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Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Accelerite is a company I surprisingly haven’t heard of before and it is also new to Tech Field Day.

Founded in 2012 it is a wholly owned business of Persistent Systems and is a software house that aims to “Simplify and Secure the Enterprise Infrastructure”. Accelerite says there is a proliferation of devices and clouds that enterprises need to manage and secure.

CloudPlatform

I hadn’t realised that it was Accelerite that bought CloudPlatform from Citrix in March 2016. CloudPlatform was Citrix’s Apache CloudStack based platform, an open source cloud management platform and was at a time a possible alternative to OpenStack. It didn’t seem to get much traction in terms of numbers although tere are some massive deployments and it was seen as more enterprise ready. OpenStack seemed to get the buzz and won the marketing battle but has itself struggled with adoption due to complexity & feature bloat. Cries of OpenStack is dead are overblown, it is used in very large telcos and service providers, is being simplified and streamlined and will possible then creep back into enterprises who want an open source private linux of the cloud. AWS and Azure have of course been courting the same enterprises with their public cloud offerings. It remains to be seen how much time and effort enterprises are going to expend to what end to create what at least Wikibon is terming the True Private Cloud when public cloud is very tantalising and growing in features way above IaaS.

Accelerite’s CloudPlatform has multi-hypervisor support with its own hypervisor or you can choose from VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, KVM, or Hyper-V. There is bare metal provisioning as well with a particular use case highlighted of high performance computing applications. It can use traditional storage or hyper-converged.

Rovius

Accelerite has also come out with a new offering called Rovius which it terms an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud which it sells as public cloud infrastructure for your data center. It is a turn key solution touted as zero to cloud in minutes. Rovius is SaaS based which is already different, a fully managed service which can then manage your on-prem CloudPlatform cloud as well as federate to other public clouds. The idea is to take out all the pain of creating a private cloud.

This pain is certainly a reality, existing private cloud solutions like VMware vRealize Automation isn’t getting enough traction due to its complexity and resource requirements. Enterprises and even small businesses are wanting quick and simple private cloud which normally means some workflows to deploy VMs and tear them down with an approval process and a billing model for individual teams/departments/tenants. Sure, IaaS cloud does have a lot more and vRealize Automation has a lot to offer but companies can’t seem to tackle it enough to do the simple things and so don’t bother. VMware’s own numbers show only 5% of customers have bought VMware’s private cloud bundle, the vCloud Suite, which includes vRealize Automation and other cloud operational software. This must be an excruciatingly low number for VMware, the pre-eminent virtualisation to private cloud software vendor. Although there’s much talk of private cloud, this isn’t actually a reality, it’s often just virtualisation with some home-grown automation sprinkled on top. VMware has been promising a cloud managed version of vRealize Automation which would have been called vRealize Automation Air but this hasn’t happened and messaging is moving more towards Cloud Formation and VMware on AWS which is a VMware managed cloud. Other than vRealize Automation there are OpenStack and CloudStack and a few other minnows.

Accelerite seems to be wanting to step in to provide a managed private cloud with some public cloud extensions where VMware and OpenStack have so far struggled. That’s pretty ambitious considering cloud has moved so far from IaaS to even serverless offerings from public cloud vendors. Microsoft has just released its private cloud offering of Azure Stack. I’d love to hear how Accelerate sees the market, they must be fairly bullish on private cloud.

Rovius is of course moving onto the newer IaaS, providing a managed Docker and Kubernetes service with an automated scale-out Kubernetes cluster deployment. This is where other Cloud Field Day presenter, Platform9 has also headed. Rovius also provides a unified UI and API to private and public clouds, this can be very useful as a cloud abstractor so cloud placement is just a location field rather than an entire new operational burden. I’d be interested in how this works, is it just from a VM/container deployment and perhaps networking and storage provisioning, how do they manage different features from different cloud vendors. Rovius can also migrate workloads between private and public clouds, I’d like to hear how customers are using this, is this a one-time migration to public cloud or perhaps back from public cloud. What are the drivers they are seeing for cross cloud migrations?

IoT

Accelerite has much bigger dreams than being “just” a cloud management platform, it seems to also have a fairly evolved IoT business which has recently launched an “IoT Service Creation & Enrichment Platform” called Concert. This could be very interesting to hear more about, the coming together of public cloud and IoT. This is what many cloud pundits are saying the future is, public cloud for many workloads and private cloud increasingly being IoT rather than traditional IaaS/PaaS on-prem.

Accelerite talks about the healthcare use case of tracking equipment and materials around a hospital so nurses can know where all the equipment is as it moves within a hospital.

It’s interesting that Accelerite is viewing both sides of the cloud in the same way as Amazon. Public cloud married to private cloud IoT with Greengrass.

I’m looking forward to hearing what Accelerite is up to.

Gestalt IT is paying for travel, accommodation and things to eat to attend Cloud Field Day but isn’t paying a penny for me to write anything good or bad about anyone.