlatform was the enterprise version of the open-source Apache CloudStack project and according to Rajagopalan it still was missing some capabilities that were needed by large enterprises. The Rovius Cloud aims to fill the missing gaps and provides a superset of capabilities above what had been available in CloudPlatform.
Rajagopalan said that in recent years many organizations have chosen to embrace public cloud providers thanks to the self-service, API driven approach. However, he noted that enterprises are still running on-premises workloads with traditional virtualization technologies. The challenge in his view is that it hasn’t been easy for organizations to enable a hybrid cloud approach that integrates on-premises and public cloud capacity.
“CloudStack, even though it was a very stable product, still required effort to get up and running,” Rajagopalan said.
With Rovius Cloud an enterprise can point the platform at bare-metal hardware and with a set of Accelerite provided blueprints and the hardware will be converted into a private cloud inside of one hour, Rajagopalan explained. The Accelerite blueprints support heterogeneous environments with various hardware and virtualization technologies and can be configured by customers, he said.
Another challenge organizations are often faced with is management of disparate cloud assets, he noted. To that end, the Rovius Cloud includes an operations management console which provides remote management capabilities. The system is also hybrid by-design, enabling organizations to jump to the public cloud, when extra capacity is needed.
“AWS just shows up as a zone in your Rovius cloud as if it was in your private cloud,” Rajagopalan said. “So when you’re out of space in your own data center, you can simply provision workloads in AWS.”
Federation in the Cloud
Rajesh Ramchandani, General Manager of Cloud Services and Platforms for Accelerite, explained that support for the public clouds is enabled with a federation layer that Accelerite has developed. He added that Rovius Cloud also includes an integration with an Accelerite-developed Software-Defined Storage technology.
“We’re also making Kubernetes as a Service, available on Rovius,” Ramchandani told eWEEK. “So customers can easily run cloud native workloads with Rovius.”
The Rovius Cloud platform is currently available as a software appliance, although Accelerite plans to have an integrated hardware platform available by the end of 2017.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.