Year: 2014

Red Hat today announced the release of version 5 of its systems management solution for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private clouds based on the OpenStack platform, supporting OpenStack, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and virtualization platforms based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager(SCVMM) and VMware.

Version 5 is the follow up of version 4 which was released in January this year and version 5 adds the capabilities of Red Hat Satellite to the solution.

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Amazon has released the AWS System Manager for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). AWS System Manager is an add-in for SCVMM which allows customers to monitor and manager EC2 instances from within SCVMM. This add-in adds functionality to SCVMM like launching new instances, and common maintenance tasks like restarting, stopping and removing instances. Also connecting to an instance using the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is possible.

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In May HP (soon Hewlett-Packard Enterprise) announced the plan to build an offer based on its own OpenStack distribution, codename Helion, supported over the next two years from a $1 billion budget.

Last week Helion has been broadly released in GA alongside HP Helion Development Platform, its companion PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solution based on Cloud Foundry.

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This week Microsoft is holding its annual TechEd Europe conference in Barcelona Spain. During the keynote which was held today Microsoft made several announcements. This posts gives an overview of those announcements including links to more information where applicable.

Windows Azure announcements:

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Microsoft and IBM have reached an agreement where they are going to support enterprise software from each other on their cloud solutions.

Concrete this will mean that:

• IBM middleware such as WebSphere Liberty, MQ, and DB2 will be made available on Microsoft Azure.
• Windows Server and SQL Server will be offered on IBM Cloud.
• Intention to deliver a Microsoft .NET runtime for IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform.
• IBM will expand support of its software running on Windows Server Hyper-V, and the companies plan to make IBM Pure Application Service available on Azure.

Mirantis yesterday announced to have secured $100 million in Series B funding led by Insight Venture Partners with the support of August Capital, Intel, WestSummit Capital, Ericsson and SAP.

This round brings the total funding to $120 million on top of a first $20 million Series A round from Red Hat, WestSummit, Ericsson, SAP, Dell and Intel.

Mirantis claims more than 130 customers, including big names such NASA, PayPal, Cisco and Ericsson which is a quite impressive result in just 4 years.

The company will use the funds to further develop its OpenStack software and enlarge its customer portfolio with the goal to have an IPO in 2016 according to an interview to CEO Adrian Ionel.

Amazon today announced that they released the AWS Directory Service, allowing customers to either connect their on-premise Microsoft Active Directory based directory to the Samba based directory in the cloud, or to only use the Samba based directory in the cloud which Amazon calls the Simple AD directory type.

In order to link the on-premise AD to AWS Directory Service, AD connectors are provided. The connectors are provided in two flavors, the small (for up to 10,000 objects) and the Large (for up to 100,000 objects).

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Microsoft today announced several upcoming features to both its public Microsoft Azure services, as its private cloud solution based on Windows Server and System Center. CEO Satya Nadella stated that more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 is using the Microsoft Cloud and that by the end of 2014, Microsoft Azure will be operational in 19 countries around the world.

For Microsoft Azure Microsoft announced new G-Series of Virtual Machines and Premium storage and new partners in the Azure Marketplace:

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OpenStack, the open source cloud computing project has released its 10th version of its IaaS platform for public, private and hybrid clouds. This version has 342 new features and 3,219 bug fixes to support software development, big data analysis and application infrastructure at scale. Currently 1.419 individuals are contributing to the project.

The Juno release adds storage policies, a new data processing service that provisions Hadoop and Spark, and lays the foundation for OpenStack to be the platform for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

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Among the announcements made at VMworld 2014 Europe VMware also announced its plans to open a new Data Center in Germany, making available VMware vCloud Air services starting from Q1 2015. At the moment the only VMware location in Europe is in UK, the new opening is going to provide customers with a more central location focused on German and EU compliance and data regulations.

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