Industry News

Deltacloud Graduates to TLP

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

Apache Deltacloud, the Red Hat-contributed ReSTful API that abstracts differences between clouds so services on any cloud can be managed – provided of course there’s a driver – has graduated from the Apache Foundation’s incubator and is now a full-fledged Top-Level Project (TLP). There are drivers for Amazon, Eucalyptus, GoGrid, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack and Rackspace. GoGrid CIO Mark Worsey said developers only have to code to one API. Besides the API server, the project also provides client libraries for a variety of languages. Apache Deltacloud software is released under the Apache 2 license.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Mark Hinkle – Citrix Systems

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...?

AMD Sales Chief Out

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

AMD said late Tuesday that its chief sales officer Emilio Ghilardi had left the company and that CEO and president Rory Read is going to do his job while a replacement is sought. AMD didn’t say why Ghilardi left but it’s assumed Read wants his own people. Read is relatively new to the company so the sales experience will be good for him. He knows how to do it judging from his record at Lenovo although it does leave him with a full plate. Ghilardi joined AMD from HP to run EMEA in 2008 and was named sales chief the next year. Read last week told Wall Street that AMD is switching to a new “ambidextrous” strategy that includes other people’s technologies and IP to deliver differentiated products such as a tablet.

Red Hat Puts Gluster Appliance on Amazon

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:45:00 EST

Red Hat is putting its bought-in Gluster scale-out NAS storage technology, acquired in October, on the Amazon cloud. It’s styled Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services and other clouds are supposed to follow in short order.

The New OpenNebula Self-Service Portal in Action

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

A new episode of the screencast series is now available at the OpenNebula YouTube Channel. This screencast demonstrates the new easily-customizable self-service portal for cloud consumers. Its aim is to offer a simplified access to shared infrastructure for non-IT end users. The screencast shows how to create a virtual network, how to upload an image, and how to launch virtual machines using them.

C12G Labs Announces the Release of OpenNebula Pro 3.2 Cloud Manager

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

C12G Labs has just announced an update release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition of the OpenNebula Toolkit. OpenNebula 3.2, released two weeks ago, brings important benefits to cloud providers with a new easily-customizable self-service portal for cloud consumers, and builders with full support for VMware that now includes live migration, advanced contextualization and image management. The new release additionally included important enhancements in networking and security. C12G delivers OpenNebulaPro for business, government, or other organizations looking for a hardened, certified, supported cloud platform. OpenNebulaPro combines the rapid innovation of open-source with the stability and long-term production support of commercial software. Compared to OpenNebula, the expert production and integration support of OpenNebulaPro and its higher stability increase IT productivity, speed time to deployment, and reduce business and technical risks.

HP Commits to webOS Release Schedule

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:45:00 EST

Seems just the other day – actually it was two weeks ago – that we divined that HP, imagining blowing Google away, would pull out the stops to get the webOS that it bought, put in a tablet that failed in the market, dropped, then open sourced – life’s funny like that – in shape to publish the code in stages. And what do you know – surprise, surprise – HP Wednesday committed to a timetable for getting the thing out in steps by September under the lenient Apache 2.0 license. HP is making much of the fact that it materialized the roadmap 47 days after it said it would open source webOS. God knows whether HP or anybody else will ever really exploit the thing. For HP it depends on the auspices – like two bald eagles seen circling Google or Apple talons extended.

Piston Delivers First OpenStack-Based Cloud OS

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

The first OpenStack-based cloud operating system came out Wednesday. The start-up Piston Cloud Computing Inc delivered the thing, which makes sense since Piston’s founders were instrumental in OpenStack, which is a framework, not a product. The widgetry is called Piston Enterprise OS or pentOS for short and it will sell for $3,500 a server a year, a price that includes 24/7 telephone support. Piston co-founder and CEO Joshua McKenty said Piston sold maybe 10 of the things ahead of general availability and the code was destined for big iron $250,000 hardware installations. People apparently just bought it after seeing the demo at Cloud Expo. Nothing is in production yet.

OpenNebula 3.2 Cloud Platform Is Out

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

The OpenNebula project has just announced the availability of the stable release of OpenNebula 3.2. This release of OpenNebula features important improvements in security, networking and user management, and fully integrates C12G addons, previously only available for OpenNebulaPro customers. As main new features, OpenNebula 3.2 incorporates an easily-customizable self-service portal for end-users that greatly simplifies VM provisioning in the data center. This new update of OpenNebula also brings the highest levels of flexibility, stability, scalability and functionality for VMware-based data centers and clouds in the open-source domain. OpenNebula 3.2 provides an open management platform that compares to vCenter and vCloud, that can moreover be adapted to fit into your environment.

AT&T Joins OpenStack, Floats Cloud Architect

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

AT&T has joined OpenStack. It’s the first US telecom service provider to sign up for the free Rackspace-NASA-spawned open source cloud initiative. AT&T CTO John Donovan said AT&T has been participating in OpenStack for more than a year and has contributed a blueprint for a potential new function in OpenStack focused on transactional task management. Donovan said the OpenStack IaaS is housed on dedicated infrastructure in AT&T data centers in Dallas, San Diego and Secaucus, New Jersey, to start. The company means to more than double the number of centers with open source capabilities this year. Evidently AT&T is using OpenStack – or elements of it – underneath a new commodity-style cloud for developers called Cloud Architect that’s presumably intended to compete with Amazon Web Services et al.

AMD Names Chief Strategist

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:00:00 EST

AMD has named Rajan Naik chief strategy officer, reporting to CEO Rory Read. Naik, 40, was a partner in McKinsey’s technology practice. His charter will embrace both the company’s short- and long-term strategy development, including market opportunities, strategic partnerships and investment strategies. Read said Naik “possesses a strong track record of execution in strategic planning, product and market strategy, and operational performance. He will help ensure strategic and operational alignment across our business to take advantage of growth opportunities in lower power, emerging markets and cloud computing.”

Open-Xchange Adds Chief Operating Officer

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 07:03:00 EST

Open-Xchange, the supplier of business-class email and collaboration software for cloud providers, has announced the appointment of Carsten Dirks as chief operating officer (COO). Responsible for engineering, professional services, support, key account management and administration, Dirks joins a company that grew to more than 42 million users in 2011 - an increase of 75 percent over the prior year - with plans to increase to more than 80 million in 2012. "We have enormous growth potential as our products serve the increasing demand for communication and collaboration software delivered via the cloud," said Rafael Laguna, CEO, Open-Xchange. "In combination with the mobile and web-based computing opportunities, Open-Xchange is growing to support the market demand. Carsten will help us move ahead from our pole position in this market to further grow our business with our worldwide partner ecosystem."

Cloud Computing: A Platform-First Approach

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:15:00 EST

“We just came to market a few months ago with iON, which is our cloud platform – it’s a cloud platform as a service that provides integration platform services. There are several different flavors of PaaS and iON is an integration platform, and iPaaS,” notes Greg Schott, President and CEO of MuleSoft, in this SYS-CON.TV interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 9th International Cloud Expo, held Nov 7-10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Expo New York, June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

New OpenNebula Self-Service Portal for Cloud Consumers

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 05:45:00 EST

OpenNebula 3.2 will be released in a few days. Along with other major features, it will include a new easy-to-use web-based end-user interface: OpenNebula Self-Service. This new GUI will complement the existing GUIs for the operation of the cloud (OpenNebula Sunstone) and for the management of multiple zones and virtual data centers (OpenNebula Zones). OpenNebula Self-Service is meant to offer a simplified interface to end-users of the OpenNebula cloud. Self-Service works on top of OpenNebula's OCCI server and it allows users to easily create, deploy and manage compute, storage (including upload of images) and network resources in seconds. Its aim is to offer a simplified access to shared infrastructure for non-IT end users. On top of that, OpenNebula Self-Service will come ready to be re-branded, as it is easily customizable (icons, help texts and logos). Last but not least, it will include internationalization support.

Managing Cloud Zones Running in Different Data Centers

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

A new episode of the screencast series is now available at the OpenNebula YouTube account. This screencast shows the ability of the oZones component to manage several instances (zones) of OpenNebula, potentially hosted within the same data center to enhance isolation, scalability and performance, or in different data centers to build a geographically distributed multi-site cloud. The oZones server offers a single access point, and centralized management and monitoring, for multiple zones, providing the ability to show their aggregated resources: templates, images, users, virtual machines, virtual networks and hosts. Again, enjoy the screencast!

Powering the Cloud with Open Source

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

“CloudStack grew out of Cloud.com. It’s an open source product, and as the product gains maturity and gains market share we have started to see real contribution coming back,” observes Shannon Williams, President and Vice President, Market Development, Cloud Platforms at Citrix Systems, in this SYS-CON.TV interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 9th International Cloud Expo, held Nov 7-10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Expo New York, June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

OpenNebula 2011: A Year of Innovation in Cloud Computing

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 05:15:00 EST

As 2011 draws to an end, we'd like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2012. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters that we started in June. Most of the time has been spent developing new features to continue to deliver the open-source industry standard for data center virtualization, offering the most feature-rich and flexible solution for comprehensive management of virtualized data centers. The stable version of OpenNebula 2.2 was released in March with the new SunStone GUI and important new features for fault tolerance and scalability. Seven months later, in October, the project released OpenNebula 3.0 with management of zones and virtual data centers, new authentication methods with usage quotas, a VM template repository, a new monitoring and accounting service, and a new network subsystem with support for Open vSwitch and 802.1Q tagging. OpenNebula 3.0 features the latest innovations in cloud computing for the deployment of cutting-edge enterprise-ready on-premise IaaS clouds.

OpenOffice.com Lives

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 05:00:00 EST

The Apache Software Foundation, where Oracle sent OpenOffice in June after it adjured the stuff, said Tuesday that it will put out OpenOffice 3.4 in the first quarter whose code will all be under the Apache license, resolving lingering incompatibility issues. It used what was ostensibly an open letter to the Open Document Format community to distance itself from the new German Team OpenOffice.com fork and its fund-raising attempts and warn it about misusing its trademark including “OpenOffice.org and all related marks.”

Microsoft Tries Hadoop on Azure

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:30:00 EST

Microsoft added a trial version of Apache’s open source Hadoop to its Windows Azure PaaS Monday as it said it would in October when it teamed up with Hortonworks, the Yahoo spin-off. It gives Azure Big Data capabilities and advanced data analytics and a better shot at competing with rival clouds like Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s App Engine. Users can build MapReduce jobs. Microsoft said a Hive ODBC Driver and Hive Add-in for Excel would enable data analysis of unstructured data through Excel and PowerPivot. Would-be users have to submit a form and Microsoft will pick the testers it wants based on use cases. Microsoft gave no indication when the widgetry would be more than a preview. It’s part of an upgrade that includes SQL Azure Database tickles and simplified Azure billing and management.

StorSimple Supports OpenStack

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

StorSimple is supporting the OpenStack ecosystem with its cloud storage appliances by integrating with Rackspace’s underlying Cloud Files. It said the move reflects “industry demand for solutions that bring the economics of public cloud services to the enterprise data center.” Using the StorSimple Appliance, Rackspace customers will get primary storage, backup storage, archival storage and a disaster recovery solution without any changes to existing infrastructures. The widgetry automatically tiers deduplicated, compressed data into the Cloud Files service and is supposed to offer additional security features in the cloud through data encryption and on-premise key management.

OpenNebula 3.2 Beta Cloud Management Toolkit Is Out

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:45:00 EST

OpenNebula, the open source cloud project managed by C12G Labs, has announced the availability of the first beta release of OpenNebula 3.2. OpenNebula is the Industry standard for on-premise IaaS cloud computing, offering the most feature-rich, flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid (cloudbursting) clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT infrastructure, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in. This beta release is targeted at testers and users that would like to check the exciting new features that have been developed to meet the needs of our most demanding users.

Choose the Right BI Solution to Meet User Demand

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:00:00 EST

ActuateOne, built on open source BIRT technology, is the leading embedded business intelligence solution for independent software vendors (ISVs) looking to maximize their product portfolios and meet evolving user needs. For over ten years ISVs have leveraged Actuate and BIRT technology to add value to their applications by introducing features and functionality such as dynamic visualizations, interactive content delivery, data analytics and dashboarding. Download this informational white paper and find out how to: Choose the right BI solution to meet user demand Add interactive functionality, customizable dashboards and rich visualization capabilities to increase the adoption of your product

Forrester Wave: Open Source Business Intelligence

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 13:00:00 EST

Open source software and Business Intelligence are two related market segments where Forrester sees continually increasing interest and adoption levels. BI specifically continues to be one of the top priorities on everyone’s mind. Comparing open source BI technologies is often an apples-to-oranges comparison: 1) not all vendors include the same functionality in the free community versions of the software versus commercial open source versions that carry license and/or support cost, 2) some tools offer full BI suites, while others offer just reporting and analytics. Download Forrester’s evaluation of open source BI vendors and learn why Actuate BIRT led the pack due to its richness of reporting functionality.

Selecting a Business Intelligence Solution

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 11:00:00 EST

A new era of Business Intelligence is unfolding with users buying and deploying BI either with or without cooperation from IT. Because of this shift, users now have many choices and need to make the best decision when it comes to BI features, functionality and price. Stay up-to-date on the ever-changing BI market by reviewing the findings of the 2011 Dresner Advisory Services Wisdom of Crowds BI Market Study. Howard Dresner, report author and worldwide authority on BI, shares the latest market trends and provides true insight into what is happening in the BI arena today. In addition, read why Actuate/BIRT is in the top position and how it exceeded its peer group and the overall sample average for all Technical Support and Product metrics by a wide margin. Read to find out: The best approach to selecting a BI solution that is easy to buy, fast to deploy and simple to use How to take a more active role in planning, managing and evolving your BI portfolio Why Actuate is named the Leader in the Open Source Business Intelligence Vendor category

OpenXava 4.3: Rapid Java Web Development

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:00:00 EST

OpenXava is a framework for Rapid Java Web Development, well-suited for business and database oriented applications. OpenXava allows you develop applications just by writing simple domain classes with Java or Groovy. The user interface is generated automatically in runtime, without code generation. OpenXava 4.3 adds support for total properties in collections, it has a new editor for HTML_TEXT stereotype, add info and warning messages and some other useful new features. Now you can use square brakets in @ListProperties to asociate one or more properties of the container entity to a property of the collection. In this way you can add arbitrary values as totals.

Open-Xchange Plans to Double Again to 80 Million Users

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 07:45:00 EST

Open-Xchange, the supplier of business-class email and collaboration software for cloud providers, announced on Tuesday it expects to again double its number of users -- reaching 80 million paid mailboxes by the end of 2012, making it among the world's largest providers. The company is a pioneer in enabling service providers to offer a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution to their customers - from consumers to businesses of all sizes - and is now entering its fifth year since the introduction with 1&1 in Europe and the U.S. Open-Xchange gives service providers of all kinds and sizes the ability to compete with global and local cloud mail offerings. In 2011, Open-Xchange announced agreements with 15 partners in North America, Europe and Asia growing to more than 42 million users -- an increase of 75 percent over the prior year.Its software reaches end customers through partners worldwide that include web hosting companies, telecoms, cable carriers, system integrators, value added resellers and distributors.

Typemock Joins Red Hat Innovate in Israel

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:14:36 EST

Typemock, a provider and pioneer of unit testing solutions, has announced it has been selected to participate in Red Hat Innovate, a new initiative launched by Red Hat in Israel. The initiative is designed to assist software development start-up companies based in Israel to leverage the power of open source communities. Red Hat Innovate offers numerous benefits, including joint marketing activities and access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and JBoss Enterprise Middleware for development.

Rackspace Names Moorman President

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:30:00 EST

Rackspace has made Lew Moorman president. He will continue to report to CEO and now ex-president Lanham Napier. Moorman was previously president, cloud and chief strategy officer. The company said he will continue to own strategy and product development, including cloud computing technologies as well as the sales and support segments globally. Moorman has been with Rackspace since 2000, a year after it was started, and is credited with being instrumental in its growth. It now claims more than 164,000 customers in 120 countries and has more than 3,800 employees worldwide. Napier said, “Lew’s insight and judgment have served us well through our strategic acquisitions, the development of our multi-tenant cloud business, and the huge bet that we’ve made on open standards through our founding of OpenStack.”

HP to Open Source webOS

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:15:00 EST

Unable to turn a buck on the thing after killing the tablet and smartphones it was meant to power, HP said Friday that it’s going to open source webOS, the mobile operating system it got last year when it bought Palm for a sweet $1.2 billion. It claims there is still an “opportunity to significantly improve applications and web services for the next generation of devices.” It’s speculated that some Android OEMs might adopt it as a hedge against possible legal calamity since webOS is believed to have a stronger patent defense against Apple and Microsoft than Android, which is also open source, and because of Google’s impending $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a potentially Google-favored rival. Whether webOS could give Android a run for its money at this point is debatable.

Greenplum Delivers Unified Analytics Platform for Big Data

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 07:45:00 EST

Greenplum, the Big Data open source database outfit that EMC bought, announced a singular next-generation Unified Analytics Platform (UAP) Thursday that will combine its database for structure data with Greenplum Hadoop for unstructured data – either the open source Apache Hadoop or the more proprietary, more advanced MapR Hadoop that EMC has been peddling. It’s supposed to blend the co-processing of structured and unstructured data with Chorus 2.0, Greenplum’s workflow productivity engine, and “shatter current barriers to collaboration” impeding data science teams from working together across dispersed geographies with very large data sets.

Open-Xchange and Openprovider to Offer Hosted Business Email

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:18:37 EST

Open-Xchange, the supplier of business-class email and collaboration software for cloud providers, announced on Tuesday an agreement with Openprovider to be the exclusive distributor of Open-Xchange in The Netherlands. Openprovider will make hosted Open-Xchange available to resellers, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and small web hosting companies. Openprovider partners now are able to provide collaboration and mobility services to consumers and small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). In the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model, customers subscribe to the application instead of purchasing it, typically on a monthly basis. In this pay-as-you go approach, SMEs are afforded an easy-to-use, low-cost service.

OpenNebula 3.2 Bringing Full Support for VMware

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 07:15:00 EST

The OpenNebula Project has just announced that the OpenNebula add-ons will be released under Apache license and incorporated into the main distribution of OpenNebula. The LDAP authentication, the accounting toolset and the VMWare support will be included in subsequent OpenNebula releases without needing to download any additional component. OpenNebula 3.2 support for VMware will also include the following new features that have been developed by C12G Labs for its customers and partners: Support for VMware's vMotion to allow live migration of VMs between VMware hosts, enabling load balancing between cloud worker nodes without downtime in the migrated VM. Support for contextualization to provide a method to pass arbitrary data to a VM, enabling the configuration of the services at boot time. Support for non-cloned, non-persistent disks, enabling the configuration of multiple Windows VMs using the same base non-persistent disk. Support for SSH disk transfers, a replacement for the out-of-the-box shared filesystem Transfer Manager drivers, allowing the copy of the VM disks using the OpenSSH protocol, instead of relying on a shared datastore between the OpenNebula front-end and the VMware hypervisor hosts.

C12G Labs Announces the Release of OpenNebula Pro 3.0

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:30:00 EST

C12G Labs announced today a major new release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition of the OpenNebula Toolkit. The third generation of OpenNebula, released two months ago, is helping many organizations make the transition toward the next generation of cloud infrastructures by supporting multiple fully-isolated virtual data centers, advanced multi-tenancy with fine-grained access control, and multiple zones potentially hosted in different geographical locations. This new release has also brought important benefits to cloud users and administrators with a greatly improved SunStone GUI that provides easy access to all the new features in 3.0 and a new oZones GUI to manage zones and virtual data centers. Other features included in this release are new authentication methods with usage quotas, a VM template repository, a new monitoring and accounting service, and a new network subsystem with support for Open vSwitch and 802.1Q tagging. OpenNebula allows data centers to provide cloud services by leveraging their existing IT assets, instead of building a new system from the ground up, thus protecting existing investments and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Virtualization and Cloud Management Software Certified for Open Source OS

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:00:00 EST

Convirture announces that its ConVirt virtualization and cloud management software, which is used by companies worldwide to manage large variety of virtual and cloud environments based on the KVM and Xen hypervisors, is now certified to run on the following operating systems. "We are continuing to add functionality and platform support to our products so that IT managers have complete confidence in choosing to build new virtualized environment, or replace existing proprietary and expensive installations, with open source," said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. "Adding certification for the most widely used operating systems and cloud providers makes the decision to use open source that much easier."

Adobe Sends Flex to the Apache Foundation

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:00:00 EST

After casting a pall on the future of Flash by canceling any further development of Flash on mobile devices last week, Abode has abandoned its Flash-based Flex application SDK to the tender mercies of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), reinforcing the idea that Flash is ultimately toast, burned by rival HTML5, a posthumous victory for Steve Jobs who openly loathed Adobe’s stuff. Flash’s future looks bleaker still considering Flex can build both desktop and mobile apps. The Apache Foundation will have to vote on whether it will take Flex and its roadmap under its wing. Flex has been open source since 2008 but will have to shift out from under Adobe’s control and be managed as an independent project.

Four Years of the OpenNebula Project

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EST

Back in November 2007 (four years ago!) we published the first OpenNebula project website (see what it looked like back then, thanks to the Internet Archive), as we geared up for our first release of code (which did not take place until March 2008). The OpenNebula project was created as a way to transfer the main results of our cutting-edge research on efficient management of virtualization in large-scale distributed infrastructures and, since our first software release, OpenNebula has evolved into an active open-source project with a community that, by many measures, is more than doubling each year.

LuxCloud Provides Resellers with Hosted Open-Xchange

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:30:00 EST

LuxCloud, a vendor-independent SaaS distribution platform in Europe, has announced the availability of white-labeled Open-Xchange email and collaboration delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS). Open-Xchange - which will be unbranded -- is a key part of LuxCloud´s automated cloud service delivery and billing platform enabling resellers and system integrators to bring their small and mid-sized business (SMB) customers into the cloud. LuxCloud operates a software services distribution platform allowing reseller partners to rapidly launch and profitably deliver cloud services. An increasing number of SMBs are opting for cloud services moving from a traditional and expensive on-premises licensing model to the new and affordable SaaS (Software as a Service) or "pay as you go" model. Instead of requiring resellers to set up their own infrastructure to participate in the cloud, they can utilize the LuxCloud platform. This modern cloud infrastructure provides fast time-to-market, greater flexibility and low investment risk; it can even be tested prior to ordering.

Rackspace Productizes OpenStack

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 09:00:00 EST

Rackspace has turned OpenStack into a product and is pushing it into private clouds where it will meet competition from that other open source cloud Eucalyptus. The free new OpenStack-based widgetry is called Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition and it’s the first time Rackspace has extended its managed services outside its own data centers. Rackspace doesn’t expect the widgetry to be a moneymaker for another couple of years. Eucalyptus would agree with that statement. Rackspace said it will manage the installations since it knows how OpenStack works and prides itself on its “fanatical support.” The deployments will be set up by certified partners like Cloud Technology Partners (cloudTP), MomentumSI and China’s TeamSun.

AMD to Fire 1,400

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 05:45:00 EST

As soon as the market closed Thursday, AMD said it was going to lay off 1,400 people, upwards of 10% of its worldwide staff. Seems they are the wrong people and it wants to trade them in for people who can get it into low power, the cloud and emerging markets, all deemed more profitable. Otherwise the restructuring is supposed to create a more competitive cost structure and accelerate future growth, according to AMD’s new CEO Rory Read, who gets to play the heavy although AMD hinted at layoffs earlier this year. Supposedly his predecessor Dirk Meyer was ousted in January because he didn’t have a mobile strategy. For once it’s a problem Intel shares. It can’t get traction in mobile either.

Cloud Expo Speaker Profile: Sheng Liang - Citrix

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 02:00:00 EST

With Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (9th Cloud Expo) starting today Monday November 7 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, let's introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical program at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT?