qlusters

Qlusters Shuts Down

July 1, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 3 Comments

Israel business site Globes Online got the scoop about Qlusters closing shop after seven years in business. The last 30 employees of the company were informed earlier this week of the company’s decision.

Qlusters, the company formerly behind the openQRM project shutters only about a year after it raised $10 million in a Series C round. While the market of Infrastructure Management tools and particularly Virtualization Management frameworks is growing, Qlusters failed to realize its goals and burned through approximately $34 million of capital.

As we reported earlier, Qlusters had no new roadmap after dropping the opensource openQRM project, which recently announced the beta of it’s 4.0 rewrite. It’s always sad to see a company like Qlusters leave the market like this, but fortunately their technology will continue to live on thanks to the open source community.

openQRM 4.0 (Beta), Going Strong

June 18, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Matt Rechenburg has just announced the beta version of openQRM 4.0.

Not even that long after Qlusters decided to set the project free, the openQRM team has changed directions in a way Qlusters never would have allowed.

openQRM 4.0 is a major rewrite of the openQRM functionality in PHP. The openQRM team has been listening to the community and learned that contributions will be much easier if the tool would be rewritten in a scripting-based language. They decided to keep the platform as simple as possible.

Plugin support now is a lot easier, rather than having to reconfigure and enable plugins from the command line, one can now enable plugins from the webGUI (similar to the Drupal modules)

The old openQRM provided a lot of proprietary libraries and tools that were already available on a typical Linux distribution. From now on, openQRM will use the tools available from the distribution.

The goal of openQRM hasn’t changed , the focus of the project is still on on rapid-, appliance-based deployment, virtualization and storage management.

Still no news from the Qlusters side however, and their site obviously needs an update.

Qlusters Releases openQRM 3.5

April 9, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 3 Comments

Qlusters has released openQRM 3.5 to SourceForge.net. The 3.5 open source release succeeds release 3.1.4 and includes a set of new features based on input from various data centers and test/dev labs. Release 3.5 is available for download now.

openQRM is a Datacenter Management Tool that can manage different Physical and also VirtualMachine instances. It allows seamless deployment of physical and virtual machine instances and also supports P2V, V2P and even V2V migration across different technologies.

With this release they also announced that this will be the last openQRM release by Qlusters and they hope the community will continue to evolve and develop openQRM.

Matt Rechenburg will remain active project leader and Qlusters wishes him and the openQRM project a future of prosperity and continued success.

Qlusters also appointed a new CEO, Dror Nemirovsky, who joined the companty in 2007. Prior to joining Qlusters, Dror held various senior positions in both the US and Israel with companies such as Amdocs Marcam Corporation and Iscar in Israel. He replaced Qlusters founder Ofer Shoshan who had been CEO until October 2007.

With openQRM, Qlusters was working on one of the leading opensource data center management tools. Apart from their involvement in openQRM, they also offer enterprise level services and support for Nagios.

Matt Rechenburg left Qlusters and with him, the openQRM project got a new home and new direction. The initial code of a revamp of openQRM wihch will make it more flexible and more performant; adding more PHP to the code base will for sure attract a bigger development crowd.

Qlusters has yet to announce where it is heading next.