Accelerite Releases Rovius Cloud, A Bulked-Up CloudStack For The Modern Enterprise

Accelerite generally released a new cloud-building platform Tuesday—a technology acquired from Citrix and bulked up with software-defined storage, automated operations management and hybrid cloud capabilities.

Rovius Cloud delivers a solution for implementing hybrid infrastructure developed in line with Accelerite's unique strategy of giving new life to products bought from larger technology companies.

The cloud operating system looks to challenge existing hybrid solutions on the market with its ease of use, scalability, and overall cost savings, Rajesh Ramchandani, general manager of the company's cloud division, told CRN.

[Related: Rackspace To Acquire Datapipe In A Blockbuster Deal For Global Cloud Services]

Accelerite, based in Santa Clara, Calif., is the product arm of Indian software developer Persistent Systems. The company has made a business out of acquiring lower-profile technologies from large vendors, then building upon them to solve shortcomings and add value before introducing them back to the market.

Accelerite's portfolio also includes Radia, an endpoint security product originally purchased from Hewlett-Packard; as well as Aepona, an API management platform acquired from Intel.

About 18 months ago, Accelerite bought CloudPlatform from Citrix Systems—a productized version of the open source CloudStack technology.

Subsequent engineering upgrades added software-defined storage through an OEM deal with Datera, as well as an operations management console that can be either delivered through Software-as-a-Service or installed on-premises.

The general release adds the final component—integration with the public cloud, starting in the current release with Amazon Web Services. Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure will be added later in the year.

"Without hybrid, the story doesn't resonate well anymore," Ramchandani said.

Accelerite inherited much of the product's customer base from Citrix. Many CloudPlatform users were cloud providers themselves, including several telecoms around the world and large managed cloud providers like Datapipe and NTT.

The development process for Rovius looked to identify and solve problems among CloudPlatform enterprise customers, primarily around ease of deployment.

"Now we have the entire stack so we can build from bare-metal to cloud in only a couple hours," Ramchandani said.

Customers can choose an infrastructure blueprint and then point Rovius to a server. The system will discover hardware and automatically provision a cloud environment within hours, he said.

"Amazon just shows up as another data center on the Rovius Cloud UI" from which users can provision resources, Ramchandani said.

Rovius is shipping as a software appliance, but Accelerite is also working with some hardware vendors to make the product available as a hardware appliance as well.

Unlike OpenStack, a rival technology that greatly overshadowed CloudStack in the open cloud market years ago, Rovius is an integrated platform that doesn't need to tie together 19 different projects, Ramchandani said.

And the cost of deploying Rovius is well below that of rival solutions, he added, including VMware on the private cloud side, and AWS as a public alternative.

The majority of Accelerite's business goes through the channel.

One of the first Rovius Cloud implementers, Entisys360, had been working with the technology since it was still under the Citrix banner.

"They have more of a total strategy around this, not just a single product," Mike Strohl, the Concord, Calif.-based solution provider's CEO, said in comparing the product from its days at Citrix to the latest incarnation from Accelerite.

"The right technology ended up in the right hands and they're doing the right things with it," Entisys360's Strohl told CRN.

The most-significant advance Accelerite made with the product was reducing the complexity of creating hybrid clouds, allowing customers to thoughtfully execute their cloud strategies, Strohl said.

While it never hurts to undercut the competition in price, "the dollar signs have never been the holdup for most companies" in transitioning to cloud, he said.

What enterprises are looking for are platforms that help them deploy private clouds, and use them as launching pads to the public cloud.

"This brings you more rapidly down that path," Strohl said. "This just gives people the options they need to begin executing."