Year: 2010

The hottest topic of the week in cloud computing-land probably has been the introduction of Oracle VM Server as underlying hypervisor in Amazon EC2, side by side the Xen implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). But Amazon did much more than that to earn the attention of customers.

In less than one month in fact, the company announced an impressive number of changes for EC2, including a price reduction, a new micro instance, support for Linux as guest operating system, and four new features that have a huge potential.

Pricing
Starting September 1st, EC2 On-Demand and Reserved Instance prices on the m2.2xlarge (High-Memory Double Extra Large) and the m2.4xlarge (High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large) have been reduced by 19%.

Micro instances
Amazon is now targeting the lower end of its potential customer base with a new on-demand instance called Micro (t1.micro), that has the following configuration:

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In June the analysis firm Gartner published the 2010 edition of its Hype Cycle for Virtualization. 
The Hype Cycle is a graph used to represent the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies.

Private cloud computing has been included in the graph and its position is rather interesting: it just left the Technology Trigger section to enter the Peak of Inflated Expectations one, with an expectation of hit mainstream adoption between 2 and 5 years.

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Earlier this week the analysis firm Gartner announced the publication of a new worldwide survey titled Cloud-Computing Budgets Are Growing and Shifting; Traditional IT Services Providers Must Prepare or Perish, sharing some interesting findings:

• Cloud computing services consumed from external service providers (ESPs) are estimated to be 10.2% of the spending on external IT services
• 39% of 484 respondents indicated that they allocated IT budget to cloud computing as a key initiative for their organization. 1/3 of the spending on cloud computing is a continuation from the previous budget year, 1/3 is incremental spending that is new to the budget, and 14% is spending that was diverted from a different budget category in the previous year.
• 46% of respondents indicated they planned to increase the use of cloud services from external providers

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At the beginning of the month VMware finally released its long awaited cloud management solution called vCloud Director (formerly Project Redwood).

The company now published the product’s hardening guide: a 37-pages document covers vCloud Director architecture and security features, the infrastructure hardening, the certificates configuration and management, the security at network level and the resources isolation, as well as the auding/logging and the user and identities management.

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A little more than four years ago virtualization.info launched the Virtualization Industry Radar, a fairly large database of virtualization vendors active in the Hardware, OS and Application Virtualization markets.
It tries to provide a comprehensive list of products for each vendor covered on virtualization.info, assigning them a technology category to simplify the research, and a rating for the company that owns them.

It turned out that the resource is quite useful for a number of virtualization professional out there as the Radar has been visited hundreds of thousands of times.

Today, cloudcomputing.info launches the Cloud Computing Industry Radar, using exactly the same approach. 
The database, dividing vendors in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS market segments, is still fairly incomplete as cloudcomputing.info is just two months old.
More vendors will be included as cloudcomputing.info covers them on daily basis.

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As most virtualization professionals in the industry know, as soon as Oracle entered the virtualization market in November 2007 with the launch of its own hypervisor, Oracle VM Server, it immediately enforced a strict new policy, refusing to support customers any time they would use a 3rd party virtualization platform.

This of course triggered the reaction of VMware, which always heavily promoted its own ESX as the platform of choice to virtualize Oracle Database. Despite the pressure from its former partner and the mutual customers, Oracle didn’t change much its policy, according support (but not certification) only for 3rd party virtualization platforms that don’t work on x86 architectures.

So it’s with much irony that this week, during its OperWorld conference, the company announced support for a very special 3rd party hypervisor: the Red Hat implementation of Xen that Amazon is using to power its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform EC2.

Oracle is so adamant in this support policy that achieved the unachievable: place its hypervisor side by side with the Red Hat implementation of Xen inside Amazon EC2.
Starting now, in fact, a part of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform will be powered by Oracle VM Server and will provision and run OVM virtual machines for those customers that want to run off-premises Oracle applications.

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In December 2009 Novell announced a new upcoming product part of the PlateSpin portfolio: codename Atlantic.
The company officially previewed it in May, as Cloud Manager: a management solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

Cloud Manager 1.0 has been released today and it has most of the features expected in this class of solutions:

• Self-service provisioning portal
• Content catalog (virtual machines and templates library)
• Resource pooling
• Role-based user access (RBAC)
• Multi-tenancy (through VLAN managemenet)
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs) enforcement
• Resource and SLAs metering & billing
• Integration with Novell Sentinel (for event correlation and management) and Novell Operations Center (for business service management)

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During the recently ended VMworld conference (see virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced a remarkable number of new products. One of them is the long, long awaited vCloud Director 1.0 (formerly vCloud Service Director, and before that Project Redwood).

vCloud Director 1.0 (build 285979) is a management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds powered by VMware vSphere 4.1. It should not be confused with the vCloud Express platform that just four hosting providers worldwide adopted and offered in the last few months as part of large beta program.

This first release of the product introduce a number of basic capabilities expected in this class of solutions, like:

• Self-service provisioning portal
• Content catalog (virtual machines and templates library) with customization on provisioning
• Resource pooling
• Resource monitoring, reporting and billing
• Role-based user access (RBAC)
• Multi-tenancy
• Service Level Agreements enforcement
• API

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In June Eucalyptus Systems announced the second version of its flagship product: Eucalyptus, a management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds powered by Xen and KVM.
At that time the only edition available was the Enterprise one, but a couple of weeks ago the company also released the open source counterpart.

The open edition of Eucalyptus 2.0 introduces:

• Support for virtio implementation in KVM (users can choose between emulated device drivers or direct kernel supported I/O devices)
• Support for iSCSI protocol for Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes
• Support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) versioning
• Support for Fedora guest operating systems

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Just before the VMworld 2010 opening keynote, cloudcomputing.info received a couple of confirmations that VMware is about to rename its not-yet-launched vCloud Service Director (vCSD) in just vCloud Director. This would explain why the VMworld content catalog doesn’t show anymore the breakout sessions about vCSD.

On top of that, the company may be preparing a special bundle to launch version 1.0, including vCenter Chargeback and the new vShield Edge with it.
Our source reports that the bundle will feature the new per-VM licensing, starting with a 25 VMs pack.

The platform should be available on Sep. 1st.