RightScale Adds Self-Service Access to VMware vSphere Environments

SANTA BARBARA, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 30, 2014) - RightScale® Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise cloud portfolio management, today announced the general availability of the RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere, which enables organizations to give developers fast, self-service access to VMware vSphere® resources and create portable workloads across vSphere, Amazon Web Services (AWS)™, Google Compute Engine™, Microsoft Azure™, OpenStack™, and other clouds.

First announced in beta in December 2013, the RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere allows RightScale users to leverage vSphere resources through a new, lightweight, stateless on-premise appliance that sits behind a corporate firewall. It securely communicates to the vSphere environment in the data center and to the RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management solution, which provides customers industry-leading self-service, cloud analytics, and cloud management.

"Nearly half (47 percent) of recent ESG research respondents utilizing cloud infrastructure services indicated that they are actively migrating between internal private cloud and external public cloud environments," said Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. "These business are looking for greater portability as way to redistribute resources, reduce vendor lock-in, and take advantage of optimal economics. Enterprises want to easily move workloads between a range of cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, private clouds, and vSphere environments. RightScale is taking an important step in offering its customers this kind of portability."

"Our enterprise customers want to expand cloud adoption and increase developer productivity by combining public and private cloud resources with their existing vSphere environments," said Thorsten von Eicken, RightScale CTO and co-founder. "At the same time, they want to support portability among a wide range of clouds and avoid lock-in to any particular cloud provider or hypervisor. The RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere offers enterprise developers an easy cloud-centric way to deploy and manage both existing VMs and portable applications, while allowing VMware administrators to continue to use familiar vCenter management tools."

Self-Service Access to vSphere Environments
vSphere environments have traditionally been controlled, configured, and managed by specialized administrators within IT. With the RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere, new types of users such as application developers, DevOps teams, and other cloud users can use RightScale to deploy, manage, and move workloads across cloud and vSphere environments according to the policies set by IT.

Providing developers with self-service access to vSphere through RightScale reduces repetitive, manual provisioning tasks for virtualization teams. At the same time, vSphere administrators can continue to leverage familiar vCenter tools in parallel with RightScale for their administration needs.

Cloud Portability Across vSphere, AWS, and Other Clouds
RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management includes a multi-cloud platform that enables application portability across vSphere and clouds.

With the RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere, RightScale customers create portable workloads that move seamlessly between cloud environments such as AWS and VMware vSphere. This reduces vendor lock-in and enables use cases such as leveraging hybrid environments for different stages of the development lifecycle, providing failover among different clouds, and supporting cloudbursting.

Single Pane of Glass Across Cloud and vSphere Environments

RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere provides enterprise infrastructure teams with a single plane of glass for visibility, governance, and management of workloads running in vSphere and cloud environments -- including AWS, Azure, Google, Rackspace, HP, IBM, OpenStack, and CloudStack. Using RightScale, central IT teams can view all workloads across the organization, enforce policies, access audit trails, and manage costs.

Growing Demand for Hybrid Cloud

In the RightScale 2014 State of the Cloud Report, 74 percent of enterprises say that they have a hybrid cloud strategy and more than half of those are already using both public and private cloud. In addition, a high percentage of companies with more than 1,000 employees reported that they were using VMware. Fifty-two percent view their vSphere environments as a private cloud. The full results of the survey are available in the RightScale 2014 State of the Cloud Report at rightscale.com/2014-cloud-report.

For more information and considerations on how to cloud-enable vSphere, download our white paper, From Virtualization to Cloud: Leveraging vSphere, AWS, and Other Clouds, at http://www.rightscale.com/lp/virtualization-to-cloud-white-paper.

About RightScale
RightScale® Inc. Cloud Portfolio Management enables leading enterprises to accelerate delivery of cloud-based applications that engage customers and drive top-line revenue while optimizing cloud usage to reduce risk and costs. With RightScale, IT organizations can deliver instant access to a portfolio of public, private, and hybrid cloud services across business units and development teams while maintaining enterprise control. RightScale offers RightScale Cloud Analytics to help bring clarity to organizations on current cloud costs and help model and optimize for future cloud use. RightScale CloudSight consulting helps companies develop cloud strategies, deliver cloud projects, and optimize cloud usage. Since 2007, leading enterprises including Pearson International, Intercontinental Hotels Group, and PBS have launched millions of servers through RightScale.

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