Release: Centrify Express 2011

Mountain View based company Centrify has announced the release of Centrify Express 2011, a major new version of its suite of free solutions.

An interesting product inside the Express Suite is CloudTools, an integration collection of free tools meant to enable organization to extend their Active Directory based authentication and ACLs to Linux systems running on remote clouds, without any doubt a sought-after feature for Microsoft centric organization launching cloud-based Linux-powered services.

Quoting Centrify:

“IT administrators can now rapidly launch and secure Linux servers in the cloud and obtain the operational visibility that enables them to meet their security and compliance requirements”.

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Huawei to enter the Cloud Computing market

Huawei, the Chinese hardware giant, might enter the cloud computing space, or so thinks Gartner analyst and Research VP Lydia Leong according to The Diplomat.
According to the analyst, Huawei will be developing an Infrastructure as a service system similar to the one proposed by Microsoft and Amazon, the well known Azure and EC2 systems.

If the information turns out to be true, we can easily expect Huawei to apply its business model to the cloud space, with the lowest prices it can manage to accept.

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Nimbula partners with Red Hat

Today at the Red Hat SummitNimbula announced that its flagship product, Nimbula Director, will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2. Nimbula will also work with the Deltacloud community to ensure support for Nimbula Director in the Deltacloud Open Source Red Hat sponsored project.

“Nimbula has brought an innovative cloud computing platform vision to the market,” said Sarangan Rangachari, senior director, Cloud Ecosystem at Red Hat. “Nimbula is a great partner for Red Hat’s open source cloud computing initiatives and our growing cloud ecosystem. This combination of technologies can benefit our customers’ cloud capabilities and experience.”

We have covered the launch of Nimbula Director, and still believe that the Amazon EC2-like experience can prove to be a winning horse, provided Nimbula can manage to secure enough support from hypervisor vendors and the virtualization/cloud computing ecosystem.

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A dive in Windows Azure with Mark Russinovich

Mark E. Russinovich is a Technical Fellow in the Platform and Services Division at Microsoft. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals before it was acquired by Microsoft and its software are part of the arsenal of every Windows administrators.

Interviewed by Sean Deuby of windowsitpro.com, Mark Russinovich talks of the present and the future of Microsoft cloud solution Windows Azure.

Windows Azure, says Russinovich, is different from other Cloud products and technologies in its particular focus on developers: the fact that Microsoft is focusing on developers with Azure has been stressed by the recent reorg, with Scott Guthrie stepping in a leadership position.
PaaS (Platform as a Service) a là Microsoft means a whole set of technologies available for use and a complete set of management tools for the application, ranging from the development to the deployment stage.

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Microsoft announces new head for Azure Application Platform

Scott Guthrie, currently the VP of .Net Platform at Microsoft, is now leading of the Azure Application Platform group, reporting directly to Ted Kummert in BPD, while the Azure team is still reporting to Bill Laing.

Microsoft is pushing more and more on the Azure platform, and the Cloud Application Platform is a key part of the overall strategy: if Microsoft can move developers to Azure, the game can quickly become more interesting for Amazon.

The full memo, as reported by zdnet, can be found here, and is an interesting insight in Microsoft reorg.
It is worth mentioning that the Azure Platform will now combine the former Web Platform & Tools team, the Application Server Group and the Portal and Lightweight Role teams from te Windows Azure team.

Scott gave an important contribution to one of Microsoft flagship products for developers, Visual Studio: the “exciting and important deliverables in the next 6-12 months” are just speculation for now. With Microsoft Research likely moving 90% of its effort to the cloud, the innovations in this field can be tremendous.

Release: SpotCloud OpenStack Connector

Enomaly announced this week through its marketplace SpotCloud (which we covered in December) the availability of the SpotCloud OpenStack Connector, a tool to easily plug OpenStack based clouds into the SpotCloud market.

Reading this release is straightforward: in order for the ambitious project of a free market for cloud computing resources to succeed, Canadian company Enomaly will have to reach a critical mass of users and providers: allowing the highest possible number of providers to plug in their platform is a direct way to achieve this goal.
The higher the fragmentation of the different platforms in the service, however, the higher the difficulty users are likely to encounter in actually using the resources: a shared, completely compatible and common API for cloud providers is yet far to come.

Direct support by SpotCloud is in any case an interesting signal for a platform which is gaining traction.

The Apache licensed tool can be downloaded from github.

OpenStack announces new release codenamed Cactus

OpenStack the free and open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution intially launched by RackSpace has released a new version of OpenStack codenamed Cactus. Cactus is the follow up of Bexar, which introduced support for Microsoft Hyper-V.

OpenStack is currently developing two projects: OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Storage. OpenStack Compute is software to provision and manage large groups of virtual private servers, and OpenStack Object Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to large amounts of data.

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VMware announces its PaaS solution called Cloud Foundry

VMware this week announced the beta of Cloud Foundry, it’s open-source Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. Cloud Foundry integrates the Java development framework technology Spring which VMware acquired from Springsource in August 2009. Springsource at that time already acquired infrastructure management firm Hyperic, for which the funding was provided by VMware. Cloud Foundry also integrates the messaging technology from RabbitMQ, which VMware acquired in April last year. Also in April last year, VMware announced a partnership with Salesforce.com for VMForce.com and also announced a partnership with Google for AppEngine in May last year all leveraging these acquired technologies . VMware also acquired data grid technology company GemStone in May last year. Beginning this month VMware also acquired cloud-based backup services provider Mozy from EMC.

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Release: Nimbula Director 1.0.1

Nimbula kept its promises: after announcing it, it has just released the first version of its flagship product, Director.

Director aims at being able to deliver an Amazon EC2-like experience for enterprises and service provides, handling on-premises and off-premises resources from the same central console.
As announced, Nimbula Director is free for small infrastructures up to 40 cores and is now available for download, even though an optional support package is also available.
Nimbula did not yet disclose prices for larger deployments.

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VMware acquires Mozy from EMC

EMC, the mother company of VMware has transferred one of its companies Mozy to VMware. Mozy provides cloud-based backup services and will be added to the VMware product portfolio.

VMware will integrate the Mozy product portfolio into their existing cloud solutions, in order to build and deliver hybrid cloud solutions.

Mozy currently provides services to more than 1 million users, 70,000 business customers and a worldwide network of datacenters storing more then 70 petabytes of data.