In May this year cloudcomputing.info reported about Citrix which announced Project Olympus, a cloud infrastructure under development based on the OpenStack project. Last week though Citrix announced that it acquired Cloud.com, the company which provides the orchestration tool for managing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) called CloudStack. CloudStack left stealth mode entering the IaaS cloud computing market in May last year. It’s unclear wheter Project Olympus was based on the CloudStack products in the first place, or if Project Olympus will be stopped based on this acquisition, where Citrix will probably integrate some functionality into the next version.
Year: 2011
CoreVault launches VMware vCloud based hosting service
CoreVault has announced a new cloud based hosting service called Cloud Hosting, developed in partnership with VMware to provide, and targeted both for small medium business (SMB) and enterprise customers.
The service is focused on the security of the stored data, as CoreVault claims that Cloud Hosting features full compliance with stringent regulatory requirements including HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley and PCI and is hosted in CoreVaults own SAS 70 Type II facility.
VMware to acquire Digital Fuel
VMware announced a few days ago its intention to acquire Digital Fuel, which provides solutions to plan, bill and optimize IT cost and value.
Following the recent acquisitions of SlideRocket and SocialCast, this move confirms the VMware intention to be a provider of a complete set of services for the enterprise, rather than being only an enabler.
Fujitsu delivers its Azure on-premises Appliance
In July last year, cloudcomputing.info reported about the fact that Microsoft was planning on launching a version of Azure, codenamed Talisker which could run on-premises. At that time, Microsoft confirmed that Dell, Fujitsu, HP who would manufactur and use it internally, and eBay would be the fourth early adopter.
Now Fujitsu and Microsoft have announced that they will ship an Azure Appliance in August this year. The platform includes Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware. Microsoft claims that it can scale put applications across tens-of-thousands servers. The Appliance will be hosted at the Fujitsu datacenters in Japan. Fujitsu is already running the service as a trial for 20 companies, and calls it the Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform service (FGCP/A5).
The hardware provided by the OEMs, matching reference specifications from network, storage and servers defined by Microsoft and is a 64bit platform only.
Papers: VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit
VMware has released a set of papers which provide guidance for customers planning on implementing their own cloud infrastructure. The guidance is based on VMware’s experiences while building dozens of cloud infrastructures.
VMware recommends customers to start reading the following document:
- Requirements for a cloud, containing 8 pages – Defining the Cloud, Requirements and covering the VMware products making up a cloud.
VMware announces the acquisition of Socialcast
VMware CTO Steve Herrod announced on May 31 the acquisition of Socialcast. Socialcast is an enterprise social networking software vendor, such as Yammer, Salesforce and Jive.
The Socialcast acquisition is the last of a serie which included the cloud-based online presentation company Sliderocket and the groupware company Zimbra.
Microsoft releases beta of Assessment Planning Toolkit 6.0
Microsoft has made released a beta of the next version of its capacity planning tool, called Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit. This version is het follow up of version 5.5. which was released beginning this year, which introduced assessment for migration to the Windows Azure and SQL Azure platform.
Version 6.0 will include assessment and planning for evaluating workloads for public and private cloud platforms, identifying the workload and estimating the infrastructure size and resources needed for both Windows Azure and Hyper-V Fast Track. Besides that this version will include support for assessment of Microsoft’s Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for Office, called Office 365, enhanced VMware inventory, and Oracle schema discovery and reporting for migration to SQL Server. Also readiness for migration to Internet Explorer 9 is included.
Release: Citrix NetScaler Cloud Bridge 1.0
During the keynote of the annual Citrix Synergy conference, Citrix announced the release of NetScaler Cloud Bridge, which is capable of transparantly connecting on-premise networks with any off-premise cloud. By doing this companies can choose to either host applications in the cloud, while keeping sensitive data on-premise
NetScaler Cloud Bridge provides:
- Layer 2 network bridging
- Secure encrypted tunnel
- Network acceleration capabilities
Cloud Bridge is expected to be released in the first half of the year, as either a VPX virtual appliance or an MPX physical appliance. It will also be included in the NetScaler Platinum Edition.
Release: Citrix Cloud Gateway 1.0
Citrix today announced the availability of the Citrix Cloud Gateway, a centralized authentication solution to access Software as a Service, comparable with the Horizon App Manager which was announced this week by VMware.
Cloud Gateway provides the following features:
- Provisioning and de-provisioning of apps and services
- Service level monitoring
Citrix announces new cloud infrastructure called Project Olympus
Citrix today announced "Project Olympus", a cloud infrastructure based on the OpenStack project, the cloud computing platform which Rackspace released under an open source license in July last year. OpenStack is becoming a quite popular platform, because beginning this month, Ubuntu announced that it will leave Eucalyptus for OpenStack.
Project Olympus provides:
- Citrix-certified version of OpenStack, and cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer
- Support for Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere