enStratus is a US company offering a cloud management platform that brokers different public and private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud architectures, including Amazon EC2 and S3, Eucalyptus, GoGrid, Rackspace, Cloud.com, ReliaCloud, Terremark, Microsoft Windows Azure and even the brand new Google Storage for Developers.
The product arrives as a 3-tier application that can stay hosted on enStratus servers or running on-premises inside the cloud infrastructure. The components are: the credentials system, the provisioning system and the console.
The product has been recently updated to include support for VMware vSphere. vSphere is not yet a proper IaaS cloud platform: the missing component, called vCloud Service Director (vCSD, formerly Project Redwood), is expected to be delivered at the beginning of September, during the VMworld conference.
The enStratus technology doesn’t need vCSD: it is already able to leverage the VMware virtual infrastructure through the vSphere SDK and interconnect it with others in a hybrid architecture.
The first release supports the following capabilities:
- Provisioning/de-provisioning of VMs based on pre-configuredh templates and VM sizes
- Creating custom templates based on running VMs
- Budgeting in chargebacks, including tracking costs for a given budget across all clouds
- User management through LDAP and Active Directory
- Configurable user roles and policy enforcement
- Auto-scaling, auto-recovery, and automated backups
- Automated backups into the public cloud for “off-site” backups
- Monitoring and alerting of your private cloud infrastructure
- Intrusion detection system integration
- Automated DR into any public cloud
- Multi-tenancy
In a further update, planned for later this month, enStratus is expected to deliver additional features, like:
- Automated cloud-bursting from your private cloud into a public cloud
- Ability to span a single system based on functionally across a private and public cloud
- Support for configurable virtual disks
- Configurable public IP address management
- Support for F5 load balancers