Cloud.com Releases New Version And Gains Momentum

Cloud.com (see previous CloudAve coverage), the open source cloud platform provider formerly known as VMOps, recently announced the new version of their cloud platform, CloudStack 2.2, with some cool features. They have also showcases some of their customers and have promised to showcase more in the coming weeks and months. I have been following Cloud.com since their VMOps incarnation and their progress in the service provider market has been steadily improving. Within the last year alone, they announced two big public clouds offered by Telecom companies in Asia. They are also deeply engaged in the OpenStack community starting with the play at the orchestration layer with some interesting plans for the future.

First CloudStack 2.2

CloudStack is an open source cloud platform that helps in the deployment, management and configuration of highly scalable public and private clouds. Data Centers, Service Providers and Enterprises can take their platform and build public or private IaaS really fast. The platform is suitable for any service provider wanting to compete against public cloud providers like Amazon EC2, Rackspace, GoGrid, etc.. Similarly, enterprises can use CloudStack platform to optimize their existing infrastructure by creating private clouds for their internal consumption.

Some of the interesting features of the new version are:

• Even though CloudStack has been supporting vSphere, XenServer and KVM for sometime now, users could not use them together in the same cloud. This version supports all three hypervisors in a single cloud. There is also support for live migration of KVM instances across resource groups
• Support for some advanced networking configuration like VLAN and direct attached IP. There is also support for embedded software based network management
• Now a service providers can use a single CloudStack deployment to enable federation across geographically dispersed locations and manage from a single interface. This makes it easy for Service Providers to support multiple availability zones
• A streamlined and intuitive AJAX based admin interface
• Another interesting aspect is the release of CloudBridge, a server process that runs along with CloudStack providing Amazon EC2 compatible API with support for both SOAP and REST. This will help Cloud.com customers to build a hybrid cloud with Amazon EC2 and manage seamlessly from the management interface

With CloudStack 2.2, there is a feature parity between their open source version and the commercial version.

Partnership with Symplified

Partners are crucial for the success of Cloud.com and they are moving aggressively to court them. In the last few days, they announced partnership with Symplified (see previous CloudAve coverage) with a clear aim of helping their service provider customers target the enterprise market. The Boulder, Colorado based cloud security company offers a comprehensive identity management suite with Access Manager, Identity Manager and Single SignOn. This partnership will let service providers using Cloud.com platform offer SSO capabilities to large organizations, thereby, increasing end-user satisfaction and reducing management costs.

Finally, some customers

Cloud.com has been gaining significant traction on the service provider market and they recently announced two of the big wins in this space. Few months back, they announced that Korean Telecom public cloud was deployed using Cloud.com platform and last week they announced that Tata Communications used Cloud.com to set up their InstaCompute services, an offering similar to Amazon EC2. These two high profile customers puts Cloud.com at an advantageous position in the service provider market. CloudStack also provides other smaller cloud providers like ReliaCloud and GreenQCloud, world’s truly green public cloud that is 100% powered by renewable energy sources like geothermal and hydroelectric power.

They announced Logicworks as their customer last week. Logicworks is from the traditional managed hosting market with strong focus on enterprises. Their claim to fame is their specialization in complex architectures and high availability solutions. They have now shifted gears and offer public and private cloud solutions to their customers. They launched their public cloud service, infiniCloud, in December, 2010 and Cloud.com’s CloudStack is powering their solution. infiniCloud is targeted at mission critical industries with emphasis on scalability, availability, security and performance. Cloud.com is showcasing them as a proof that their platform is robust and reliable for mission critical needs.

Cloud.com also announced another customer from the traditional datacenter world, Profitability.net. CloudStack powers their Appica Suite of private and public cloud services targeted at enterprises wanting to use hybrid cloud solutions. CloudStack’s support for diverse hardware was appealing to them.

But

Cloud.com has been having tremendous momentum recently and their high profile customer wins will help them gain further traction. This space is crowded with many players vying for the same share of the pie. Moreover, OpenStack is looming over the entire space with a potential to disrupt the existing players. It will be interesting to see how Cloud.com evolves themselves to these challenges. I will be particularly interested to watch how Cloud.com reposition themselves in the OpenStack ecosystem once it is production ready and adopted by both enterprises and service providers.

Related articles

• Cloud.com revs open source data center makeover kit (go.theregister.com)
• Cloud.com improves open source IaaS cloud platform (zdnet.com)