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Cloud.com, a new Open Source Cloud management platform..

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With a domain like Cloud.com you are doomed to deliver something Virtualization related,

And today that plan became visible for the rest of the world, the company formerly known as VMOps , today emerges from stealth mode and announces that it will be rebranding to Cloud.com

We had a chat earlier this week with Peder Ulander who joined Cloud.com as chief marketing officer bringing more than 15 years of experience. Previously, Peter could be found at companies such as Sun Microsystems responsible for launching Java into the open source market by re-licensing, building a community and launching the open source Java platform. but also at other Open Source companies icluding MontaVista Software, the largest distributor of Linux for embedded devices, and Cobalt Networks, one of the early open source for networking companies, Cisco and Symantec.

Next to Peter the company also announced two other new additions to it’s management team

Kevin KLuge joins as vice president of engineering and previously served as vice president of engineering at Zimbra, an open source server software provider for email and collaboration, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007 and sold to VMware in 2009. Prior to Zimbra, Kluge was vice president of engineering at Corvigo, a leading anti-spam provider. Additionally, Kluge has held leadership positions at Openwave Systems, where he led engineering for multiple innovative products including instant messaging, voicemail and multi-media messaging services (MMS), Sun Microsystems and Portola Communications.

and Kyle MacDonald joins as chief evangelist having most recently served as vice president of corporate development and strategy for Hosting.com / Wachovia Capital Partners. Prior to this position, MacDonald held executive leadership positions at Sun Microsystems including leading the Web 2.0, Internet and next generation service providers sector at Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle in 2009. MacDonald also held the position of corporate technologist for software and strategic technology at AMD where he helped developed AMD’s software strategy and key strategic alliances with companies such as IBM, BEA, Adobe, EMC and Symantec.

The new team members join the team of CEO Sheng Liang, who founded the company in 2008. Liang has extensive experience in the technology industry and has served in a number of both technical and executive leadership roles. Prior to Cloud.com, Liang co-founded and served as CTO of Teros, which was acquired by Citrix in 2005. Sheng also was a member of the senior management teams at SEVEN Networks and Openwave Systems, and was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.

Cloud.com also lets the Virtual world know that it closed a $11 million Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures. Current investors Redpoint Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $17.6 million

Apart from its new name, management and funding Cloud.com today also announced their product : CloudStack,
an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of private and public cloud services. They provide an integrated software solution for delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which comes in three distinct versions: CloudStack Enterprise Edition, CloudStack Service Provider Edition and CloudStack Community Edition.

CloudStack is the result of work started by VMops in 2008 and is already being used in productions by some key customers.

Next to the expected features such as definition, deployment and management of cloud devices, CloudStack also adds metering to the feature list, so billing can be done based on actual usage of the public , private or hybrid deployments.

About the Open Source release availabel on Cloud.com tells us :
The CloudStack Community Edition is distributed under the General Public License 3 (GPL3). The Community Edition offers a leading open source software stack integrated with the open source Xen and KVM hypervisors, and can be deployed with Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. With its simple to install software package, Cloud.com is a fully integrated binary that enables developers to quickly and easily build, manage and deploy IaaS clouds.

There is a lot of competition in the Open Source Cloud and Virtualization management area, Corporate OpenQRM just being relaunched by Matt Rechenburg, Eucalyptus these days being managed by Marten Mickos and Abiquo just having opened a new office in the US, … and this all seems just like the start

So I`m keen to follow this one … and I’ll be having a closer look at the Cloud.com platform in our lab soon.

Pano Logic Appoints Dana Loof as Executive Vice President of Marketing

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Pano Logic, the leader in zero client desktop virtualization, today announced the appointment of Dana Loof as executive vice president of marketing.

With extensive experience building brands and developing high-impact marketing programs, Loof will be responsible for building the innovative company’s brand worldwide and overseeing all aspects of the company’s marketing activities. Loof previously held senior level positions at Symantec, where she led global advertising, and VERITAS, where she built and promoted the VERITAS storage management brand. Most recently Loof served as the vice president of marketing for EVault, Inc., a data protection company, and transitioned the EVault brand to the new Seagate Technology brand, i365, A Seagate Company.

Loof held her position at Symantec prior to EVault. While at the company, she was responsible for global marketing communications. Previously, Loof was a director of account management at both Smartage.com and Fabrik Communications, where she helped drive sales and exceeded quotas quarter after quarter. She began her career at Oracle and received her Bachelors of Science degree in international business with an emphasis in marketing from San Francisco State University’s College of Business.

Industry Moves: PHD Virtual Technologies Ramps Up Engineering Team

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PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, as announced that it has expanded its engineering team. To help lead this expanding team, which has doubled in overall R&D capacity in the past month, Vladimir Hrabrov has joined the company as vice president of engineering and Alex Mittell has been named director-senior virtualization architect.

Hrabrov joins PHD Virtual from Hewlett-Packard and has over 30 years of experience designing and developing enterprise-scale configuration management systems in entrepreneurial environments as well as established organizations. As a Certified Scrum Practitioner, he brings valuable experience in building strong, agile engineering teams, as well as a proven, disciplined approach to release, risk, and product quality management. At HP, Hrabrov was an R&D and program manager in charge of OS deployment for HP Client Automation. He joined HP as a part of the Novadigm acquisition where he was a senior architect and project manager. Before his work at Novadigm, Hrabrov worked at Legent Corp, Spectrum Concepts and the Ukrainian Ministry of Standards, where he held key management and development roles. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.”

Mittell joined PHD Virtual in 2008 and is a widely known technical expert and thought leader in the virtualization community. He is a co-founder of Xtravirt, the UK provider of virtualization solutions throughout the technology lifecycle. While at Xtravirt, Alex authored many of the free virtualization tools that are available on the PHD Virtual web site. Prior to co-founding Xtravirt, he worked at Oxford University in the UK as a virtual architect, where he designed and configured the university’s virtual infrastructure.

Release: Red Hat Network Sattelite 5.3

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Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3, the latest version of Red Hat’s on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.

Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 is globally available today and is automatically delivered to customers with a Red Hat Network Satellite subscription. The availability of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 marks the first release based off of the open source project Spacewalk, announced in June 2008.

Virtualization is a key requirement in many IT environments today, and with Red Hat Network Satellite, a systems administrator only needs one console to update, provision and monitor both their physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. Red Hat Network Satellite includes virtual platform management capabilities that allow customers to create and entitle Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems with the ability to install the same systems profiles physically and virtually in a repeatable, centrally managed way. Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 supports both KVM and Xen virtualization technologies. Red Hat Network Satellite abstracts virtualization technology from administrators, freeing up their time to focus on higher value-add projects.

With Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3, customers are also offered bottom-line benefits through the enhancements included in the latest version of the systems management solution. These enhancements include increased flexibility and faster provisioning setups with the incorporation of more mature open source Cobbler technology in the product’s underlying provisioning architecture. In addition, with Satellite 5.3, customers receive powerful open source technologies backed by the Red Hat subscription, delivering the feature-richness of the community development model combined with the commercial support to run mission-critical applications in the enterprise.

Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 also enables customers to manage large deployments more easily and with comparable performance to smaller deployments due to enhanced scalability improvements, such as code optimization, designed to enable faster execution when managing multiple systems. Customers also benefit from content sharing between Satellite servers that is now faster and provides greater consistency with the ability to share content between different organizations in the Satellite server given Satellite’s improved multi-tenancy capabilities and inter-Satellite synchronization improvements. Satellite can also now be more easily and smoothly integrated into customers’ existing automated processes given its improved open and extensible APIs. These enhancements in Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 can ultimately save enterprises time and money while delivering a more consistent operating environment that helps to drive down long-term operational expenses.

Peak 10 Deploys VMware vSphere 4 Platform

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Peak 10 announced the deployment of VMware’s vSphere 4 platform as an enhancement to its virtualization services infrastructure.

vSphere 4 further enables Peak 10 customers to implement internal cloud computing environments with access to external cloud resources, while maintaining a high level of security and integrity.

The platform solidifies Peak 10’s end-to-end infrastructure, offering customers pools of virtualized resources that federate between on and off-premise environments on-demand and with ease. Both large and small organizations can achieve the primary benefits of cloud computing, as vSphere delivers high levels of application availability, lowered cost per application workload, and increased management tools.

Peak 10’s deployment of VMware’s vSphere 4 platform, provides its customers with enhanced physical features for operational efficiency including twice as many virtual processors per virtual machine (VM), four times the memory, three-times increase in network throughput, and additional SAN tiers available for high-end databases. In addition, Peak 10 private cloud customers will be able to utilize vSphere upgrade checks, virtualization health checks, capacity planning, dedicated resource pools, integrated VirtualDR services, dedicated and managed clusters, and hosted VMs.

Peak 10’s managed IT and data center services improve performance, reliability, lower costs and maximize internal resources for customers while keeping their valuable information technology assets close to the business. The company combines its secure, private network and enterprise-class data centers with world-class engineering and support to serve market-leading companies nationwide. As a managed services leader, Peak 10 offers a wide range of technology services including virtualization, full service hosting, and cloud-based services in a cost-efficient and reliable platform for its customers.