The US startup RightScale last week announced its third round of funding, led by Tenaya Capital and DAG Ventures, which provided $25M on top of $17.5M already offered by Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Presidio Ventures.
RightScale offers a management solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), like many competitors, but the interesting aspect is that it’s a Software-as-a-Service solution.
The product, called Cloud Management Platform, currently supports a number of public IaaS clouds: Amazon EC2, GoGrid and FlexiScale. The company already announced the upcoming support for The Rackspace Cloud.
But it also supports those private IaaS clouds that are already managed by Eucalyptus.
Cloud Management Platform abstracts the different infrastructures by leveraging the available APIs, allowing the customers to build hybrid cloud architectures.
The key tier of the platform is the content library which features a technology called ServerTemplates. RightScale developed it in a way that it’s easier to customize a gold master image, called RightImage, and add the needed component in a modular fashion at the boot time.
The gold master is designed to be deployable without any user intervention and run inside any supported cloud, accounting things like application support and licensing issues.
RightScale published a short 5-minutes video to explain how it works:
[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri407EbonvE[/youtube]
Cloud Management Platform allows customers to customize ServerTemplates, deploy them through a self-service provisioning portal, manage and monitor them.
Behind the scene, the orchestration layer provides advanced capabilities like auto-scaling when specific thresholds are matched.
The product also features role-based access control (RBAC) with administration delegation, log archiving, resource usage tracking and billing, and an API for additional automation.
In August the company announced support for Windows guest operating systems (2003 and 2008, both 32 and 64bit). This means that that the RightScale orchestration layer can now manipulate Windows virtual machines through the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interface, and seamlessly move them from one cloud provider to another, or from a private cloud to a public cloud and vice versa.
Again, the key component here is the content library, its ServerTemplates and the RightImages, available with just Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows plus SQL Server Express 2003/2008 and Windows plus SQL Server 2003/2008 (64bit only).
RightScale offers multiple editions of its platform. One, capped to a single administrator, is free of charge.
The Standard edition costs $500 / month, plus an additional one-time fee of $2,500, for up to 5 administrators.
RightScale has been included in the cloudcomputing.info Cloud Computing Industry Radar.