Year: 2012

Yesterday Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., a one-year old company that has developed a private cloud operating system built on OpenStack and named Piston Enterprise OS, announced an exclusive licensing agreement with Gridcentric to include its Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) technology in every Piston Enterprise OS license.

VMS technology increases the per-server density of Virtual Desktops, taking the common memory elements of these desktops and storing them once, in a golden snapshot that will supply the content with an optimized streaming process that avoids duplication.

This partnership launches the first commercially available VDI solution built on OpenStack.

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Yesterday Eucalyptus System announced version 3.1 of its flagship product: Eucalyptus, a management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, that will be available to customers on June 27.

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Last week Citrix released version 3.0.3 of its CloudPlatform, based on Apache Cloudstack.

3.0.3 is a minor release but includes a couple of interesting improvements in the following areas:

• Amazon Compatibility
• High Availability
• XenServer Management
• Cisco Nexus 1000v support

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Today Amazon announced the availability, with no additional charge, of VM Export, the counterpart of VM Import, that allows the export EC2 instances to costumers on-premise infrastructures.

This new features let system administrators to choose between local IT infrastructure and AWS cloud services  when they need to deploy or move company workloads.

This new feature follows the logic of integration between public and private clouds, already followed by VMware, that represent the future in the management of dynamic workloads.

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Last week Flexiant announced release 2.0 of its Cloud Orchestrator software previously called Extility.

Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator 2.0 enables service providers to build a multi-level reseller model, the key features of this release include:

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Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.

vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric applications on VMware cloud infrastructure and SQLFire Enterprise Edition, an in-memory distributed SQL database that will enable application data to meet cloud scale with the needed performances.

vFabric Suite leverages Spring development framework, inherited from SpringSource acquisition in 2009, vFabric application services and a per-VM licensing model to provide a comprehensive infrastructure oriented to the deployment of cloud-ready applications.

Part of this broader shift in application infrastructure was the move to cloud and application deployment on virtual infrastructure. Traditional application servers simply weren’t designed, optimized or licensed for this new world. These legacy systems are too cumbersome, too costly, and definitely not cloud-ready. We saw the need for a new breed of application infrastructure to support this new world of applications.

said Jerry Chen, vice president, Cloud and Application Services, VMware.

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Last week Citrix announced a new tech preview for Hosted Server VDI technology that allows cloud providers to leverage Microsoft SPLA to host VDI-style desktops obtaining a pay-as-you-go monthly subscription licensing to offer costumers the ability to install applications and usb peripherals.

As discussed before for other companies, service providers are unable to cost-effectively offer these virtual desktop capabilities, to multiple costumers, with VDI based on Windows 7 because client operating systems are not covered by Microsoft SPLA program, Hosted Server VDI Tech Preview, targeted at nearly 2.000 Citrix Service Providers, bypass the problem using Windows Server 2008 R2 instead of Windows 7 making the solution fully enabled for multi-tenenacy in the Microsoft program.

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On May 7 Cloud Sidekick announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE) which extends the Community Edition (CE) with Storm Deployment Automation and support for High Availability management server configurations.

With these new features Cato further abstracts AWS API providing the ability to write automation workflows for both AWS public cloud service and private clouds based on Eucalyptus.

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On May 3 Nirvanix Inc announced a new Series C funding round for an amount of $25 million.

The investment, led by Khosla Ventures and joined by previous investors like Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures raises the total capital to $70 million.

Nirvanix provides a service specialized in storing large unstructured contet files across public, hybrid and private cloud storage deployments as an alternative to Amazon Web Services or Box.net.

Nirvanix’s proposal differs from the others for the amount and size of data processed and offers an interesting data recovery features that autonomously serves costumer from a secondary or tertiary location if the primary results unavailable.

This new investment will be used to establish a “cloud competency center” in Colorado and to raise the numbers of data centers around the world.

Yesterday Convirture announced the update of its virtualization and cloud management software ConVirt Enterprise Cloud to include support for the latest version of OpenStack (Essex) and the certification for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

The company also announced that CloudStack support will be available in a future update planned for the third quarter of this year.

At the same time, Convirture, released ConVirt 2.1 Open Source (formerly XenMan), ts open source management console for multiple hypervisors, including Xen and KVM.

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