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Going to CloudCamp London?

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In exactly 10 days, on Wednesday, 16 July 2008 from 18h30 to 20h00, the second edition of CloudCamp will take place at The Crypt, Clerkenwell Green, London. The first CloudCamp unconference took place in San Francisco on 25 June 2008 and was attended by over 300 cloud computing enthusiasts, practitioners and visionaries. 200 plus are expected to attend the London event, which is being organised to provide a common ground for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing.

CloudCamp London will follow the popular “Open Space” format, encouraging an open exchange between presenters and participants. Attendees may propose and lead sessions on any area of interest to them. In addition, CloudCamp will feature “Lightning Talks” in which presenters expound on topics of interest in dense ten minute bolts. Following the camp, “CloudBash” a networking opportunity with drinks and pizza, compliments of our generous sponsors!

CloudCamp London corporate sponsors include CohesiveFT, FlexiScale, Excelian, GigaSpaces, Skills Matter, Amazon, Enomaly and Google.

Unfortunately, Virtualization.com will not make it to this event, but if you’re covering it in words, pictures or video, be sure to let us know!

From Virtualization to Cloud Computing: Q-layer Launches Delegation Manager

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Q-layer, enabler of cloud computing through Virtual Private Data Centers (VPDC), today announced the Q-layer Delegation Manager, a solution that turns virtual server environments into a cloud computing platform.

The first release of Delegation Manager provides complete support for VMware Infrastructure 3 environments, including the VMware ESX Hypervisor, with future support for additional Hypervisors including Xen, xVM VirtualBox and Hyper-V. The Q-layer Delegation Manager aims to enable fast browser-based provisioning of data center assets for helpdesk, technical end-users and non-technical end-users, with integrated credit-based charge-back capabilities, reporting and flash-based management controls.

Q-layer’s Delegation Manager is installed through the VMware Virtual Center as a Virtual Appliance and builds on Q-layer’s VPDC and Datacenter Abstraction Layer (DAL) technology. It enables model-driven orchestration capabilities for data centers, including workflows to cohesively orchestrate virtual servers, networks and storage.

According to the press release, the Q-layer Delegation Manager augments existing data center infrastructure, including hypervisors, networks and storage devices. The system provides complete orchestration of these underlying assets to enable data center agility for cloud computing. To facilitate this ecosystem, Q-layer is also working with leading technology partners to create complete virtualization solutions for the next generation data center.

“With Q-layer’s Delegation Manager, end-users can provision and deploy a complete data center within minutes,” said Paul Speciale, vice president of product management at Q-layer. “Our technology has been proven in leading data centers, and leverages the capabilities of existing data center infrastructures to provide the most simple and extensible cloud computing solution for data center operators.”

The Q-layer Delegation Manager will be generally available in the third quarter of 2008. Pricing starts at $1,995 per node, for any number of Virtual Machines.

CohesiveFT And FlexiScale Partner Up For On-demand Cloud Computing

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CohesiveFT, providers of the Elastic Server Platform, an on-demand service for dynamic assembly and deployment of virtual machines, and FlexiScale, a provider of on-demand Cloud computing, today announced a technology partnership to enable deployment of CohesiveFT’s Elastic Servers to FlexiScale’s Cloud.

FlexiScale

CohesiveFT

The integration of technologies from CohesiveFT and FlexiScale aim to enable true on-demand application stack assembly and deployment on a pay-as-you-go Cloud. This partnership will also allow ISVs, application developers and QA teams to dramatically increase their productivity throughout the development lifecycle. These teams will not be dependent on resource constrained operations departments to provision development and testing  environments and will be able to change their application stack definitions with the click of a mouse.

Initially, Elastic Server-branded virtual machines will be available from FlexiScale’s Control Panel as templates built in a Xen virtual format for deployment into Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS) in FlexiScale’s Cloud. The Elastic Server templates will feature application stacks as prebuilt virtual machine images of popular components . Users will have access to these custom images on demand, eliminating the typical administrative overhead of assembling virtual machine images “by hand”.

FlexiScale’s and CohesiveFT’s collaboration intends to enable full dynamic connectivity between the Elastic Server platform and FlexiScale’s Cloud in the near future.

Hyperic Launches CloudStatus, Cloud Management Software Deluxe

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In an impressive effort to make the cloud more transparent, open source cloud management software vendor Hyperic has launched CloudStatus.com, a web service (in beta) that lets a user peek in on the various compute clouds to see how things are running.

CloudStatus

CloudStatus measures service availability, latency and throughput for cloud-based infrastructure and application services. The initial release provides metrics for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (which runs on the Xen hypervisor), Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service and Flexible Payment Service. Hyperic does so by sending a software agent to make requests against various cloud services, which obviously leads to a few questions about the viability of the service.

EC2

As Stacey Higginbotham puts it on GigaOm:

“It’s a decent idea, but my worry is that Amazon or another cloud provider could shut the service down, either by offering their own status service or by stopping the Hyperic agent. Given the rush to provide dashboards, application-testing products and other services on top of established computing services, I’m eager to see how startups keep their footing in the clouds.”

The Hyperic team also blogged about the release featuring a promotion video which we’re happy to share with you.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst On The Linux Vendor’s Virtualization Initiatives

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A half-year after becoming president and CEO of Linux vendor Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst was in Boston this week for the annual Red Hat Summit, where a lot of announcements were made about Red Hat’s forray into virtualization. Whitehurst sat down with Network World’s Jon Brodkin to discuss open source, a new patent settlement, and Red Hat’s moves in virtualization, reports PC World.

This is the excerpt of the interview where they talk about virtualization:

The virtualization market is dominated by VMware, but you guys expanded your virtualization portfolio with a Linux-based hypervisor this week. What are your goals in virtualization?

Virtualization is half the operating system. Paul [Cormier, Red Hat president of products and technologies] would actually say virtualization is the operating system in a lot of ways. We feel pretty strongly virtualization needs to be pretty tightly integrated with the operating system.

VMware’s the dominant player in an industry that’s what, like 5 or 10% penetrated? And it’s primarily in development and test scenarios, and primarily to reduce server sprawl.

We come from a different heritage. Our systems usually aren’t running at 10%. Linux workloads are a lot higher. The value from our perspective is less around server consolidation and more about what new functionality or architectures can be enabled by virtualization.

You talk about grid computing, cloud computing, whatever that is. The necessary enabler of that is Linux with integrated virtualization. Because otherwise what are you going to run on a cloud?

Read the rest of the interview on PC World.

EMC Joins Daoli Trusted Infrastructure Research Project

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EMC has joined the Daoli Trusted Infrastructure Project which conducts research into “trust and assurance” in cloud computing environments. EMC joins a growing global research team that today includes four of China’s leading technical universities including Fudan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Tsinghua University, and Wuhan University. The team’s research will focus on cloud computing, trusted computing and virtualization.

Daoli Project

The research will explore a variety of techniques that could be applied to secure the underlying physical location as well as broadly shared resources.

“The team is exploring the convergence of several key technologies including cloud computing, trusted computing and virtualisation,” said Burt Kaliski, director of EMC’s Innovation Network. “It will look at how they might be applied to provide high-assurance software environments inside and outside the enterprise. The Daoli Project will help us understand what our customers are likely to encounter in the future, and we look forward to sharing the knowledge this research will generate.”

Participants will share findings with researchers worldwide by way of a wiki hosted by Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Details of the research are expected to be discussed at the third annual Asia-Pacific Trusted Infrastructure Technologies Conference in China in October.

[Source: VNUnet]