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rPath X6 Adds Features To Automate Lifecycle for Private, Hybrid Clouds

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: rPath, private cloud, hybrid cloud, virtualization, management, self-service, elasticity, VMware, NRE,

rPath is shipping an upgrade to its “IT service factory” platform to improve automated command and control for managing software and configurations across physical, virtual and cloud. rPath X6 adds support for self-service, automation and enhances its GUI tools for full lifecycle management of private / hybrid clouds. 

rPath focuses better management and automation of components below the application layer, including OS, middleware, configuration files and other parts of the core stack. The company’s goal is to “break the dependence on brittle, unmanageable and rapidly proliferating system images in favor of version-controlled system blueprints,” Shawn Edmondson, rPath’s director of product management told IDN.

 rPath specializes in offering IT support for some of the more complex and time-consuming tasks required to for taking cloud projects from design time to runtime, Edmondson added, including construction, image generation, deployment, configuration, maintenance and updates. 

 “There has been a tremendous amount of change driven by the rise of virtualization platforms and cloud,” Edmondson said. “It began with dev-and-test, but now we’re seeing that impact bleed into the production side. These changes are making IT think differently about how they can handle and manage software.”

Because software system complexity can threaten ROI from virtualization and cloud projects, rPath X6 aims to eliminate time-consuming and error-prone image construction [to give] IT complete transparency and control over the software and configurations running in data centers and across cloud and hosting providers,” he added. 

Inside rPath’s Automation IT Architecture
Models, Blueprints and Automated Release, Updates
rPath x6 let users use a visual drag-and-drop UI to create what rPath calls “blueprints,” which are metadata-based models of the software stack components and configurations. These blueprints are stored in the rPath repository and used to generate system images. Having a blueprint repository allows IT to update its software stacks and configurations by simply updating a blueprint and renumbering the updated version.

 

Beyond design time’s blueprint repository, rPath has an inventory system for deployment and management during operations. “We have software running on every system and metadata on every system and we check what is on every system. That is reflected in rPath, which lets IT see and query any system and see what’s there,” Edmondson said. The release engineer can then decide how the updated blueprint gets deployed and which departments / servers / clouds should get the update, he added.

rPath X6 includes a number of key upgrades for both design-time and operations professionals, including:

 

• ”Pushbutton” User Experience—Transforms complex and arcane IT tasks into simpler drag-and-drop gestures and pushbutton commands. rPath graphically models systems as reusable “blueprints,” which can be version controlled. These blueprints let users construct images on demand and easily update and upgrade systems. The visual UI is designed for platform and release engineers, developers and QA engineers, architects and system administrators.
• Unified Software / Configuration Automation—Allows users to “personalize” and “activate” software stacks through easy editing of host configuration settings (including network protocol, storage and IP settings). Once defined, the configuration settings can then be managed by rPath X6 as metadata within the blueprint, which encompasses the entire version.
• Support for VMware / OpenStack Integrated Private/Hybrid Clouds-- rPath's system automation and standardization features can now be combined with OpenStack's elasticity and vCloud Director's requisition, approval and provisioning capabilities. This provides customers self-service, automation and elasticity for IT system provisioning and on-going management, including requesting, deploying, maintaining and dynamically scaling.   (rPath announced a similar integrated private cloud option with newScale and Eucalyptus last summer.)

Early users are finding quick benefits to rPath’s approach. “rPath is an integral part of our strategy, providing a powerful solution for automating and standardizing how we turn applications into deployable systems and how we maintain and re-use them over time,” Ed Seymour, a lead architect for Fujitsu, said in a statement. “For most companies this is a manual, cumbersome process, but rPath makes it simple and automated.

Financials and media companies are also showing keen interest in rPath, Edmondson said. 

Other rPath X6 features include:

• Flexible System Organization: System sets are flexible, hierarchical, static or query-driven operational groups for deployed systems.

• Domain-specific Configuration Editing: A fully pluggable configurator model for low-level OS, middleware, and application configuration changes allows IT to use existing or new scripts, as well as built-in file templating. rPath is compatible with open-source configuration engines such as Puppet, Cfengine, or Chef.
• Parameterization and Control: Stores metadata-modeled configuration parameters in the system inventory, and maps those parameters to low-level configurators.
• Group Configuration: System sets deliver flexible grouping for deployed systems; group configuration will expose configuration parameters on those sets.

rPath is a founding member of the NRE Alliance, a coalition of independent vendors collaborating to deliver enterprise-grade self-service private and hybrid cloud solutions.  Other NRE Alliance members include newScale, Eucalyptus Systems and MomentumSI.

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