Today, Metacloud emerged from stealth mode to announce the general availability of an enterprise-grade, OpenStack-based IaaS solution backed by Storm Ventures and former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. Metacloud’s offering targets enterprises seeking to deploy IaaS private clouds that afford them the performance and scalability of large public clouds while additionally providing the flexibility, security and privacy specific to a private cloud environment. The Metacloud solution is based on the Essex version of OpenStack although it borrows from Folsom, the latest OpenStack release, as well. The product claims the following key attributes and differentiators:
•High availability that automates failover in order to ensure continued operation and service delivery.
•Automated scalability features that allows IT executives to elastically add to existing resources at both a computational and storage level.
•High performance based on an optimized path to the OpenStack infrastructure’s object storage component.
•Network optimization designed to preserve network performance while preserving the separation of secure tenants.
Metacloud’s CEO Steve Curry spoke of the vision for and place of Metacloud in the cloud landscape as follows:
We founded Metacloud with the firm belief that cloud is not a buzz word, nor should it be hard to deploy and manage. Businesses can’t wait for months or years for results and cloud implementations shouldn’t take that long. Despite popular misconceptions, IT organizations can have the best of both worlds — a cloud customized to their requirements, deployed quickly and cost effectively. IT organizations shouldn’t have to keep buying proprietary hardware or software that locks them into an increasingly expensive cycle. Nor should they have to put up with costly public cloud services that can’t scale with their data center operations or business needs.
Curry makes three points about Metacloud that are worthy of elaboration:
•Metacloud enables enterprises to build a cloud “customized to their requirements” that concomitantly allows for quick deployments and cost savings.
•Metacloud allows customers to avoid vendor lock-in and vendor requirements to purchase proprietary hardware.
•Metacloud allows customers to scale their deployments in ways that respect and recognize the specificity of their IT needs as unique enterprises with correspondingly unique IaaS needs.
Metacloud already boasts production-level enterprise deployments such as Tableau Software and another Fortune 100 company. Metacloud was co-founded in 2011 by Steve Curry and Sean Lynch. Curry formerly managed global storage operations at Yahoo! where he was responsible for “hundreds of petabytes of content and user data.” Prior to Metacloud, co-founder Sean Lynch was Sr. VP of Technology Operations at Ticketmaster Entertainment, where he played a pivotal role in engineering the Ticketmaster platform that currently manages billions of dollars in transactions per year.
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