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Rackspace buys Cloudkick to improve management

Hosting company brings dashboard to get handle on complex environments

Rackspace Hosting has bought cloud management company, Cloudkick to bring new dashboard service to its customers. Its new purchase offers what Rackspace calls a cockpit for managing complex environments and the company hopes that the Cloudkick, which is part of the Rackspace OpenStack initiative, will enable it offer improved management services to its customers.

Cloudkick, which is two years old, is being used to monitor 1 million servers. The company, which has 1,500 customers, offers a dashboard that allows customers to manage a hybrid infrastructure across both multi-tenant virtualised servers and dedicated hardware.

"Until now, the cloud has been about automating hardware and making it more agile and efficient," says Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace. "But as cloud computing has made it easier to launch servers, companies launch a lot more of them, and use many of them inefficiently and even lose track of some. Cloudkick brings order to that chaos and sprawl. It takes cloud computing to a new level: into automation of the work of system administrators. In addition to providing robust cloud health information, Cloudkick enables automation around deployment and scaling. It makes cloud computing more powerful, with less expense."

Rackspace has been busy of late. Last week, the company launched a new service that brought together cloud and managed hosting.