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AbiCloud from Abiquo

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Last month Abiquo announced the release of their “abiCloud”, an open source cloud computing platform for allowing companies to create and manage large, complex IT infrastructures (virtual servers, networks, applications, storage…) in a quick, simple and scalable way.

We had a chat with Diego Mariño, Co-founder & CEO of Abiquo , he told us that
one of the key differences of AbiCloud is the the web rich interface for managing the infrastructure. He told us “You can deploy a new service just dragging and dropping a virtual machine. This version allows to deploy instances over VirtualBox, but we support VMware, KVM and Xen too.”

As their first tester had its infrastructure on Virtualbox and because its very simple to have it up and running in different architectures that’s where their first focus is at.

Today they support Xen & KVM through libvirt, and the connectors for these hypervisors will be offered during Q2. Support for VMware, is offered to hosting providers with closed modules.

Basically, Abiquo allows to companies to convert their infrastructure into a service. Other competitors in the field include the recently founded Eucalyptus, Enomaly, and sun via it’s Qlayer acquisition.

Abiquo says it has a different focus and approach , what they are offering is the ability to create private clouds for more complex infrastructures.

The have their own open API which will be released in Q3 , with no plans to support the Amazon’s API

AbiCloud is available for Download from SF.net

CohesiveFT Releases VPN-Cubed for EC2

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CohesiveFT today announced the release of VPN-Cubed for EC2, a specially packaged version of the company’s customer-controlled cloud security offering for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 users now have immediate access to this specific VPN-Cubed use-case allowing them to create and configure their own VPN-Cubed overlay network inside of and across EC2’s geographically distinct regions. The VPN-Cubed overlay network provides four key capabilities EC2 users currently cannot control: static addressing for the user’s EC2 devices; topology control by using VPN-Cubed managers as virtual switches, virtual bridges or virtual routers; use of popular enterprise protocols like UDP Multicast for service discovery; and lastly encrypted communications between all devices on the overlay network.

VPN-Cubed for EC2 is available as a Free Edition which provides a high availability version for use in one EC2 region or in one EC2 VLAN, and a paid version which allows creation of a reliable, cross-region, cross-VLAN overlay network. Both are available through Amazon DevPay as “Paid AMIs”. EC2 users can now get their own highly available and secure VPN-Cubed overlay network up and running quickly and easily.

VPN-Cubed is the first commercial solution that enables customer control in a cloud, across multiple clouds, and between private infrastructure and the clouds. VPN-Cubed provides an overlay network that allows the customer control over addressing, topology, protocols, and encrypted communications for their devices deployed to virtual infrastructure or cloud computing centers. VPN-Cubed gives customers the confidence and flexibility to utilize cloud computing by offering a layer of security that the customer controls inside of 3rd party environments.

InformationWeek’s Chief of the Year for 2008: Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO)

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Amazon‘s 50-year-old CTO Werner Vogels has emerged as the right person at the right time and place to guide cloud computing – until now, an emerging technology for early adopters – into the mainstream. He not only understands how to architect a global computing cloud consisting of tens of thousands of servers, but also how to engage CTOs, CIOs, and other professionals at customer companies in a discussion of how that architecture could potentially change the way they approach IT.

We would like to congratulate Vogels on being selected by InformationWeek as Chief Of The Year 2008.

The article / interview is well worth a read.

Also, check out our video interview with man, recorded over the Summer.

Amazon EC2 Now With Beta Support for Windows

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Beta level support for Microsoft Windows is now available on Amazon EC2, in the form of 32 and 64 bit AMIs, with pricing starting at $0.125 per hour. Microsoft SQL Server is also available in 64 bit form.

With over two years of operation and many highly-requested features added, Amazon EC2 is today exiting its beta into general availability and offering customers a Service Legal Agreement (SLA). The Amazon EC2 SLA guarantees 99.95% availability of the service within a Region over a trailing 365 day period, or customers are eligible to receive service credits back. The new Amazon EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud.

Rackspace Acquires Cloud Providers Slicehost And Jungle Disk

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Rackspace Hosting today announced it has acquired privately owned VPS provider Slicehost, and storage provider Jungle Disk. (hat tip to TechCrunch)

The purchase price of the combined acquisitions is approximately $11.5 million payable in cash and stock, with the potential for up to $16.5 million in additional payouts of cash and stock based on certain performance criteria.

Rackspace is one of the largest providers of dedicated servers. Recently it has also moved into the virtualization world through partnerships with VMware and its own “cloud” division Mosso. Today’s announcement further shows that traditional hosting companies anticipate a growing importance of virtualization-based solutions.

Slicehost is one of the leading providers of Xen-based virtual servers. They cater mostly to developer crowds. In two years they have managed to build a customer base that runs more than 15.000 virtual servers.

Jungle Disk is a provider of storage software that works in conjunction with Amazon’s S3 storage platform. Rackspace announced that it will gradually move over new customers to its own storage systems, but will continue to support Amazon S3 as well.

Rackspace owns 8 datacenters in the United States, Hong Kong and the UK, and further has sales offices througout Europe and South Africa.

rPath Takes rBuilder Technology to Amazon EC2

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rPath today announced the beta launch of its rBuilder Appliance Creator and rBuilder Catalog features for the Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2). When coupled with rPath’s industry leading technology for release management, lifecycle management, and its comprehensive support capability for Linux technology, these new features offer one of the most comprehensive solutions for managing cloud application deployments in the industry.  This solution is being offered to developers for Amazon EC2 deployments at no cost via rBuilder Online. 

The rBuilder Appliance Creator takes developers through the steps to package a Linux-based application as an Amazon Machine Image.  With rBuilder, the on-going maintenance and release management of the application image becomes efficient and elegant.  The rBuilder Catalog for Amazon EC2 provides a simple management interface for launching, managing, and retiring application images for Amazon EC2.  The dynamic search and catalog capabilities will be familiar to anyone that uses Apple’s iTunes, and this “dynamic playlist” metaphor provides a basis for future management activities directed at large scale catalogs of machine images.