Year: 2014

The analytic data management Apache Hadoop-based company, Cloudera, announced to have raised the remarkable amount of $900 million in a series of financing round which includes the first $160 million from T. Rowe Price, Google Ventures and a partner of MSD Capital, L.P. The majority of the investment comes from Intel, which allows it to have the 18% share of Cloudera.

Apparently this is the largest investment in data center technology in Intel’s history.  The aim of the collaboration is accelerating customer adoption of big data solutions, helping companies to have bigger opportunity to increase the value of business data by making use of Apache Hadoop solutions open source. Cloudera is going to develop and distribute systems such as Apache Hadoop , for Intel platform supporting different technologies, including structures Intel, flash memory and security.

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In November last year, Amazon announced its Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution WorkSpaces. WorkSpaces offers a fully managed Windows 7 experience running on top of Windows Server 2008. At that time the service was offered in a Limited Preview.

Today Amazon announced the general availability of its WorkSpaces solution, which can be accessed using a PC or Mac or by using one of the WorkSpaces mobile clients available for iPad, Kindle Fire HDX and Android Tablets. With this release Amazon also releases the Amazon WorkSpaces Sync client, which automatically backups ups the documents created to Amazon S3.

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The Apache Software Foundation which took over the developement of CloudStack platform from Citrix in April 2012 today released version 4.3 of Apache CloudStack. Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

With this release CloudStack now supports the most popular hypervisors from: VMware, KVM, XenServer, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and Microsoft Hyper-V.

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Today Red Hat announced that Alessandro Perilli joined its team as General Manager, Open Hybrid Cloud Program, focused on OpenStack, OpenShift and CloudForms.

Founder and former Chief Editor of virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info, Alessandro joined Gartner in 2011 as Research Director for Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) research division where he led the private cloud computing research.

This news, that virtualization.info has anticipated yesterday, could hide some interesting implications if we consider that Alessandro historically serves large enterprises in the Fortune 2000 group and the, controversial but still extremely popular, post that he wrote on Gartner’s Blog in November 2013 that enumerates the reasons why, according to the analyst, OpenStack won’t sell to enterprises.

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IBM revealed once again its support to open standards and open source actions, this time the Big Blue has announced to be Premier-level sponsor for the next OpenStack Summit that is going to be held in Atlanta, at the Georgia World Congress Center on May 12-16.

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On March 10, VMware published two videos where Matthias Eisner discuss about VMware vCloud Application Director, the first video is about the creation and deployment of a custom application and the second one about the deployment of a predefined application in which he makes a demonstration on how to deploy an application with VMware vCloud Application Director based on an existing application definition.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLo4ytjEtrA[/youtube]

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VMware today announced the release of VMware Horizon DaaS, its Desktop as a Service offering running on top of vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware’s owned and operated public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service.

VMware will offer desktops through Windows Server environments, using the SPLA licensing terms. But it will also offer Windows Client Desktops, where users should bring their own SA licenses. Support for Remote Desktop Services will be added later this year.

On the website of Brian Madden, extra analysis can be found about VMware’s announcement.

In these days IBM launched its new hybrid cloud offering called IBM Platform Computing Cloud Service.

The service, that runs on IBM SoftLayer infrastructure, integrates IBM Platform LSF and Platform Symphony workload management software delivered as SaaS and aims at that market segment that requires high-performance computing, where cloud adoption is still proceeding at a slow pace.

IBM PCCS is available in two models: a stand-alone cluster running in the Softlayer cloud (private cloud) where users directly access workloads and data and a hybrid cluster (cloud bursting) that integrates on-premise and cloud resources in a proper hybrid model.

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Citrix has released version 2.2. of its cloud services delivery and business management platform CloudPortal Business Manager. Version 2.2. is the follow-up of version 2.1. which was released in September 2013. CloudPortal Business Manager provides a webportal which manages the commerce, user management, service provisioning and operational aspects.

Version 2.2. provides the following new features:

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VMware vCloud Hybrid Service is the VMware’s owned and operated public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service, launched in 2013 in US only ,was running in beta on a single datacenter in UK until today, February 25 when VMware announced the general availability for Europe.

The service will be initially provided only from a data center in Slough, UK complementing VMware’s existing US data centers and providing to customers the adequate compliance with UK and EU regulations, a wider rollout across Europe is planned through 2014.

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