RightScale Adds HP To Its Multi-Cloud Management Lineup

HP on Tuesday announced its Converged Cloud Services, its entry into the cloud market as a full-service provider. Users of the service can take advantage of HP's hardware, software, infrastructure and support to move their IT resources to the cloud. HP's service is based on open-source, OpenStack technology.

RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said cloud support for HP was a natural step.

“When a company like HP, with all its technology and infrastructure comes to this market, we very much want to support them so our customers can have a choice of using the best providers on the public cloud landscape,” Crandell said in an interview.

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RightScale already supports several public and private cloud partners, including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Citrix CloudStack and Eucalyptus.

With RightScale’s support for multiple cloud providers, customers can access more than one provider for different uses.

Crandell said such “multi-cloud” usage is growing as business customers see more value in using different hosted platforms for different tasks.

“Our goal is to allow customers to have the interoperability to use these cloud providers from a single pane of glass, namely our dashboard,” Crandall said. “While operating from a single pane of glass, you can choose from all of them when you want to run an operation.”

For HP’s cloud services, RightScale’s cloud management provides automation and scalability to manage HP’s cloud infrastructure, while giving customers access and choice to other cloud providers’ platforms through one dashboard for public and private clouds, he said.

RightScale also offers MultiCloud Marketplace, which gives HP customers access to a library of pre-built cloud templates, scripts and architectures to help them manage their operations.

Thomas Ryan, vice president, Marketplace and Ecosystem, for Hewlett-Packard's Cloud Services, said in an e-mail that HP welcomes cloud support from RightScale.

"As part of HP Cloud Services’ broad partner ecosystem, the powerful combination of HP and RightScale will provide enterprise customers with fully automated cloud management," Ryan said. "HP Cloud Services customers who want to manage their cloud services from a single dashboard with automated provisioning, configuration and governance can leverage RightScale, and they can also access the company’s broad collection of pre-built solutions."

Santa Barbara, Calif.-based RightScale has risen rapidly in the exploding cloud management segment. In September 2011, the company won $25 million in venture funding, on top of $22 million invested earlier.