Tag: OpenStack

HP Selects Ubuntu As Lead Host and Guest OS For OpenStack

One of the major announcements at this week’s OpenStack Conference in Boston was HP’s decision to use Ubuntu as the “lead host and guest operating system” for its OpenStack-based Public cloud. HP’s selection of Ubuntu marked a huge affirmation for Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company. As commercial grade OpenStack deployments proliferate, HP’s decision to choose Ubuntu positions Canonical strongly to gain traction in the emerging market for commercial grade, host and guest operating systems for OpenStack.

In a blog post, Canonical commented on HP’s selection of Ubuntu by noting: “Both companies share a common commitment to open source and both embrace the OpenStack community. With over 117 member companies the momentum behind OpenStack is truly game changing and promises to position it at the center of the next wave of computing.” Canonical joined the OpenStack project in February and in May, announced that that the 11.10 version of its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud would be based on OpenStack instead of Eucalyptus.

Piston Cloud Computing Launches pentOS, Enterprise Grade OpenStack Based Cloud Offering

Open source cloud computing took another giant leap forward with Piston Cloud Computing’s September 27 announcement of the launch of pentOS™. pentOS marks one of the first enterprise grade versions of OpenStack, the open source cloud computing infrastructure that has gained the backing of 110 companies including AMD, Canonical, Cisco, Dell, Intel and Citrix. The deployment of pentOS underscores the emerging power of OpenStack as an increasingly competitive option to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. With pentOS, Piston joins Citrix Systems, Nebula and Dell in an elite group of vendors that commercialize the OpenStack platform. Piston marks one of the first live deployments of an enterprise grade level of OpenStack because Nebula’s OpenStack-based appliance and Citrix’s Project Olympus anticipate shipping in Q4 of this year.

With pentOS, Piston Cloud Computing leverages OpenStack’s IaaS software and additionally provides enterprise-level security, scaling and customer support. Some of the key features of pentOS involve the following:

• Ease of scalability: patent pending Null-tier architecture allows enterprises to scale their cloud architecture by replicating individual servers, one at a time, instead of upgrading an entire ecosystem of different machines.

• An enterprise installation of CloudAudit, a tool that enables cloud providers such as Piston to provide details of security and performance to potential customers.

• Enterprise customers can use pentOS to build private clouds and inter-operate with public clouds built upon an OpenStack infrastructure.

Piston’s announcement comes head on the heels of OpenStack’s launch of Diablo, its latest software release since the Cactus release in April 2011. Diablo, the first upgrade to OpenStack released on a 6 month schedule, upgrades its existing Nova, Object Storage and Glance components. The Diablo release additionally features OpenStack Dashboard and KeyStone. OpenStack Dashboard gives users access to an interface to understand performance within their cloud deployments. OpenStack Keystone provides enhanced authentication and identity management functionality.

Founded by CEO Joshua McKenty, chief technical architect of the NASA Nebula Cloud Computing Platform, and Christopher MacGown in early 2011, San Francisco based Piston Cloud Computing is funded by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures. The company’s deployment of an enterprise version of OpenStack significantly alters the horizon of cloud computing options available to enterprises that have particular concerns about vendor lock-in. Once deployed in General Availability mode, pentOS, Nebula and Project Olympus collectively promise to reconfigure the balance of cloud computing market share away from Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Joyent, toward commercialized offerings of OpenStack that can deliver the portability increasingly demanded by enterprise CIOs.

Joyent Fires Salvo At Amazon Web Services With Enhanced Joyent Cloud

On Thursday, Joyent announced the launch of a new public cloud computing platform that takes direct aim at Amazon Web Services in the increasingly competitive Infrastructure as a Service space. The newly improved Joyent Cloud offering from the San Francisco based company incorporates the company’s August 15 reconfiguration of its SmartOS operating system that allows users to deploy applications on Windows and Linux operating systems in addition to SmartOS. The new Joyent Cloud boasts four principal innovations to an upgraded infrastructure management system called SmartDataCenter:

Enhanced analytics
Customers will have increased visibility to the performance of their cloud infrastructure thanks to the deployment of DTrace, an open source analytics tool that Joyent had previously leveraged exclusively for corporate, troubleshooting purposes.

Safe storage, Increased speed, Data security
Joyent claims its Windows, Linux and SmartOS machines have superior processing speeds, data security standards and secure storage. SmartOS machines deliver even more granular analytics than their Windows and Linux counterparts.

Lower computational costs
Because Joyent’s servers are reportedly up to 14 times faster than comparable Amazon EC2 machines, computing costs for customers are amongst the lowest in the industry.

More predictable pricing
Joyent has shifted to a pay per use pricing model at a rate starting at $.085/hour, in contrast to their previous subscription model.

The enhanced analytics give Joyent a competitive advantage over Amazon Web Services, which has often been characterized as a black box when it comes to providing customers with visibility about the performance of their deployments. “Customers are going to get, in their user interface, the ability to measure real-time latency from the infrastructure all the way up through the application stack,” said Steve Tuck, General Manager for Joyent Cloud. Amazon Web Services customers frequently use third party applications such as RightScale in order to gain more insight into latency within a cloud stack.

Joyent customers can now deploy applications on Windows and Linux operating systems because of the company’s “porting” of the KVM hypervisor onto its SmartOS operating system. The integration of the KVM hypervisor onto SmartOS allows for hardware virtualization in addition to operating level system virtualization. Joyent founder and chief scientist Jason Hoffman hailed the new Joyent SmartOS as the “first hypervisor platform to emerge in five years” and the only cloud solution in the industry “that can manage both KVM hardware virtualization and operating system-level virtualization on a single OS.” After porting the KVM onto its hypervisor, Joyent open sourced its revamped cloud SmartOS cloud operating system. The outspoken Hoffman claimed that “this combination of virtualization options, data consistency through ZFS and access to DTrace for rapid troubleshooting, is the most powerful and efficient collection of technologies in cloud application development. I invite developers who use VMWare, Citrix, Red Hat or Microsoft hypervisor tools to try this open source package.”

Hardware virtualization refers to a scenario whereby a hypervisor enables one server to function as several servers operating independently of each other. For example, one server might thereby be virtualized into three servers, each of which runs a different operating system such as SmartOS, Windows and Linux simultaneously. Operating system-level virtualization, on the other hand, refers to a case where the operating system itself is virtualized. In this case, a virtualized operating system features discrete cases of the same operating system running independently. Speaking of the impetus for the company’s recognition of hardware virtualization in its August 15 KVM integration, Joyent’s Steve Tuck noted that “there are a lot of developers out there that say, ‘I just want Linux or I just want Windows. I don’t want to worry about a couple of small differences, even if they are minor, before I code.”

Joyent Cloud claims 13,000 customers including high profile names such as LinkedIn, Kabam, StackMob, and Gilt Groupe. The company’s aggressive push of its Infrastructure as a Service offering comes in the wake of competition from increasing OpenStack deployments, the enterprise oriented Direct Connect offering from Amazon Web Services, Dell’s announcement of a VMWare based cloud offering and HP’s forthcoming OpenStack based cloud. Joyent is a member of the Open Virtualization Alliance, an association dedicated to the adoption of the KVM hypervisor as a robust alternative to proprietary cloud solutions.

HP’s Support of OpenStack Affirms Open Source, Inter-Operable Cloud Solutions

HP became the latest technology behemoth to support OpenStack, joining company with the likes of AMD, Canonical, Cisco, Dell, Intel and Citrix on July 27. Emil Sayegh, HP’s VP of Cloud Services, announced Hewlett Packard’s support for OpenStack in a blog post featuring the following highlights:

• Recognition of the importance of open source, inter-operable solutions for the cloud computing industry
• Active participation in the OpenStack community
• Sponsorship of the OpenStack Design Summit and OpenStack Conference in October 2011.
• Belief that collaboration with OpenStack marks an “opportunity to enable customers, partners and developers with unique infrastructure and development solutions across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.”

The last bullet point indicates that HP is likely to deliver hardware that comes pre-loaded with OpenStack software that can support customers seeking to build public, private and hybrid cloud computing deployments. HP’s affirmation of OpenStack arrived in conjunction with analogous but different affirmations from Nebula and Dell. Nebula announced its intent to launch an appliance pre-loaded with OpenStack software while Dell revealed details of an OpenStack Cloud Solution that enables customers to quickly deploy OpenStack based cloud solutions using a combination of hardware, software and professional services. OpenStack can now claim support from over 90 companies and more than 1200 contributors.

Piston Cloud Computing and Bromium Venture Into Cloud Security Space

Piston Cloud Computing recently completed a $4.5 million funding raise from Hummer Winblad and True Ventures, Divergent Ventures and other angel investors. According to the company’s blog, the company’s offering “extends the OpenStack cloud solution to address the security, performance, and lifecycle management problems in today’s hybrid cloud approaches, and specializes on the federation of large, complex datasets that have regulatory requirements for authentication and access control.” Right off the bat, Piston positions itself in the red hot cloud computing security space with reference to its ability to manage large-scale datasets with complex regulatory requirements regarding privacy and security issues. Piston Cloud Computing was founded in early 2011 by Josh McKenty, lead architect for NASA Nebula’s Cloud Infrastructure, and Chris MacGown, Technical Lead at Slicehost, which was acquired by Rackspace in 2008. Puneet Agrawal of True Ventures commented on True’s support of Piston as follows:

At True, we have been following OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, very closely over the past year. What became clear quickly was that OpenStack was real and gaining momentum with developers in addition to large enterprises. The project now includes over 80 participating companies, including Dell, Cisco, Citrix, and Rackspace, among others…So when we had the opportunity to fund the lead architect behind its development, we jumped at the chance.

Agrawal’s remarks speak volumes about the respect had by OpenStack in investor circles. Piston represents just one of the recent commercializations of OpenStack, following closely open the heels of Citrix’s Project Olympus. The industry should expect more commercializations of OpenStack as companies lower the cost of development by incorporating OpenStack into the core of their cloud offering. Conversely, investors will watch the fortunes of projects such as Piston and Project Olympus closely in order to gauge the rigor of OpenStack’s process for incorporating code from contributors all over the world. Despite the fierce need for security products for the cloud infrastructure space, Piston faces stiff competition from a constellation of other companies gravitating to the cloud security space. For example, Bromium, a San Francisco based start-up that recently raised $9.2 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, emerged from stealth mode in June and announced its operation at the intersection of “virtualization and security.” Peter Levine, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, noted that “Bromium turns today’s security model on its head and exploits virtualization and the latest hardware features to shift the balance of power in favor of the good guys.”

Citrix Systems Boosts OpenStack With Cloud.com Acquisition

On July 12, Citrix Systems announced its acquisition of Cloud.com, the open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform that enables enterprises to create private or public cloud environments. Although the terms of the acquisition were not widely revealed, TechCrunch reports that Citrix Systems agreed to purchase Cloud.com for somewhere between $200 and $250 million. Citrix’s acquisition of Cloud.com comes less than two months after disclosure of its plans to commercialize OpenStack with Project Olympus, a product that allows customers to create IaaS cloud environments that leverage the OpenStack operating system code. The addition of Cloud.com’s CloudStack platform to Citrix’s product line means that Citrix can now claim ownership of XenServer hypervisor, XenApp, XenDesktop, Netscaler cloud networking products and the forthcoming Project Olympus. The acquisition of Cloud.com is expected to bolster OpenStack’s position in the cloud computing space because Citrix now promises to promote OpenStack utilization through the three pronged channel of Project Olympus, CloudStack APIs for OpenStack and its corporate support of OpenStack as an open source solution in contrast to a vendor such as Eucalyptus.

As a result of the acquisition, all Cloud.com employees will become part of Citrix. Cloud.com will henceforth be branded as Citrix CloudStack and belong to Citrix’s new Cloud Platforms Group. The acquisition gives Citrix a cluster of high profile customers such as Zynga Inc., GoDaddy.com, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Nokia Oyj and South Korean telecommunications company KT Corp that used Cloud.com to create internal cloud infrastructures. A June 17, 2011 GigaOm post by Derrick Harris notes that Zynga used Cloud.com to create its internal Z Cloud alongside RightScale as a tool to manage the union of its Amazon EC2 public cloud and Z Cloud.