Rackspace buys server management company Cloudkick
Rackspace has acquired outright the server management company Cloudkick.
On Thursday Rackspace announced that it had bought the on-cloud and off-cloud server management company Cloudkick. Rackspace plans to use Cloudkick's technology to provide customers with enhanced server management tools and for internal use by Rackspace. The acquisition is an outright acquisition and Cloudkick's management services will be integrated across the whole of Rackspace's product set, according to Rackspace.
The acquisition is "primarily a technology purchase. I guess we could have built [the technology] ourselves but it's a question of time... the meat of it is the ability to integrate it all across dedicated and cloud infrastructure", Rackspace's marketing director Fabio Torlini told ZDNet UK on Thursday.
Cloudkick provides tools for managing physical and cloud servers from a single management console. Cloudkick currently supports eight different cloud services — Amazon Web Service's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Rackspace, Slicehost, Linode, GoGrid, SoftLayer, VPS.NET and Rimuhosting. Features include the ability to visualise and monitor the use and state of multiple servers and automate the monitoring of new servers according to policies set by the administrator. Cloudkick can take servers from any of the eight supported clouds and individual physical hardware deployments and display them in the same management console.
Both Rackspace and Amazon Web Services compete with regards to their compute and storage cloud products, but Rackspace is "not going to cut off any of the competing cloud infrastructures from Cloudkick", Torlini said.
Rackspace customers should begin to "see changes in quarter one [2011] and by the end of next year [Cloudkick] should be fully integrated across the board", Torlini said.
Cloudkick and Rackspace are both partners in the OpenStack cloud scheme, which was launched in July. Cloudkick will still be an autonomous partner within OpenStack, Torlini said.
Rackspace would not disclose financial details of the acquisition. Cloudkick has a customer base of around 1,500 businesses and over one million servers have passed through its management tools, according to Rackspace.