Year: 2010

It’s not a secret that VMware is working hard to expand its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product, recently renamed vFabric, to support more application frameworks and languages. 
VMware is reportedly very interested in both PHP and Ruby, but support for the latter may be the first to arrive.

Dave McCrory, the founder and former CTO of Hyper9, in fact recently spotted Yukihiro Matsumoto, Ruby’s chief designer, at the VMware campus in Palo Alto.

As McCrory correctly highlights, the VMware’s interest for Ruby is also confirmed by several rumors, like the potential acquisition of Engine Yard, the hosting provider that offers a popular Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud for single and multi-tier Ruby-on-Rails applications.

As expected, VMware today officially unveiled a new component of its vCloud management infrastructure: vCloud Request Manager.

Available in Q4 2010 as an extension of vCloud Director, Request Manager is a self-service provisioning portal that allows administrators to automate the cloud services provisioning workflow.

As soon as an end-user requests a new vApp from the vCloud Director catalog, Request Manager issues an approval request to one or more managers, tracks licensing usage (and denies provisioning if no licenses are left), and sends approval notifications to the right recipients. In similar ways, when a vApp is manually deleted or expires, Request Manager keeps track of its decommissioning and updates the used licenses counter.

On the back-end, administrators can design the workflow through a graphic interface, and define Blueprints elements, to customize vCloud Organization objects on details like VM quotas, cost allocation models, default leases and compute/storage/network settings.

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Last week Microsoft released the Windows Azure Management Pack, which can be installed on System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2 with Cumulative Update 3 installed. For unknown reasons though the Management Pack got pulled from the Microsoft Download site.

With this Management Pack installed, you will be able to monitor applications which reside within Windows Azure from your SCOM environment.

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A couple of days ago, the well-known virtualization expert Eric Sloof broke the news about an upcoming addition to the recently released VMware vCloud Director (vCD).
The product, apparently called vCloud Request Manager (codename Project Sydney), adds a layer of IT governance to vCD, by offering the followign capabilities:

• An approval workflows to monitor and authorize provisioning requests
• A tracking system for software license usage as vApps are commissioned and decommissioned
• A configuration management system to apply standardized settings on vCloud Director “Organizations” through the use of policies called “Blueprints”

The product, which will be announced next week, should be available later during this quarter of the year.

The US startup enStratus continues to focus on public storage-as-a-service clouds.
After adding support for the new Google Storage for Developers platform, in mid September the company further extended the Cloud Management Platform support to three new clouds: the AT&T Synaptic Storage, the EMC Atmos (still available even if EMC doesn’t host it by itself anymore) , and the ServerExpress.

The first two are storage-as-a-service clouds, which can be used as primary or backup storage facilities in the enStratus environment, while the third one is a full Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) public cloud apparently powered by Xen.

The US startup RightScale last week announced its third round of funding, led by Tenaya Capital and DAG Ventures, which provided $25M on top of $17.5M already offered by Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Presidio Ventures.

RightScale offers a management solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), like many competitors, but the interesting aspect is that it’s a Software-as-a-Service solution.

The product, called Cloud Management Platform, currently supports a number of public IaaS clouds: Amazon EC2, GoGrid and FlexiScale. The company already announced the upcoming support for The Rackspace Cloud.
But it also supports those private IaaS clouds that are already managed by Eucalyptus.

Cloud Management Platform abstracts the different infrastructures by leveraging the available APIs, allowing the customers to build hybrid cloud architectures.

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So far cloudcomputing.info and virtualization.info reported about a number of startups that offer a benchmark platform to compare the performance of multiple Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) public clouds, including CloudHarmony, CloudSleuth and Bench the Cloud.

Unfortunately, performance is not the only thing hard to compare in public cloud computing offerings. Comparing pricing is another big challenge, as Geva Perry at Thinking Out Cloud highlights.
He suggests that the problem depends on at least four issues:

1. Cloud providers use non-standard, obfuscated terminology
2. Cloud providers use wildly varying pricing scheme
3. Not all cloud offerings are created equal
4. Cloud computing pricing is fluctuating rapidly

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Exactly one month ago a new startup entered the cloud computing market with a new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product: Makara (formerly OSS-1701).
Its Cloud Application Platform can be used for PaaS private and public clouds, hosting PHP and Java applications.

Makara was co-founded in May 2008 by Issac Roth (CEO) and Tobias Kunze Briseño (CTO). 
Roth was the Sales Engineering Manager at Wily Technology when the company has been acquired by CA in January 2006. In the following two years he became a Director of Product Management at CA before leaving to start Makara.
Briseño has been a Senior Development Manager at Pangora, a subsidiary of LYCOS Europe, for more than four years.
With them there is Jimmy Guerrero (Vice President of Marketing), the former Product Marketing Manager for MySQL at Sun first and Oracle after the merger.

Makara is funded with $6M provided by Shasta Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

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At the end of June, cloudcomputing.info reported about a new startup in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market: Nimbula.

Founded by the pioneers of EC2 at Amazon, with the founder and former CEO of VMware Diane Greene, Nimbula’s mission is to allow companies to build an on-premises clone of EC2, with similar scalability and performance.

At its public launch the company already announced a first round of investment equal to $5.75M, provided by Sequoia Capital and VMware. Just a couple of months later, it announced a second one: $15M, provided by Accel Partners.

Last week the canadian startup Enomaly updated its management solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platforms, Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), to version 3.4.

The update, currently limited to the Service Provider edition of the product, is pretty significant as it introduces for the first time support for VMware ESXi, side by side with existing support for Xen and KVM virtualization platforms. 
This is not the only new feature worth a mention. Additional ones are:

• Support for multiple storage pools
• Support for storage thin provisioning (called Sparse images)
• Support for PAE in 32bit VMs, ACPI and APIC
• Support for virtio para-virtualization interface (disks only)

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