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Elastra Raises $12 Million from Amazon for Cloud Management

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Elastra, a startup focused on providing solutions for internet cloud configuration and management, secured $12 million in Series B financing in its second venture round, which was was led by Bay Partners, with Amazon.com and existing investor Hummer Winblad also participating. Elastra had previously raised $2.6 million. If the investment by Amazon makes you raise your eyebrows too, go read the excellent analysis on GigaOM.

Check our previous coverage of the company here.

CEO Kiril Sheynkman says Elastra’s offering is unique because it can manage individual applications, rather than virtual appliances, and because it manages applications across private and public Internet clouds.

Elastra now has more than 40 paying customers running databases on Amazon’s cloud using its technology, and plans to announce support for VMware and additional components such as application and web servers. It’s also planning to support clouds other than Amazon.

Elastra

[Source: VentureBeat]

Release: CentOS 5.2, Free Red Hat Enterprise Linux Clone

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The CentOS development team has released CentOS 5.2, which is based on and promises full compatibility for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2. Available for i386 and x86-64 architectures, the release offers new drivers and bug fixes, as well as improvements to the Xen virtualization kernel, according to the team.

The fresh clone comes with updated software support for Apache, Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Also, you won’t be paying the $350-$2,500 per year subscription fee for RHEL 5.2!

Documentation can be found here, release notes here, download mirrors here.

[Source: The Register]

Elastra Makes Cloud Computing More Accessible For Enterprises

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San Francisco-based startup Elastra seeks to “unlock the value of the cloud” with a new service that lets enterprises quickly create database applications on utility computing platforms like Amazon Web Services. The company says its Elastra Cloud Server offers an easier way to deploy applications on Amazon’s infrastructure, providing customers with two markup languages that can be used to create database-driven services. The Cloud Server uses a metered, pay-per-use software pricing model, and will be available in April.

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Elastra’s tools include the Elastic Computing Markup Language (ECML) and Elastic Deployment Markup Language (EDML), and system management dashboards to scale deployments. Available databases include MySQL, PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB, an Oracle-compatible database which just raised $ 10 million in Series C financing.

Dana Gardner at ZDNet notes:

In general the Elastra approach provides onramps to compute clouds based on descriptive tools that help reduce complexity for IT departments. This should encourage experimentation and ultimately lead to ramp ups in the use of public clouds, as well as the build-out and use of home-grown, so-called private clouds. Less attention has been given of late to the promise of private clouds, which are really a natural extension of current datacenter consolidation, clustering, application modernization, ITIL and virtualization initiatives.

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Part of Elastra’s DNA is putting more data in the cloud, where it can be used assiduously to support apps, services and business processes. And once the data layer makes its way to the cloud (private, public or both), can the rest of the support infrastructure be far behind? We’re already seeing a lot of talk around integration as a service, and infrastructure as a service. And we’re also increasingly seeing tools and development as a service.

[Source: Data Center Knowledge]