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European enterprises are beginning to embrace the business opportunities offered by virtualizing assets and accessing applications through the cloud, according to new research, commissioned by Brocade.

The research shows that 60 percent of enterprises expect to have started the planning and migration to a distributed — or cloud — computing model within the next two years. Key business drivers for doing so are to reduce cost (30 percent), improve business efficiency (21 percent) and enhance business agility (16 percent).

The findings appear to confirm recent research by analyst firm IDC, which identified that cloud IT services are currently worth GBP 10.7bn globally, a figure that is estimated to grow to around GBP 27bn by 2013.

For enterprise organizations, investment in the majority of cases is in the development of a private cloud infrastructure due, in part, to concerns over security. Over a third of respondents cited security as the most significant barrier to cloud adoption, closely followed by the complexities of virtualizing data centers, network infrastructure and bandwidth.

The research also analyzed the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) space, and while enterprises are embracing the cloud and the business advantages it brings, SMEs appear to be slightly slower to adopt with only 42 percent predicting a move to the cloud within the next two years; unsurprisingly, 63 percent of these plan to opt for a hosted solution.

Other key research findings include:

— More than a quarter of large organizations are planning to migrate a cloud model within the next two years; 11 percent within one year

— A quarter of organizations stated that the ability to consolidate the number of data centers was also a critical driver

— The availability of bandwidth was also a deciding factor amongst 14 percent of respondents

Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2.

In addition to providing the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops, the 2.2 update includes new scalability capabilities, migration tools and features to expand the performance and security of the solution.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.1, which introduced Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, was released in November 2009. Designed as an ideal a foundation for the virtualization of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows, with Microsoft SVVP certification, as well as for cloud computing environments, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has gained momentum with customers, including Fujitsu, IBM and NTT Communications, for their cloud deployments.

Additional companies around the world, including Swedish-based Voddler and Sri Lanka-based Etisalat, have also adopted Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a strategic virtualization platform for their datacenters.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, capable of hosting and managing both Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines, provides a single infrastructure from which customers can manage their server and desktop virtualization deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops, introduced in today’s 2.2 update, allows customers to deploy Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD) configurations, also known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), bringing scalable, centralized provisioning and management of their desktop systems. It provides a web-based connection broker that allows end users to access their hosted virtual desktops, coupled with the open source SPICE remote rendering technology, which offers a rich multimedia experience, including multiple monitors, HD-quality video and bi-directional audio/video for video conferences. Other features, such as templating, thin provisioning and desktop pooling, are also included. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops supports Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop.

With the 2.2 release, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization also features industry-leading scalability, supporting guests with up to 16 virtual CPUs and 256 gigabytes of memory per virtual machine. The release additionally provides new virtual machine conversion capabilities through a V2V tool designed to automate the conversion of VMware or Xen virtual machines for use within Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. To further simplify moving virtual machine images between environments, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 also includes the ability to import and export virtual machine images and templates with the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 is globally available today.

Red Hat has announced new offerings, ecosystem infrastructure and services designed to provide CIOs with a comprehensive, easy on-ramp to cloud computing.

The company announces the expansion of development services that provide customers with the tools and expertise needed to deploy and manage cloud environments as well as enhancements to the Red Hat Premier Certified Cloud Provider Program.

Red Hat today announced Red Hat Cloud Foundations, a major new offering family delivering comprehensive solutions for planning, building and managing Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service private and public clouds.

Each Red Hat Cloud Foundation offering includes industry-leading products, implementation cookbooks and reference architectures, expert professional services and training classes – elements necessary to successfully create and operate clouds.

With Cloud Foundations, customers can achieve the benefits of the cloud today, with lower risk and simple, easy implementation. These offerings are designed to significantly expand the reach and appeal of cloud, offer the richest set of development and deployment environments in the industry and deliver consistency between the datacenter and public clouds.

The first in this family, Cloud Foundations: Edition One, is available immediately. Cloud Foundations: Edition One enables customers to deploy real private clouds today, and includes:

• Industry-leading products for implementing a private cloud, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid.
• A cookbook implementation guide, making cloud setup quick and simple.
• A detailed reference architecture providing step-by-step instructions, scripts and settings for creating and configuring the private cloud. The reference architecture transfers the years of experience and knowledge Red Hat engineers have built and refined while creating private and public clouds for some of the world’s largest and most demanding companies.
• Consulting services to enable turnkey assessment, implementation and operational management of a private cloud. Included in the Cloud Foundations services family are Red Hat Cloud Quickstart, which helps customers explore the usage of cloud computing in their infrastructure and develop proof points of cloud viability, and Red Hat Pathway to Cloud Computing, designed for customers ready to start strategic planning and deployment of cloud technologies.
• Training classes, to transfer knowledge and best practices to customers, creating a strong base of skills among their staff quickly and efficiently.

Through the Certified Cloud Provider Program, Red Hat established the industry’s first program to certify that vendors have validated cloud capabilities and support processes that provide rapid problem resolution. Red Hat today expands the program to include new partners IBM, NTT Communications and Savvis, and introduces new benefits of the program. Red Hat announced the establishment of the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program in June 2009 with its first member, Amazon Web Services.

Through the Certified Cloud Provider Program, Red Hat delivers more industry-leading offerings, including:

• Cloud-specific Red Hat offerings and pricing designed to make the cloud accessible and attractive to developers, administrators and users.
• Preconfigured, certified Red Hat images enabled with cloud-specific configuration and security settings to make deployments simple and secure. This includes pre-configured firewall and SELinux settings for secure cloud use the moment an image is started.
• Innovative management and updating services built for scale and designed to provide maximum security and lower costs, while ensuring consistency between customer datacenter and public cloud environments.
• Extension of Red Hat partner ISV certification to public clouds, enabling enterprise solution availability and consistency regardless of deployment choices.

Through the program, Certified Cloud Providers can run any supported virtualization solution, ranging from Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to VMware and Microsoft platforms. In addition, Premier Certified Cloud Providers are able to deliver Red Hat Cloud Access, an innovative and flexible licensing model that allows customers to easily use existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions in the datacenter or the cloud, thereby driving easy cloud adoption.

Red Hat is also announcing its strategy to enable enterprises and Certified Cloud Providers to deliver industry-leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities, opening the cloud to a new range of developers, from large enterprises and the ISVs who serve them, to emerging Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies.

Red Hat’s PaaS roadmap describes a comprehensive solution that enables users to build and deploy applications within cloud environments while bridging their on-premise application environments. It will be based upon the comprehensive JBoss Enterprise Middleware product line and become part of the Red Hat Cloud Foundations family of solutions.

Red Hat’s strategy is designed to provide a path for the large installed base of Linux, Java and JBoss users, enabling them to easily deploy applications to the cloud, and is also designed to attract new developers, both within traditional ISVs and enterprises, and new ISVs who are creating SaaS solutions from scratch. Red Hat leverages the flexibility of JBoss Open Choice, an application platform approach for supporting virtually any programming model and language. Red Hat PaaS will support Java, Ruby on Rails and the Spring Framework, as well as many other languages and scripting environments.

Red Hat PaaS solution will also provide tools for easily developing, deploying and managing cloud-based applications. The capabilities will include tools and services for deploying and configuring an application within a cloud environment. It will also include the capabilities for managing the application environment to optimize services and resources.

Red Hat is also introducing new Red Hat Enterprise Linux developer offerings, available exclusively through Red Hat Certified Cloud Providers. These offerings are designed to give SaaS developers the easiest on-ramp to the cloud, and provide a consistent environment for development and deployment. By providing access to a robust, open development platform on certified clouds, Red Hat simplifies the on-ramp for cloud application development and enables more rapid delivery of SaaS solutions based on the leading open source application platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

By providing the full breadth of enterprise-quality capabilities, including virtualization, operating systems, middleware and application frameworks, now backed by the Red Hat Cloud Foundations solution and the expanded Certified Cloud Provider Program, Red Hat is unique in its ability to provide a consistent environment between cloud and on-premise environments.

For more information about Red Hat and cloud computing, visit http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/.

To learn more about this announcement, join Red Hat for a webcast that will be broadcast live from the Red Hat Summit in Boston at 12:30 pm ET on June 23, 2010. The webcast will also be available for replay. To join, visit http://www-waa-akam.thomson-webcast.net/us/dispatching/?event_id=20f5425fcb4a6cbb8136d0918bf9e9f2&portal_id=af9b227bf07c733390c2738ee0330646.

At the Structure 2010 conference on cloud computing, Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, former Amazon executives who led the development of the Amazon EC2 public cloud service, announced that they are launching Nimbula. Nimbula’s business and technology focus is on blending EC2-like scale, agility and efficiency with private infrastructure customization and control.

Nimbula has been operating in stealth mode since early 2009 with $5.75 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and VMware.

Today Nimbula also unveiled details of the technology that provides the foundation for its first product, Nimbula Director, a cloud computing operating system that efficiently manages on- and off-premises IT resources on customer-controlled infrastructure.

Nimbula Director delivers utility grade computing and empowers IT innovation behind the firewall. Unlike other enterprise cloud solutions, Nimbula provides for linear scaling to thousands of nodes and automated hands-off installation and data center management. Fine-grained policy-based authorization and network security combined with metered bursting into public clouds such as Amazon Web Services offer unmatched control and visibility.

Prior to founding Nimbula, Pinkham was Vice President of Engineering at Amazon and leader of the group that planned and developed Amazon EC2. Prior to joining Amazon, Pinkham founded the first ISP in Africa, which was acquired by UUNET.

Co-founder and Vice President of Products Willem van Biljon led the Amazon EC2 development effort. Prior to joining Amazon, van Biljon was a co-founder of Mosaic Software, which was acquired by S1 Corp.

Pinkham, van Biljon and Sequoia’s Botha have served as Board members since 2009. Today, Nimbula announced that VMware former CEO and co-founder, Diane Greene, also has joined the Board.

Other members of the Nimbula management team are Martin Buhr, Nimbula Vice President of Sales and Business Development, and Reza Malekzadeh, Nimbula Vice President of Marketing. Most recently, Buhr spent four and a half years with Amazon Web Services where he led business development and sales for Amazon EC2, and served as Business Director for EMEA. Malekzadeh spent more than eight years at VMware in its Palo Alto headquarters and in EMEA. He was previously VP of International at Akimbi, which was acquired by VMware.

Nimbula is currently in beta with half a dozen large international customers in the financial services, technology and healthcare industries. The company plans a formal product launch and ramp to sales in the second half of 2010.