Year: 2012

At its annual Re: Invent developer conference Amazon announced that it will launch 2 new instance types for its Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform, TechCrunch reports.

The first new instance type offers Cluster High Memory with 240GB of RAM and two 120 GB SSDs for large-scale in-memory processing. The second one will offer 117 GB of RAM and 48 TB of HDD space provided by 24 hard drives.

This news follows recent big-compute addition news from other cloud services vendors, like Microsoft which announced big-compute capabilities for its Windows Azure last week.

VMware has released version 5 of its application provisioning, update life cycle, and release automation solution of application deployment topologies called vFabric Application Director. vFabric Application director is part of the VMware vFabric suite Advanced or the vCloud Infrastructure Suite Enterprise.

vFabric Application Directors allows you to declare applications and related components by making a blueprint, which later integrates with the vCloud API’s to deploy into a private or public cloud.

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Red Hat today released OpenShift Enterprise, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) for on-premise use, or within private,public or hybrid clouds. As long as Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances can be configured and accessed, OpenShift Enterprise PaaS can be deployed.

OpenShift Enterprise is built on top of Red Hat technologies, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and OpenShift Origin, the basis for Red Hat’s existing online OpenShift PaaS service that has been available in a free beta since May 2011.

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After releasing the first beta in October this year, the Xen community today released version 1.6 of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), a cloud management platform. XCP includes the Xen Hypervisor, the enterprise ready Xen API toolstack and integrations for cloud, storage and networking solutions.The Xen Hypervisor serves as a basis for commercial products like Oracle VM and Citrix XenServer and is in use at cloudproviders such as Amazon and Rackspace.

Since the Xen Community released version 1.0 in March 2011 a lot of features have been added as can be seen in the XCP Release Features comparison matrix.

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Eucalyptus Systems has released version 3.2 of its management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. This release is the follow up of version 3.1 which was released in June this year.

Eucalyptus Systems initially started out providing an open source management system called Eucalyptus, for virtual infrastructures that supports KVM. Nowadays Eucalyptus is providing management of Xen, KVM and VMware virtual environments using Amazon specification for EC2, S3, EBS, and IAM and is capable of running several Windows OS’s en Linux Distributions. The product is provided for free and using a paid annual subscription providing support.

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Amazon last week announced that it added support for running the FreeBSD, Debian and CentOS Linux distributions on its Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform.

The new Amazon Virtual Machine Images (AMIs) can be found in the Operating Systems section of the Marketplace.

Cisco announced on November 15 and 18 to be intentioned to acquire two privately held companies Cloupia and Meraki.

Cloupia, focused on cloud computing platform management with its flagship product Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC), as we mentioned in a past article, according to its management team the company could have been easily a Cisco spin-off, and apparently we were right.

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After all the rumours about OnLive financial problems and relative acquisition by Lauder Partners Affiliate, we received the press release last friday, November 16 about the integration of OnLive Game Service into LG Smart TV with Google TV (G2 Series).

This will be the first commercial development of cloud gaming in a TV without the need of a gaming console, OnLive is offering its users the possibility to play and save games on the go, using mostly of the PC and Mac or Android tablets.  OnLive enables cross-platforms, users will be able to start playing with a platform, saving and continuing with a different one as all the data will be saved in the cloud.

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Amazon yesterday announced that it can now provide Amazon Virtual Machine Images (AMI) which run Windows Server 2012, which Microsoft released last august on its Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform. Windows Server 2012 will be made available next to the Windows Server 2003 R2, 2008 and 2008 R2 offerings already available.

Amazon is offering 31 AMIs based on Windows Server 2012, 19 different languages and for Windows with SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 in the Express, Web and Standard Edition. These AMIs are available in every region and are for use in any instance type.

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Dell last week announced that it has acquired Gale Technologies. Gale Technologies provides infrastructure automation software or orchestration software as we often refer to it. This acquisition follows a couple of other acquisitions Dell has made in the recent past, like the acquisition of Quest Software in July this year and Wyse Technologies in April. The products of Gale Technologies will be integrated in the Active System Manager solutions provided by Dell.

Currently Gale Technologies offers GaleForce, which is a orchestration platform, which also offers Self-Service and Resource Scheduling.

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