RackWare’s new RMM 6.0 platform update with Advanced Hybrid Cloud Management Suite was released on Wednesday, providing enterprises serious about managing
RackWare’s new RMM 6.0 platform update with Advanced Hybrid Cloud Management Suite was released on Wednesday, providing enterprises serious about managing DevOps an easier way to strike a balance between innovation and cost management.
DevOps workflows are all the rage in IT, with a streamlined bridge between IT operations and developer teams seen as the ticket to internal innovation. But as developers are given the power to crank open the tap of public cloud resources to test new applications, costs can often become unwieldy. Especially when they’ re forgetting to turn that tap off once their application is thoroughly washed.
RackWare CEO Sash Sunkara can speak to that pain directly.
“I’ d get these huge bills for $20,000 or $30,000 per month, ” she says. “We started using our own software last year to provide controls so there’s no surprises for the business unit or for IT.”
RackWare, in its sixth-generation of major platform update after 6.0 became generally available on Thursday, is a cloud orchestration tool tailored for a hybrid environment. Since its launch, the company has championed the advantages of dipping into the public cloud where needed, but also not sacrificing the known quantity of private cloud delivery.
As many enterprises have adopted some model of hybrid cloud structure, an approach that is approved many IT consultancies, RackWare’s grown its presence in the market. Competing with orchestration solutions like VMware’s vRealize and IBM’s Cloud Brokerage, it’s carved out a competitive advantage by enabling orchestration with a focus on cost accountability and management.
When developers decide to shortcut to Amazon Web Services and bypass IT, not only can it be expensive, it can be risky, Sunkara says.
“If these aren’ t vetted and it doesn’ t go through security, that’s a big risk, ” she says. “So we have role-based access.”
RackWare’s administrator view captures the actions of developers and control permissions for what resources they can access. Administrators also can provide a catalogue of services available to developers to access on a self-service basis.
A standalone product that works at the OS level, Rackware doesn’ t require pairing with a hypervisor to work its cloud orchestration magic. It’s also compatible on Linux or Windows, and can be used whether resources are being called over the public Internet, through a VPN, or dedicated line. In any case, a high-level of encryption around RackWare data loads provides security.
The broad stroke use cases for RMM 6.0 are numerous – from managing backups and disaster recovery plans, to moving workloads in and out of public or private clouds, to managing applications. RackWare says it can do all this at 50-60 per cent cost savings over “traditional approaches” and reduce overall time spent on the tasks.
Key automation features at play include the AutoParking and AutoScaling features. AutoParking is the feature that Sunkara says saved RackWare itself a lot of money. It notices when a developer’s computer resources are sitting idle, and moves them from memory to “park” in storage at a lower cost to maintain. When the developer comes back from their long weekend and wants to return to work, it can be restored. AutoScaling matches cloud resources to a performance profile that matches what a developer wants to accomplish, an effort to avoid the commonplace overestimation of resources needed for a project.
RackWare RMM 6.0 is priced on a per image basis and subscriptions are typically for a 12-month term.
