IBM Unveils Industry's First Public Desktop Cloud

IBMがDesktop Cloud Computing製品を発表。  Citrix、Desktone、VMWare、Wyse社の技術を統合して提供している。

---

As a part of its trajectory in desktop virtualization technology, IBM today announced the availability of the industry's first public desktop cloud.  

Cloud computing gives end-users easy access to the critical information they need remotely, from any device, anywhere. IBM helps organizations benefit from this model with desktop services that give end-users with network-attached PCs and other devices the ability to access applications and data through a centrally managed computing environment.  

"Today more than ever, enterprises need an affordable, reliable and efficient way to deploy and manage desktop infrastructures," says Jan Jackman, Vice President, End User Services, IBM Global Technology Services.  "The public desktop cloud brings cost savings, flexibility, scalability and security to clients like never before." 

The new IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud subscription service helps clients virtualize desktop computing resources, and provide a logical, rather than a physical, method of access to data, computing power, storage capacity and other resources.  This service requires no up front capital or one time expense and will provide the highest levels of security, resiliency, reliability, and quality for virtual desktops.  The service offers flexible delivery models, including three standard cloud-based offerings, dedicated infrastructure, and customer premise solutions, while providing the necessary safeguards to minimize the risk of data theft and loss, centralize data protection, and eliminate unauthorized access.

Through key technology and business partnerships with Citrix, Desktone, VMware and Wyse, along with IBM tools for customer assessment and strategic planning, IBM is helping financial organizations, public sector and academic institutions around the world address PC replacement dilemmas, deliver resilience and reliability for critical information, and resolve Internet access parity problems, all at competitive subscription service pricing.

"We're thrilled that IBM recognizes Desktone's pioneering work in desktops as a service® (DaaS®), from both technical and market development perspectives, and has selected us to provide foundational technology for its innovative service," says Harry Ruda, CEO, Desktone.  "Desktone's solution is the first and only virtual desktop hosting platform designed specifically for the cloud era, providing unique capabilities such as multi-tenancy and seamless multi-data center support, key elements to designing and building a scalable, cost-effective global desktop cloud offering." 

Supported by government funding, the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network is partnering with IBM on a grass roots project called CBO Connect to provide desktop computing to over 200 sites nationwide.  The CBO Connect is a coalition of community based organizations consisting of non-profits, schools and libraries where visitors have access to 21st century classrooms that offer desktop cloud computing, interactive video conferencing for distance learning, video distribution system with digital signage, and other classroom and administrative services.

"We recognize the interdependency between access to online services, economic development and the quality of life," said Jose Rodriguez, CEO of the Hispanic Information Telecommunications Network.  "By working with IBM, we can build classrooms to serve as technology learning centers for underserved broadband communities and ultimately provide a low cost entry point for residential subscribers by using cloud computing services." 

The IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud service will be available in the Americas and Europe starting October 2009. 

Eucalyptus Systems Launches the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition Which Includes Support for VMware Virtualization Technologies

Eucalyptis社がいよいよ製品を提供開始。 

---

Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creator of the leading open source private cloud platform, today announced the company's first commercial offering: the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE).  EEE enables customers to implement an on-premise Eucalyptus cloud with VMware®'s industry-leading virtualization technologies, including vSphere®, ESX™ and ESXi™. 

EEE is the only on-premise cloud computing solution available today for vSphere customers, providing a robust, affordable cloud computing solution that leverages their investment in VMware technologies.  EEE also supports other hypervisors typically found in a data center, such as Xen and KVM, providing customers the flexibility to configure cloud solutions that best meet their infrastructure needs.

"Eucalyptus Systems' mission has been to support the open source Eucalyptus on-premise cloud platform while also delivering solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments, and we are proud to launch the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition as our first commercial offering for the enterprise," said Dr. Rich Wolski, Eucalyptus Systems co-founder, CTO and former director of the Eucalyptus research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).   "EEE represents the first step toward broader Eucalyptus-enabled cloud interoperability that leverages multiple virtualization environments and technologies."

EEE is built on Eucalyptus -- an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization's own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration.  Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a cloud that is controlled and customized by local IT.  Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure.

For EEE, Eucalyptus leverages vSphere, ESXi, and ESX virtualization technologies to provide an on-premise cloud in the data center.  EEE also includes an image converter that helps users develop VMware-enabled Eucalyptus applications that are compatible with Amazon EC2.  Moreover, Eucalyptus supports popular open source hypervisors such as KVM and Xen, enabling EEE customers to choose the most appropriate software stack for each cloud application while maintaining a single cloud API that is Amazon compatible.

"As enterprises and governments increasingly seek to leverage the benefits of cloud computing in on premise infrastructure, existing datacenters are poised for transformation," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. "With the release of its Enterprise Edition, Eucalyptus is providing customers with the ability to blend their VMware, KVM and Xen assets into a single cloud fabric while ensuring compatibility with existing public cloud options."

Licensing and Availability
Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition is available today and is licensed based on the number of processor cores on the physical host.  For more information, including detailed pricing, please visit www.eucalyptus.com or call 805-845-8000.

Carpathia Hosting Brings Tightly Coupled Storage and Compute Infrastructure to the Cloud with ParaScale Cloud Storage Software

Parascale社の技術がCarpathia Hosting社のCloud戦略、Carpathia Cloud Orchestrationのバックエンド技術として採用された、という事を発表。 

---

ParaScale, Inc., a startup company developing cloud storage software solutions, today announced that Carpathia Hosting, a leading provider of enterprise managed hosting services, has deployed ParaScale software as the backend infrastructure of its cloud computing service to offer seamless integration of cloud and dedicated resources. Called Carpathia Cloud Orchestration, the integrated cloud compute and storage platform aggregates storage from heterogeneous servers to form a massively scalable storage pool that can be viewed, accessed and managed from a single point.

Using ParaScale, Carpathia Hosting has deployed an elegant distributed platform that can scale linearly for applications and storage. According to Jon Greaves, CTO of Carpathia Hosting, “ParaScale is more than just a tier of storage. It is a platform on which applications can be instantiated and run from. These applications can be anything from simple transcoding and indexing algorithms, to antivirus and malware protection. Applications running directly on the same operating system and hardware as ParaScale, help to eliminate network bottlenecks. These applications can interface seamlessly with storage using the ParaScale global namespace, making it tightly coupled and reliable.”

Meeting Clearly Defined Buying Criteria
Carpathia Hosting evaluated many storage solutions including SAN, NAS and cloud before selecting ParaScale as part of their service offering. Their selection criteria included using commodity hardware to create multi-petabyte storage solutions with standard protocol support to deliver the value of cloud storage without the need for customers to recode applications or manually move files using web interfaces. Additionally, Carpathia Hosting wanted the ability to build solutions beyond basic storage services with the storage platform providing a common infrastructure building block.

Greaves explained, "While many solutions offered good API's and features focused at the web development community, we found the ParaScale feature set aligned very well with the needs of our enterprise and federal customers wanting to take advantage of the pay-per-use cloud storage without the integration headaches of other cloud-based solutions."”

ParaScale Cloud Storage in Action
Carpathia had specific customer needs in mind when it selected its storage solution. For example, a customer required a dedicated cloud that can process high volumes of data over a low latency network. When new content is written to the storage cloud, the Carpathia Cloud Orchestration infrastructure spins up a compute instance, processes the data directly, and writes it back to the cloud. By running as a tightly integrated solution, the system is able to achieve extremely low latency between the processing of the data and the storage.

Another advantage is the ability of the infrastructure to scale linearly as required. Using cloud bursting, the platform can add more compute instances to process extremely large data sets dynamically. Such a system meets the performance and scalability requirements of the customer and truly differentiates Carpathia Hosting's offering from other providers.

Service providers striving to offer cloud services to their customers need to sort out the hype and understand the strengths and weaknesses of different solutions,” said Cameron Bahar, founder and CTO of ParaScale. “Carpathia Hosting wisely developed their service provider strategy and methodically evaluated technologies against the goals of their plan. Today, they have early market advantage and are delivering both private and multi-tenant solutions built on a platform that will seamlessly grow in tandem with their business

CA to Acquire NetQoS, Inc. in $200 Million All-Cash Transaction

Computer Associates社がネットワーク管理ソフトのベンダーであるNetQoS社を焼く＄２００Mで買収することを発表、自社のデータセンター/Cloud Computing戦略に寄与する技術として位置づける。

---

CA, Inc., the world's leading independent IT management software company, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held NetQoS(R) Inc., a leading provider of network performance management and service delivery solutions, for $200 million.

"CA offers the industry's strongest and most complete service assurance and delivery portfolio," said Ajei Gopal, executive vice president of CA's Products and Technology Group. "With the addition of the NetQoS network flow monitoring, unified communications management, and response time analytic network solutions, CA will further strengthen its ability to help enterprise IT organizations and service providers deliver reliable, flexible and cost-effective IT and business services."

"NetQoS customers and partners will benefit from CA's extraordinary development capabilities, outstanding sales force, and global customer support infrastructure," said Joel Trammell, chief executive officer, NetQoS. "NetQoS' solutions will strengthen CA's ability to deliver to its customers service-centric insight into network, systems and application performance--with no visibility gaps."

CA is a recognized leader in the management of networks, systems, application performance, and cloud computing.* NetQoS' industry-leading solutions will extend CA's capabilities in each of these areas:

Network and Systems Management

The combination of CA eHealth Network Performance Manager, CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and the NetQoS Performance Center will give CIOs and network engineers and operations managers better visibility and control of critical services in their physical and virtual network and systems environments. This will enable customers to flexibly and efficiently deliver high-quality services such as unified communications.

Application Performance Management

By linking transaction views to the infrastructure, CA Wily Application Performance Management and the NetQoS Performance Center will enable a new level of quality of experience, in which the infrastructure is application-aware. This 360-degree view of applications will provide customers both an outside-in and inside-out perspective of their business and IT services, something no other single vendor can provide.

Cloud Management

CA's acquisition of NetQoS builds on the assets CA acquired from Cassatt earlier this year, as well as CA's organically developed CA Spectrum(R) Automation Manager for dynamic performance-based automation of physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. As enterprises and service providers become increasingly reliant on the shared infrastructure of private and public computing clouds, CA and NetQoS will provide a robust level of network and systems traffic management that will be critical to successfully delivering cloud-based services.

Founded ten years ago, NetQoS has more than 1,000 active customers worldwide, including many in the Fortune 100. With annual revenue of $56 million in 2008, NetQoS' revenues have experienced a 58 percent CAGR over the past five fiscal years.

At the close of the transaction, Joel Trammell will join CA as senior vice president and general manager, and Dr. Cathy Fulton, NetQoS chief technology officer and executive vice president of Products, will join CA as senior vice president, Software Engineering. Initially, NetQoS will operate as an independent entity within CA's Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit and will report to Ajei Gopal. It is anticipated that a majority of NetQoS' 250 employees will remain with CA.

The all-cash transaction is expected to be slightly dilutive in fiscal 2010 on CA's non-GAAP and GAAP earnings per share. The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of the calendar year, pending regulatory approvals.

Peak 10 Delivers Private Cloud on VMware vSphere 4

ホスティング事業者のPeak10社がVMWare ｖSphere4プラットホームを採用したCloud Computingサービスを提供開始する、と発表。

---

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Adding to the flood of announcements issuing from VMworld (www.vmworld.com) in San Francisco this week, data center operator and managed services provider Peak 10 (www.peak10.com) announced that it has deployed VMware's vSphere 4 platform, enhancing its virtualization services infrastructure.

In a press release issued Monday, Peak 10 says the platform "further enables customers to implement internal cloud computing environments with access to external cloud resources."

Peak 10 says the platform enables it to offer customers pools of virtualized resources that federate between on- and off-premise environments on demand. The interoperability of hosted and on-premise VMware virtualized environments is an attribute that has been mentioned repeatedly in announcements from the event this week.

"IT teams face increasing pressure to implement more cost-effective solutions for their IT infrastructures, and because we have always offered technology solutions for business problems, vSphere 4 helps us better support their goal," says Monty Blight, the vice president of managed services at Peak 10, quoted in the company's announcement. "Many customers have strongly expressed their reluctance to re-develop their applications for the cloud, and vSphere 4 eliminates that issue."

According to Peak 10, deploying the vSphere 4 platform provides the company's customers with an enhanced set of features that includes twice as many virtual processors per virtual machine, four times the memory, a threefold increase in network throughput and additional SAN tiers.

Customers of Peak 10's private cloud product will be able to use vSphere upgrade checks, health checks, capacity planning, dedicated resource pools and other functions.

Savvis Previews Virtualized Private Data Center

Savvis社が自社のCloud Computing環境、Project Spiritを部分的に公開、来年の正式提供に向けての準備を進めている。 

---

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Internet infrastructure services provider Savvis (www.savvis.net) previewed its new cloud infrastructure platform called Project Spirit, which will power the industry's first complete virtualized private data center that is aimed at enterprise customers.

Project Spirit will let companies buy a range of data center services including compute power, storage, security and networking on an on demand basis or as a service through a web interface.

The VPDC will be available to customers next year, with a beta version expected to be released later this year.

The new Savvis cloud offers a range of benefits including increased automation, lower cost and features, greater scalibility, a broader range of quality-of-service, and enhanced security such as firewalling, file integrity monitoring, and intrusion detection/prevention services.

"We've built a platform that more closely simulates the traditional data center experience and has the ability to, down the road, to be more software programmed as opposed to interacting with it in a provisioning interface manner," says David Shacochis, vice president of research and development at Savvis in an interview with the WHIR.

"We're going to be expand it into a more programmable API down the road, but right now, we feel like it's a pretty exciting platform for the kinds of enterprises that are used to working with data center resources for quite some time but don't necessarily feel they need to reinvent the way there applications are to take advantage of it."

The company says that Cisco Nexus 5000 and 7000 switches will serve as the virtualized network backbone, and that VMware vSphere will serve as the compute platform for VPDC's powered by the Savvis cloud.

Savvis wil use these technologies to deliver services over a converged fabric data center network and service provider-enabling virtualization platform.

The company says the VPDC platform will be considerably more affordable than other methods of hosting microsites, offering a common platform to quickly deploy new microsites.

3Tera Partners with SOASTA for Cloud Computing Deployment Testing

3Tera社とSoasta社がパートナーシップを組み、両社のCloud環境を統合した環境を提供する事を発表。 

---

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Cloud computing technology and services provider 3Tera (www.3tera.com) and cloud testing provider SOASTA (www.soasta.com) have entered into a partnership to help those using 3Tera's cloud technologies create flexible, scalable, performance-certified websites and applications that can reliably handle traffic spikes.

With this partnership, according to its Thursday announcement, 3Tera customers will have access to SOASTA's CloudTest performance certification process and methodology to achieve the best use of 3Tera's AppLogicT cloud computing platform. 3Tera AppLogic combined with CloudTest offers customers the ability to quickly run multiple tests at varying traffic levels, a "drag-and-drop" interface to easily change application infrastructure as needed, and an integrated environment to setup, test, detect and fix performance issues. 

"Working with 3Tera blends together the best of both worlds-flexible cloud computing infrastructure and best-of-breed cloud testing to create an easy, quick and very effective solution for successfully deploying applications in the Cloud," SOASTA chief executive officer Tom Lounibos said in a statement.

3Tera senior vice president of sales, marketing and product management Bert Armijo said, "SOASTA's innovative cloud testing approach integrates perfectly with 3Tera's cloud computing offerings, providing customers new levels of precision when architecting applications for scaling with demand."

CloudTest also lets users isolate performance bottlenecks to the application and infrastructure, and it provides a certification process to ensure optimal service availability and flexibility.

Based upon its CloudTest On-Demand load and performance testing solution, SOASTA Performance Certification is a cost-cost turnkey process that increases the accuracy of web-scale testing. CloudTest identifies potential bottlenecks end-to-end, such as application or network issues that limit the scalability and reliability of an application, ensuring a web application or website can handle unexpected spikes or surges in traffic.

By removing the need to manage the configuration of individual servers and virtual machines, application performance in 3Tera-based clouds becomes much easier to predict and measure.