In a letter to Verizon Cloud Customers as posted to Twitter by Kenn White, Verizon notes it will shut down its Verizon Public Cloud Reserved Performance and Marketplace as of April 12, 2016. Customers are encouraged to migrate their data to Verizon’s Private Cloud offerings because any data stored on Verizon’s public cloud servers will not be retained after that date. Verizon has yet to make a public announcement about the termination of its public cloud services although a company spokesperson specified that the discontinuation affects only cloud services that can be provisioned by way of a credit card and that the company remains “committed to delivering a range of cloud services for enterprise and government customers.” Verizon’s decision to abandon its public cloud product offerings points to the increasing dominance of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform within the public cloud space and the corresponding difficulty for other IaaS players to match these three vendors either in price, scale or the sophistication of their product offerings.
Tag: public cloud
HP Acquires Eucalyptus And Names Marten Mickos Leader Of Its Cloud Business
HP announced plans to acquire Eucalyptus, the company whose open source private cloud software interoperates with Amazon Web Services, on Thursday, September 11. Under the terms of the agreement, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos will lead HP’s cloud business as Senior Vice President and General Manager and report directly to Meg Whitman, HP’s President and CEO. Mickos, a longtime critic of the OpenStack project, has recently adopted a more conciliatory approach with respect to OpenStack in what was, in hindsight, rhetorical positioning for his role at HP as leader of the OpenStack-based HP Helion cloud product portfolio. Despite his historical criticism of OpenStack, Mickos has an enviable pedigree for commercializing open source software as the prior CEO of MySQL, now one of the most widely used open source software products in the world. HP CEO Meg Whitman elaborated on Mickos’s pedigree for the position as follows:
The addition of Marten to HP’s world-class Cloud leadership team will strengthen and accelerate the strategy we’ve had in place for more than three years, which is to help businesses build, consume and manage open source hybrid clouds. Marten will enhance HP’s outstanding bench of Cloud executives and expand HP Helion capabilities, giving customers more choice and greater control of private and hybrid cloud solutions.
As Whitman notes, HP’s acquisition of Eucalyptus strengthens its position with respect to hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise, particularly given the success had by Eucalyptus in interoperating its private clouds with the Amazon Web Services public cloud. Moreover, the experience of Mickos in successfully commercializing open source software suddenly vaults HP’s chances of succeeding in the commercial OpenStack space to the level of Red Hat, IBM and Piston Cloud Computing, whereas previously its Helion cloud portfolio evinced little in the way of a promising commercialization strategy or roadmap. Even though details of the integration of Eucalyptus with HP remain scant, the one certainty that results from HP’s acquisition of Eucalyptus is that the market dynamics within the commercial OpenStack space have now shifted dramatically, almost as if overnight. The rest remains to be seen as Mickos has his work cut out for him if he is indeed going to rescue HP from the abyss of empty OpenStack rhetoric to a promising, full fledged product that can compete with the likes of Piston, who have already demonstrated success in mitigating the complexities specific to OpenStack deployment and operations by way of their Piston OpenStack platform. As a result of the acquisition, Martin Fink, the current leader of HP’s cloud business will continue as CTO. Terms of the purchase of Eucalyptus were not disclosed although sources close to the deal speculate that the acquisition price was less than $100M for its technology and 70 or so employees. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of HP’s 2014 fiscal year.
Egenera’s Hybrid Cloud Management Platform Now Supports Microsoft Hyper-V
Egenera, a Boxborough, MA-based company specializing in cloud infrastructure management, recently announced a new release of its Egenera Cloud Suite platform for provisioning “physical, virtual, and public cloud resources” from within the purview of a single management interface. The new release serves the needs of both enterprises and cloud service providers that face the challenge of managing workloads within public cloud infrastructures and on premise environments. Enhancements to the Egenera Cloud Suite platform, which combines the PAN Cloud Director, PAN Manager and PAN Domain Manager, include support for Microsoft Hyper-V and Active Directory, more granular role-based access controls and improvements to billing and templating that streamline and automate workflows.
Given that enterprises increasingly leverage combinations of on premise and public cloud environments to differentially accommodate the needs of test, development and production environments, the ability of the Egenera PAN Manager and PAN Cloud Director to comprehensively manage varied hosting infrastructures positions it strongly to manage hybrid clouds, the most common use case for cloud deployments since comparatively few organizations pursue a “cloud only” solution. Egenera’s recent release builds on this summer’s integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), whereby AWS is now part of the standard service catalog within its Pan Cloud Director service catalog. Meanwhile, this week’s release marks a significant breakthrough for Egenera, which now expands its purview to virtualized environments supported by the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor due to requests from many of its customers, as noted in an interview with Cloud Computing Today.
VMware Launches vCloud Hybrid Service IaaS Platform By Leaning On Industry Familiarity With VMware Virtualization Tools
This week, VMware revealed details of its Infrastructure as a Service platform, vCloud Hybrid Service. Based on the premise that enterprise customers are interested in a cloud offering marked by an extension of the technology within their datacenters, VMware announced a cloud solution built around the VMware virtualization technologies with which the enterprise is deeply familiar. VMware’s offering is branded as a hybrid cloud because it enables customers to transport workloads back and forth between their public cloud platform and private customer data centers in ways that allow enterprises to leverage private and public cloud solutions in tandem as dictated by their business needs.
Key features of the VMware IaaS vCloud Hybrid Service include the following:
•IaaS platforms delivered through VMware service providers that provides vCloud Datacenter Services to enable customers to provision virtual environments with ease. vCloud Datacenter Services feature SLAs guaranteeing uptime of 99.5%, role based access control and the ability to configure stacks for compliance with SAS 70 Type II or ISO27001 standards.
•A choice of dedicated or virtual private cloud solutions. A dedicated solution offers customers “physically isolated infrastructure” in contrast to the “logically isolated infrastructure” specific to a virtual private cloud solution.
•An IaaS infrastructure delivered by certified VMware service providers such as AT&T Inc., Bluelock, Colt, CSC, Dell Services, Optus, SingTel, Softbank, T-Systems
•vCloud Connector 2.0 enables customers to transfer workloads between private datacenters and VMware public clouds. Customers can effect the transfer of workloads betweeen infrastructures by using one network configuration instead of reconfiguring network settings in the destination infrastructure. Additionally, customers can manage the transfer of data between different infrastructures with “One Catalog” that synchronizes the list of available content across all relevant infrastructures, thereby avoiding the scenario whereby customers are forced to manage multiple content catalogs concurrently.
Because VMware’s IaaS vCloud Hybrid Service is delivered through a cluster of service partners, the offering is fundamentally different from the IaaS product offerings of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. VMware plans to make its vCloud Hybrid Service technology and IP available to all service partners, and promises to build one of the most extensive IaaS partnerships for public cloud computing available in the world today. The product effectively gives new meaning to the term cloud interoperability given that customers can transfer workloads not only between private enterprise datacenters and public clouds enabled by VMware’s service partners, but also between VMware’s public cloud, partner datacenters as well. vCloud Hybrid Service will be available through an early access program in June and anticipates becoming generally available in Q3 of this year.
Nimbula Announces Cloud Migration Service For Transitioning Public Clouds to Private
On Monday, Nimbula announced a set of professional services that facilitate the transition from a public to a private cloud. Branded the “Nimbula Cloud Migration Service,” the professional services utilize Nimbula Director, Nimbula’s flagship product that determines the operating parameters of an operational cloud with a view toward streamlining deployment of a private or hybrid cloud. Nimbula’s services are geared toward transitioning a customer’s deployment of a pubic cloud such as Amazon EC2 cloud to a private cloud environment that gives them greater control while allowing for a reduction in costs. Zynga represents the paradigmatic example of a company that started on the Amazon EC2 platform but subsequently created a private, “Z” cloud that coexists alongside its EC2 deployment. Zynga uses the Amazon’s EC2 platform as a testing stage for its applications before migrating them to its own cloud based infrastructure. Nimbula’s professional services team provides enterprises and startups alike with a migration plan and technical overview of the planned private cloud environment. Founded by industry veterans that developed the Amazon EC2 platform, Nimbula’s Cloud Migration Service complements its core cloud operating system offering.
Cloud Computing Today 