cloud computing

Eucalyptus Set To Launch With $5.5 Million In Series A Funding

April 29, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Eucalyptus Systems, creators of an open source private cloud platform, today announced that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A round of venture financing led by Benchmark Capital with BV Capital also participating.

The funding marks the launch of Eucalyptus Systems as a private company that will build and service enterprise-grade products based on the Eucalyptus open source privatecloud software. Eucalyptus Systems’ mission is to support the open source Eucalyptus cloud platform and to deliver on-premise private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments.

Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a “cloud” that is controlled and customized by local IT. Moreover, a local cloud based on Eucalyptus adds capabilities such as end-user customization, self-service provisioning, and legacy application support to data center virtualization features, making IT customer service easier, more fully featured, and less expensive.

Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure. The Eucalyptus design gives users the flexibility to seamlessly move applications from on-premise Eucalyptus clouds to public clouds, and vice versa. Eucalyptus also makes it easy to deploy “hybrid” clouds, which use public and private cloud resources together to get the unique benefits of each. To assist customers with setup, deployment, training, and support, Eucalyptus Systems has created the QuickStart program, the ideal first step for organizations looking to partner with Eucalyptus experts on critical cloud infrastructure initiatives.

The Eucalyptus management team includes Co-founder and CEO Woody Rollins, Co-founder and CTO Dr. Rich Wolski, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Matt Reid, and the team of Ph.D. computer science engineers from the Eucalyptus project at UCSB. In addition, Andreas Von Blottnitz, former CEO of AOL Europe and Citrix Online, is chairman of the board, and Dr. Klaus Schauser, founder of AppFolio and founder and CTO of Citrix Online, is serving as an advisor.

To date, Eucalyptus has been downloaded over 14,000 times in 72 countries. In addition, Eucalyptus software is the cloud computing engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (powered by Eucalyptus), which was recently announced as part of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Eucalyptus will ship with every copy of Ubuntu, starting with the Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition, made available on April 23.

Force10 Networks Unveils Exascale E-Series Switch / Router Family

March 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Force10 Networks today introduced the ExaScale E-Series family of switch/routers to meet the requirements of today’s virtualized data center and cloud computing environments. As enterprises transition to virtualized data centers and adopt cloud-based services, the network is increasingly required to be more dynamic and responsive to changing resource demands. The Force10 ExaScale E-Series is designed to deliver the performance, availability, resiliency and flexibility essential to power these new dynamic environments while significantly lowering total operating and management costs.

With support for the industry’s leading line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities, the Force10 ExaScale E-Series reduces capital costs and simplifies management to reduce ongoing operational expenses.

The ExaScale E-Series also extends Force10’s history of enabling cost-effective network ownership with an energy-saving, eco-efficient power and cooling design that provides the industry’s lowest power consumption per line-rate port. Patent-protected advances in backplane and chip design as well as custom designed power components reduce overall system power consumption and lower per port consumption by as much as 70 percent versus comparable competitive platforms.

Enabling Force10’s Virtualization Framework to Fuel Competitive Advantage
The ExaScale E-Series is the foundation for Force10’s Virtualization Framework and provides the multi-terabit platform required to power advanced data centers and cloud computing environments. As budgets have come under pressure, enterprises are turning to virtualization technologies that increase business critical application availability while lowering the total cost of IT infrastructure ownership.

Utilizing the management flexibility of the ExaScale E-Series, Force10’s virtual technology suite, including VirtualScale, VirtualControl and VirtualView, enterprises and service providers can build, manage and monitor network and application performance as well as automate business processes. These technologies enable organizations to build more agile virtualized environments that can dynamically respond to changing business requirements, increasing process efficiencies and fueling a sustainable competitive advantage.

The Force10 Virtualization Framework utilizes open, standards-based data center automation and orchestration technology to promote greater efficiency and agility within the data center. By integrating standards-based technology for real-time network traffic analysis and management, enterprises can maximize existing networking resources while building in the flexibility they require to rapidly respond to changing application requirements.

Force10 also partners with leading vendors to provide complete solutions that optimize data center infrastructure. For additional information on the Force10 data center partner ecosystem, please visit the company’s Technology Alliance Partner Program web page, including its computing alliance with IBM.

The ExaScale E-Series delivers an industry-leading total throughput of more than two billion packets per second across a switching fabric capacity of up to 3.5 Tbps or 250 Gbps full duplex per slot. Utilizing the capacity of the switching fabric, the ExaScale E-Series delivers continuous non-blocking, line-rate throughput that eliminates network bottlenecks, regardless of packet size or enabled features.

Leading Technology for Next Generation Environments
The Force10 ExaScale E-Series is purpose-built for demanding network environments, including:

Virtualized data center and cloud computing networks with multiple switching or routing domains in local or geographically disparate environments
High-performance computing networks with non-blocking and deterministic management and storage I/O requirements
High-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching and routing in high-performance Layer 2 and IP core or aggregation networks

The ExaScale E-Series also provides the key technologies and functionality to facilitate seamless interoperability for tomorrow’s converged fabric and MPLS-ready networks, including:

IPv4 unicast and multicast routing for advanced services networks
IPv6 ready for native and dual stack next-generation IP networks
MPLS ready with P router and VPN functionality
40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ready

The half-rack Force10 ExaScale E1200i chassis bundle starts at $89,000 and is available today.

Video: Sun Open Cloud Announcement

March 20, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or if you’ve been completely distracted by the speculation about an impending acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM, you know Sun yesterday announced its Open Cloud Platform. In the 8-minute video below, found on DataCenterKnowledge, Lew Tucker (CTO Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms at Sun) outlines some of the details:

Cloud Company Zimory Adds Support For VMware ESX Server

March 2, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Deutsche Telekom spinoff Zimory recently announced support for VMware’s ESX Server – extending the company’s advanced cloud technology to enterprise applications.

Zimory Enterprise Cloud combines existing virtual servers into a homogeneous, flexible, computing cloud – enabling data center managers to move applications quickly within single or multiple (on- and off-premises) locations. The technology enables very fast deployments of multiple virtual machines from an on- to an off-premises data center. Zimory now supports Xen and all flavors of VMWare.

Zimory Enterprise Cloud optimizes data centers by increasing the efficiency of existing resources. Zimory begins where server virtualization ends: Zimory combines virtual servers into a single homogeneous computing cloud. Depending on current resource requirements, users can move applications quickly within a data center as well as between various locations — the optimal choice to temporarily distribute workloads.

Zimory management solutions enable businesses to make server resources available to other internal departments — in a controlled way and a finite amount of time – and allow quantification of this utilization even at the application level.

Announced last month, Zimory Public Cloud provides companies of all sizes instant, easy and flexible access to external computing power worldwide while also enabling businesses with excess server capacity to offer their resources to businesses around the world.

Zimory Public Cloud for sellers aggregates available server computing capacity from around the world and makes it available through an Internet trading platform. Using Zimory Public Cloud, companies looking for computing resources can buy capacity quickly — as needed — without long-term contractual commitment. Zimory handles pricing, contracts, security, virtual machine migration and billing.

Savvis Aims To Deliver IT Infrastructure In The Cloud

February 13, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Savvis today unveiled Savvis Cloud Compute, a new virtual data center hosting and private cloud computing solution providing enterprises with an opportunity to cut costs without having to sacrifice security or performance.

With the introduction of an advanced customer portal, these new offerings feature enhanced user control and flexibility in provisioning virtual compute and storage capabilities on top of both private and shared platforms. This enables “right-sized computing” via the ability to purchase fractional compute resources on demand by the “instance” with flexible month-to-month business terms.

Savvis Cloud Compute provides essential benefits for enterprises that have substantial fluctuations in web traffic and computing requirements from heavy business day peaks. Immediate benefits are available for SaaS applications, seasonal web eCommerce traffic, and financial trading applications. In addition, Savvis Cloud Compute assists in the implementation of disaster recovery for back-office locations, and shifting test and development environments to lower cost footprints.

Savvis Cloud Compute inaugurates Savvis’ moving its utility compute and storage solutions into the cloud and marks the first in a series of new, integrated value-added IT solutions delivered in cloud technology that Savvis will roll out this year.

The News:

Savvis Cloud Compute delivers secure, enterprise-class cloud compute and storage functionality designed to meet customer requirements for on-demand, scalable, flexible and cost-effective managed hosting services for business-critical applications and infrastructure.
Businesses with seasonal or unpredictable computing needs will benefit from easy access to more efficient, low-cost, IT resources provisioned in near-real time, helping them maintain a competitive edge by limiting financial risk, keeping IT costs in check, and enabling speed to market. Customers can tap the benefits of cloud computing without significant initial investment and minimum commitments. This zero capital expenditure model appeals to customers that want to reduce their capital budgets without sacrificing IT growth in the long run.
Ideal for production and pre-production environments, Savvis Cloud Compute provides flexible infrastructure, delivering greater end-user control through the SavvisStation Portal to add servers and storage capacity automatically and in minutes. This combines with comprehensive capacity management reporting to help customers optimize their IT spend by anticipating and acting on changes in demand.

Savvis Cloud Compute operates seamlessly with other Savvis utility and dedicated services providing customers with the ability to map complex enterprise application needs to the most appropriate service enabling affordable, business-critical performance.