Adding to its portfolio of IT management software, Dell has acquired Enstratius (formerly called EnStratus), which offers software for managing workloads in hosted cloud environments.
Enstratius' software, which can run on premises or procured as a hosted service, provides a way for organizations to manage their workloads running on private or public cloud services. It includes capabilities such as application provisioning and scaling, configuration management, usage governance and utilization monitoring. It can also interoperate with other configuration management tools such as Chef and Puppet.
At present, Enstratius' software can manage jobs on over 20 public and private cloud platforms, most notably OpenStack, VMware's platform, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure. Customers can add additional cloud platforms as well.
The acquisition is another step in Dell's strategy of building a portfolio of cloud management tools for the enterprise. Last November, Dell purchased Gale Technologies. Like Enstratius' software, Gale's Active System Manager provides cloud management capabilities and the two products are complementary, according to Dell.
The Enstratius software will also build on other IT systems management software packages that Dell has developed or acquired, such as its Foglight performance monitoring application, the Quest ONE set of identity and access management products, the Boomi integration platform, and the AppAssure and NetVault data protection packages.
Enstratius was founded in 2008, and is based in Minneapolis. Dell plans to retain Enstratius employees, and to add additional engineering and sales capability. Dell did not disclose the terms of the deal.
