Year: 2010

A new US startup recently left the stealth mode and officially entered the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market: Cloupia.
The company is focused on cloud computing platform management with its flagship product Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC).

Cloupia was found by five people: Raju Datla, Raju Penmetsa, Bhaskar Krishnamsetty, Murali Alapati and Kevin Lim.

Three of them come from Cisco: Datla (CEO) has been Senior Manager of Software Development at the networking giant for almost five years; Penmetsa (Vice President of Technology and Strategy) has been a Technical Marketing Engineer there for almost 4 years; Lim (Director of Engineering) has been the Technical Leader of network management software and service platform development for nine years.
The two that don’t come from Cisco are Krishnamsetty (Vice President of Engineering), who has been a Director at Fidelity Investments for more than two years, and Alapati, who has worked as business development consultant for PG&E and Morgan Stanley in the last ten years.

The company doesn’t disclose if it’s privately funded or not, but looking at its management team it may easily be a Cisco spin-off.
Cloupia executives worked at Cisco for a significant amount of time and at a particular time, so it’s worth to highlight that this company may have an understanding of the Unified Computing System (UCS) internals and strategy that is superior to most competitors.

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These days the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market is getting more and more crowded with vendors that offer on-premises management solutions.
One of them is Attribo, an Indian startup that left the stealth mode in late 2009.

Attribo was founded in October 2008 by Vinod Shintre. Srivibhavan Balaram joined Shintre as co-founder in July 2010.
Shintre (Chief Architect) comes from defineE, an Indian solution provider that he founded and managed as CEO for six years.
Balamar (Director) previous companies include Business Objects (and SAP, after the acquisition), were he was a founder Vice President and Head of India Development Center.
The company, which is privately funded, is not yet exposing all details about its structure, so the rest of the management team is unknown.

The company develops a solution called Cloud Control Center (3C).
3C is a web-based management console which allows customers to operate 3rd party public IaaS clouds. It offers a number of common features in this class of products:

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At the end of July a new startup entered the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market: Skydera.

The startup, incubated at the Founder Institute, is focused on cloud management.
It was founded in late 2009 by Lecole Cole, currently covering the CEO role.
Cole has been the Director of Systems Engineering at WindSpring for two years, and the Engineering Lead at Tele Atlas for one year before that.
Despite the public launch, the company is not yet fully exposed, so the rest of the management team is unknown.

Skydera’s platform, currently in beta, supports the four major public IaaS cloud providers: Amazon (all AWS regions supported), Rackspace, GoGrid, and Slicehost.
It’s also able to manage private clouds but the company doesn’t specify which hypervisors are supported.

As many competing products in this increasingly crowded market segment, Skydera technology offers pretty all the features you would expect from a cloud management solution:

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In April 2008 Google launched its public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing infrastructure called App Engine (GAE).
At that time the platform only supported Python language.
Exactly one year later, Google added a second supported language: Java.

Now the company is working to expand the GAE capabilities even more: SDTime reports in fact that Google plans to introduce support for Ruby on Rails, Clojure and Scala. 
These languages already work inside GAE but only on the App Engine Java Virtual Machine (JVM), but Fred Sauer, Developer Advocate at Google, said that they may run natively.

This may impact other public PaaS providers like Heroku, which offers cloud hosting for Ruby applications and which recently secured a $10M funding in its Round B.

As most readers know by now, VMware is expected to announce its management solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platforms, vCloud Service Director (vCSD), at the end of the month, during the upcoming VMworld 2010 conference.

vCSD will leverage the vCloud API, a programmable interface that the company submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) for standardization.
The API has been announced in September 2008 and the current public version of the specification is 0.9.

virtualization.info has received multiple confirmations that VMware was planning to release vCSD with support for API 0.9 because of time issues. But something changed and apparently we’ll see vCSD 1.0 and vCloud API 1.0 together.

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In January 2010 VMware announced the acquisition of Zimbra, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration suite owned by Yahoo! at that time.
Zimbra also includes a free and open source mail client that can be installed on-premises and that works with the mail server or with any other POP3 and IMAP4 server.

As virtualization.info published in the original article, Yahoo! was reportedly trying to sell it since September 2008 without success. VMware bought it going far, far away from its core domain that is hardware virtualization.

Yesterday VMware relaunched the product with the name of Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance, claiming a full integration with vSphere. This basically means that Zimbra now comes as an OVF virtual appliance that can be imported inside a vSphere virtual infrastructure and that it is fully supported in “special” configurations like the ones that may involve the HA, vMotion, Storage vMotion and DRS features.

The VMware channel and the vCloud hosting partners can now resell the product. It will be interesting to see how challenging will be for them to sell a mail server to the customers that usually buy hypervisors. Mostly because VMware certainly is an undisputed leader in virtualization but it definitively has no credibility in the PIM market yet.

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In mid July a new, very interesting company officially entered the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing market: PiCloud.

The company, still in semi-stealth mode, was founded in September 2008 by Ken Elkabany and Aaron Staley.
The former was an undergraduate student instructor while the latter was a teaching assistant, both at the University of California Berkeley.

The confidential documentation used to pitch venture capital firms has been uploaded online and it’s currently publicly available here. It reveals that there’s only a third employee: David Wu, Vice President of Business Development at Riverbed Technologies.
It also reveals that, amazingly, the startup is only funded with $35,000, provided by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and that the founders hope that PiClouds will turn into an acquisition target for Google and Amazon. This second mention is extremely interesting: Elkabany and Staley believe that Amazon will extend its IaaS cloud at a point in the future, adding the PaaS component.
Last but not least the pitch reveals that PiCloud projects a revenue of $7.3M for this year and $41.7M for 2011, coming from 10,000 SMBs, equal to $5.6M in profit.

PiCloud offers a PaaS platform for Python applications, with a very unique approach.

The PiCloud platform in fact doesn’t include a back-end infrastructure. The company just offers a custom Phyton library that developers can use in their code. 
Once the library is used by a function, PiCloud executes its code remotely, on third party Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

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Less than one month passed since Rackspace launched OpenStack, a free and open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution that can be installed on-premises.

OpenStack includes components from The Rackspace Cloud and Nova, the platform that powers the NASA Nebula cloud.
Both are built on top of the open source hypervisor Xen, so this was the only virtualization engine supported at launch.
Over time Rackspace expects to extend support to Citrix XenServer and the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

Meanwhile, there’s a surprising development: the community already developed code to support both KVM and Oracle VirtualBox. 
The news arrives from Soo Choi, Product Manager of Nebula at NASA.

By the way, the entire Nebula team is on Twitter. You may want to follow some of them.

In mid July Rackspace and NASA jointly launched a new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform that customers can install on-premises.
The private cloud platform, called OpenStack, has been released for free under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

Supported by 25 top cloud computing players, including AMD, Citrix and Dell, OpenStack provoked the public reactions of some vendors, including VMware and C12G Labs, the company that develops and maintain OpenNebula. 
But apparently there’s much more that happened behind the scenes.

Dr. Mike Norman, former CEO of Scapa Technologies, provided a very interesting insight about the RackSpace open source strategy and how it impacted the relationship with Eucalyptus Systems.

In his first post on this subject, Norman wrote:

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Last week at the security conference DEF CON 2010, two security researchers demonstrated how easy and powerful it is to use cloud computing for malicious activities.

The two rented ten virtual machines on Amazon EC2 Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform and used them to produce a denial of service (DoS) against a target SMB.
The striking thing is that taking down the target infrastructure for two hours costed just $6.

The two researchers highlighted that Amazon doesn’t enforce any bandwidth limitation and doesn’t check for malicious activity inside its Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs).

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