NTT Multimedia Communications Laboratories, Inc.

NTT America, a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) and a global IP network services provider, today announced the company is helping customers provide premium externally managed DNS options for corporations and enterprises that need global, 24/7 access and support through its highest quality, fully redundant, dual stack, Tier-1 Global IP Network, as illustrated in a case study with Dynamic Network Services Inc. (Dyn Inc.), the world's fastest growing provider of managed DNS.
Complete info at CircleID and TheStreet.(author unknown)

The Structure 2010 LaunchPad showcased 11 companies hand-picked by GigaOM on the basis that — as far as we’re concerned — they have “the right stuff” to succeed in the marketplace. Each presenter had just four minutes to present its business to a panel of three judges from the venture capital industry and the audience. The judges selected CloudSwitch as the winner, with Datameer and NorthScale tied for second. CloudSwitch also won the audience choice award by a long shot.

Nimbula: Enterprise cloud operating system that lets users build a computing cloud in their private data center. Funded by Sequoia Capital and VMware. Scores: 8, 9, 7

Cloudant: Data management, search and analytics as a cloud service. Cloudant is finishing closed beta, and the VC panel expressed uncertainty about the business model. “Is the free stuff good enough, and how to you build a business?” Scores: 7, 7, 6

SolidFire: Scalable block storage for providers and enterprises that need storage for thousands of servers. The system uses no proprietary hardware and spinning discs — it’s an all-solid-state design. Scores: 7, 7, 8

Datameer: Analytics that make it easy for businesses to aggregate big data, leveraging the power and scale of Hadoop. Datameer has funding from Redpoint Ventures. The system’s designed to be as simple to use as Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet product, according to CTO Stefan Groschupf, helping to reduce the number of IT requests. A panelist called the team “very credible.” Scores: 8, 10, 8

NorthScale: Alternative to relational databases. Gradually migrate your data from old to new systems. Already has more than $1 million in recurring bookings. Scores: 8, 8, 10

More on World Cup

• Esquire Misses the Point on Twitter and the World Cup Tech Insider
• Technology Quiets the Vuvuzela in Real Time Tech Insider
• Why the World Cup Matters to Carriers Tech Insider
• I’ve Got the Whole World (Cup) in My Hands! Tech Insider

GridCentric: Eliminates need for overprovisioning of computing resources. Instantly scalable. Several customers in trial, and just got its first paying customer: a computational biology lab. Scores: 6, 7, 6

Nephosity: Non-programmers in enterprise settings need an easier way to manage their computational workflows, said founder and CEO Michael Pan. Nephosity seeks to offer that through its “Pomsets” tool, which provides task parallelism and queueing, as well as resource pooling. Pomsets is open-source. Scores: 6, 6, 6

CloudSwitch: Downloadable software product delivered as a VM. Automatically encrypts data and moves enterprises’ existing apps into the cloud without requiring user to make any changes. Permissions can be set for who gets to access the cloud and how. Over $14 million raised from Commonwealth, Matrix and others. Commercially available as of today. Scores: 10, 10, 9

Riptano: “Cassandra is getting a lot of adoption,” and companies need help making the move. Scores: 8, 7, 7

Greenqloud: Compute cloud based in Iceland, powered with renewable energy. Target markets are North America and Europe, where Greenqloud says it can save you money on hosting based on its location. Scores: 7, 7, 6

Zettar: Software that integrates an enterprise’s existing applications with private and public storage clouds. Zettar is currently looking for pilot customers and seeking $5 million to $7 million in Series A funding to accelerate growth. Scores: 7, 8, 7

Watch live streaming video from gigaomtv at livestream.com

The Structure 2010 LaunchPad showcased 11 companies hand-picked by GigaOM on the basis that — as far as we’re concerned — they have “the right stuff” to succeed in the marketplace. Each presenter had just four minutes to present its business to a panel of three judges from the venture capital industry and the audience. The judges selected CloudSwitch as the winner, with Datameer and NorthScale tied for second. CloudSwitch also won the audience choice award by a long shot.

Nimbula: Enterprise cloud operating system that lets users build a computing cloud in their private data center. Funded by Sequoia Capital and VMware. Scores: 8, 9, 7

Cloudant: Data management, search and analytics as a cloud service. Cloudant is finishing closed beta, and the VC panel expressed uncertainty about the business model. “Is the free stuff good enough, and how to you build a business?” Scores: 7, 7, 6

SolidFire: Scalable block storage for providers and enterprises that need storage for thousands of servers. The system uses no proprietary hardware and spinning discs — it’s an all-solid-state design. Scores: 7, 7, 8

Datameer: Analytics that make it easy for businesses to aggregate big data, leveraging the power and scale of Hadoop. Datameer has funding from Redpoint Ventures. The system’s designed to be as simple to use as Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet product, according to CTO Stefan Groschupf, helping to reduce the number of IT requests. A panelist called the team “very credible.” Scores: 8, 10, 8

NorthScale: Alternative to relational databases. Gradually migrate your data from old to new systems. Already has more than $1 million in recurring bookings. Scores: 8, 8, 10

More on World Cup

• Esquire Misses the Point on Twitter and the World Cup Tech Insider
• Technology Quiets the Vuvuzela in Real Time Tech Insider
• Why the World Cup Matters to Carriers Tech Insider
• I’ve Got the Whole World (Cup) in My Hands! Tech Insider

GridCentric: Eliminates need for overprovisioning of computing resources. Instantly scalable. Several customers in trial, and just got its first paying customer: a computational biology lab. Scores: 6, 7, 6

Nephosity: Non-programmers in enterprise settings need an easier way to manage their computational workflows, said founder and CEO Michael Pan. Nephosity seeks to offer that through its “Pomsets” tool, which provides task parallelism and queueing, as well as resource pooling. Pomsets is open-source. Scores: 6, 6, 6

CloudSwitch: Downloadable software product delivered as a VM. Automatically encrypts data and moves enterprises’ existing apps into the cloud without requiring user to make any changes. Permissions can be set for who gets to access the cloud and how. Over $14 million raised from Commonwealth, Matrix and others. Commercially available as of today. Scores: 10, 10, 9

Riptano: “Cassandra is getting a lot of adoption,” and companies need help making the move. Scores: 8, 7, 7

Greenqloud: Compute cloud based in Iceland, powered with renewable energy. Target markets are North America and Europe, where Greenqloud says it can save you money on hosting based on its location. Scores: 7, 7, 6

Zettar: Software that integrates an enterprise’s existing applications with private and public storage clouds. Zettar is currently looking for pilot customers and seeking $5 million to $7 million in Series A funding to accelerate growth. Scores: 7, 8, 7

Watch live streaming video from gigaomtv at livestream.com

Designed decades ago to hold up amid nuclear apocalypse, the infrastructure of the Internet now faces strain from a very different source: the explosion of cloud computing. According to Nick McKeown, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University, creating an Internet that will serve us well into the future demands a new, open approach to data flows and networking. McKeown spoke today at the GigaOM Network’s Structure conference about how and why we’ll increasingly see networks defined by software, with control gradually being “lifted up and out into a global network operating system.”

As emcee Joe Weinman, VP of Strategy and Business Development at AT&T commented, “It might be a bit of a challenge to replace the multi-hundred-billion-dollar infrastructure of the Internet.” But McKeown emphasized that he’s not advocating the “crazy academic” idea of wiping the slate entirely clean and starting over. “The way the Internet needs to change is through a constant evolution,” he said. “And we’re trying to allow that evolution to happen.”

The networking industry is already starting to restructure, said McKeown, with what he calls “software-defined networks” separating control from the data path. McKeown offered the Stanford campus as an example of how this might work. His team (which is working on openflow.org with support from the National Science Foundation, the governments of China and Korea, and others) started digging a few years ago into the question of how far central control of all data flows could really go, looking at how difficult (and costly) it would it be to centralize the process of how every decision is accepted and then routed in the network.

More on World Cup

• Esquire Misses the Point on Twitter and the World Cup Tech Insider
• Technology Quiets the Vuvuzela in Real Time Tech Insider
• Why the World Cup Matters to Carriers Tech Insider
• I’ve Got the Whole World (Cup) in My Hands! Tech Insider

According to McKeown, it took only “about half of a PC for the entire Stanford campus,” which led him to a basic conclusion: “If you can centralize the controller in a logical sense, eventually you will. You will always prefer to do it this way if you can.” Due to replication needed for fault tolerance and performance scaling, this centralized control actually functions in many ways a distributed controller, he said.

Gradually, said McKeown, control of data flows will be lifted up and out into a global network operating system, exploiting flow tables that exist in switches and networking gear today. On top of that system will be presented an API on which features will sit. This will demand an open interface, as well as “at least one, and probably many” network-wide operating systems, both open and closed (“the more the merrier”). According to McKeown, “You also need a well-defined open API,” which his team expects to come along within a few years.

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Mo’ servers in the cloud, it turns out, mean mo’ problems. That’s one of the reasons why cloud computing users are increasingly relying on more sophisticated analytics and management software to help them see any potential problems and to help fine-tune the way the systems are working. As the analytics companies, including Scalr, Virtual Instruments, Adaptive Computing, Xangati, Cloudkick, and SpringSource, reiterated on a panel at the GigaOM Network’s Structure event on Wednesday, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Infrastructure management services help customers troubleshoot critical problems. The panelists agreed that oftentimes customers will come to them with a major issue that they need solved, but then will recognize the need for higher-level management services to fine-tune operations. Both critical problem-solving and fine-tuning can save customers a lot of money.

Michael A. Jackson, co-founder, president and COO of Adaptive Computing, said that managed infrastructure services can also “change your organization competitive stance your space.” Alex Polvi, CEO and co-founder of Cloudkick, pointed out that customers can use these services to help drive the development of their next-generation products. Polvi said one of his customers really liked the fact that Cloudkick’s analytics can provide graphs that show the real-time effect that a new piece of code has on the system and the graphs helped the customer shape the way he thought about product development.

Analytics can be especially important when it comes to deciding whether to work with a private, public or hybrid private/public cloud. They can help companies determine which type of cloud they want and need, and which service is working for them.

So what are the challenges with offering these analytics? Well, Jagan Jagannathan, founder and CTO of Xangati, said the biggest one is pulling out deep enough analytics across so many data feeds. “The challenge is gathering the same kind of data that the customer was used to before the cloud, on infrastructure that is removed from them,” said Jagannathan.

Watch live streaming video from gigaomtv at livestream.com

CloudSwitch, a Burlington, Mass.-based cloud porter, today launched the commercial version of its flagship product to help enterprise customers seamlessly move applications into the cloud. The startup claims that using it, applications from stack components to security protocols run in the cloud just as they do within the data center. For businesses hesitant to learn the intricacies of cloud development and management tools, CloudSwitch should be a welcome sight.

The underlying premise behind the CloudSwitch offering is simple. Applications and associated data currently housed in VMware or Xen environments, and running on Windows or Linux, are transported to compatible public clouds (Amazon EC2 and Terremark vCloud Express, initially) via a Layer-2 network bridge. Data is encrypted along the way to ensure security on the journey between the customer data center and the cloud, and the Layer-2 bridge means APIs and other server characteristics remain the same. Thus, CloudSwitch users can continue using their current management tools, essentially as if the application still is running in-house. Users pay CloudSwitch an annual license fee, and pay for cloud use as usual with their provider of choice.

If that’s not enough to lure leery enterprise customers, CloudSwitch is following the lead of fellow cloud vendors by developing a strong channel program. It also announced today a partnership with systems integrator LTech to help with the process of deciding which applications to port to Amazon EC2, and how to do it. And large companies might be swayed by the CloudSwitch team’s impressive backgrounds. Co-founders Ellen Rubin and John Considine come from Netezza and Sun Microsystems, respectively, and other key personnel come from EMC, RSA Security and BladeLogic.

More on World Cup

• Esquire Misses the Point on Twitter and the World Cup Tech Insider
• Technology Quiets the Vuvuzela in Real Time Tech Insider
• Why the World Cup Matters to Carriers Tech Insider
• I’ve Got the Whole World (Cup) in My Hands! Tech Insider

Apparently, the CloudSwitch pitch is paying off. Rubin says the company has a strong base of financial services and pharmaceutical customers through its beta program, and their experiences and demands are driving future development. However, despite its relatively revolutionary proposition, CloudSwitch will need to keep evolving to stay ahead of large systems management vendors like CA Technologies and BMC Software, which are getting into the cloud-management game themselves.

Rubin says there’s somewhat of a plan in place already. CloudSwitch monitors a variety of metrics as customers’ applications run within CloudSwitch environments, and in the future she thinks it might be able to as a broker of sorts. Based on information gathered from its entire user communities, the company could tell customers which applications would be best to run on which clouds.

Related GigaOMPro content (sub req’d): Defining Internal Cloud Options

Summary from James’ keynote talk at Velocity 2010

• Pace of Innovation – Datacenter pace of innovation is increasing.  The high focus on infrastructure innovation is driving down the cost, increasing reliability and reducing resource consumption which ultimate drives down cost.
• Where does the money go ?
  • 54% on servers, 8% on networking, 21% on power distribution, 13% on power, 5% on other infrastructure requirements
  • 34% costs related to power
  • Cost of power is trending up
• Clouds efficiency – server utilization in our industry is around 10 to 15% range
  • Avoid holes in the infrastructure use
  • Break jobs into smaller chunks, queue them where ever possible
• Power distribution – 11 to 12% lost in distribution
  • Rules to minimize power distribution losses
    • Oversell power – setup more servers than power available. 100% of servers never required in a regular datacenter.
    • Avoid voltage conversions
    • Increase efficiency of conversions
    • High voltage as close to load as possible
    • Size voltage regulators to load and use efficient parts
    • High voltage direct current a small potential gain
• Mechanical Systems – One of the biggest saving is in cooling
  • What parts are involved ? – Cooling tower, heat exchanges, pumps, evaporators, compressors, condensers, pumps… and so on.
  • Efficiency of these systems and power required to get this done depends on the difference in the desired temperature and the current room temperature
  • Separate hot and cold isles… insulate them (don’t break the fire codes)
  • Increase the operating temperature of servers
    • Most are between 61 and 84
    • Telco standard is 104F (Game consoles are even higher)
• Temperature
  • Limiting factors to high temp operation
    • Higher fan power trade-off
    • More semiconductor leakage current
    • Possible negative failure rate impact
  • Avoid direct expansion cooling entirely
    • Air side economization 
    • Higher data center temperature
    • Evaporative cooling
  • Requires filtration
    • Particulate and chemical pollution
• Networking gear
  • Current networks are over-subscribed
    • Forces workload placement restrictions
    • Goal: all points in datacenter equidistant.
  • Mainframe model goes commodity
    • Competition at each layer rather than vertical integration
  • Openflow: open S/W platform
    • Distributed control plane to central control

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2. The real concerns about Cloud infrastructure (as it is today)
3. Versioning data in S3 on AWS
4. Spanner: Google’s next Massive Storage and Computation infrastructure
5. Friendfeed using Mysql for Schema-less data

Linux Magazine: "Having file systems in the kernel has its pros and cons. Being able to write file systems in user-space also has some pros and cons, but FUSE (File System in Userspace) allows you to create some pretty amazing results."(author unknown)05014792752261736291

Whether for economic, technical or simply follow-the-herd reasons, enterprises are feeling the gravitational pull of cloud computing, particularly when it comes to storage, one of the more expensive pieces of any IT infrastructure. But cloud storage providers are currently delivering their services on their own terms — typically through an application programming interface. The bulk of the storage market however, is based on block- or file-based access for conventional enterprise applications, which is far different from the service provider preferred implementation of a REST or SOAP API. Simply put, an API alone is not going to get the enterprise to the cloud.

Enter a new crop of companies aiming to bridge this divide with gateway products that on the enterprise side present familiar storage interfaces such as block-based iSCSI or Fibre Channel or file-based interfaces such as NFS or CIFS. These storage access mechanisms are proven in traditional IT shops and provide a seamless integration with existing applications. In some cases, they are a necessity. For example, many applications from Microsoft, such as Exchange and Sharepoint, depend on block-based local storage access. No other options exist.

These products then take the familiar enterprise-style storage interfaces and bridge them to the cloud, or in some cases to a choice of cloud providers. So not only do they provide the necessary translation services for enterprises to access cloud storage in a way they understand, but they also serve as intermediaries or brokers to multiple cloud providers. Enterprises like this option because they’re not comfortable being tied to any one specific provider. Better yet, many products also include a host of requisite storage features like backup and recovery, encryption, deduplication and provisioning.

The following companies have or will soon have products that address this cloud gateway market, each with a slightly different twist:

StorSimple is building a cloud-ready storage appliance that enables customers to take advantage of public and private cloud storage services. The appliance also implements a number of technologies to balance storage across on-premise and off-premise locations. The company is focusing on solutions specific to Microsoft applications including Sharepoint and Exchange, and hence delivers a view of cloud storage as block volumes.

Cirtas is developing its BlueJet storage controller deployment in data centers, making cloud-accessible storage operate as if it were onsite. Cirtas appears to be working on block-based approaches, but details are still slim.

TwinStrata distributes CloudArray, software that can be deployed as a virtual appliance. Customers can access the virtual appliance through iSCSI, a common enterprise block-based interface, then go to internal or external cloud storage offerings. The company’s CloudArray product page has a lengthy list of features including typical enterprise requirements for thin provisioning, snapshots, compression and more.

Gladinet approaches this market from the desktop (as compared to server applications) and aims to make the experience of using cloud storage similar to that of plugging in an external USB drive. In addition to its Cloud Desktop product, it offers a Cloud Attached File Server, which could be used for business applications.

Panzura builds what it calls an Application Cloud Controller, which appears to be packaged as an appliance and to support standard block and file interfaces to public or private clouds. The company touts is ability to work with standard Microsoft applications such as Sharepoint and SQL Server. Panzura also supports content delivery networks.

CTERA has a broad offering for getting storage into the cloud including their Portal for Internet and Managed Service Providers to offer their own cloud storage offerings and make use of larger public cloud options on the back end. The company also offers an appliance for small business that includes local storage, and a smaller, router-like device for the SOHO market that makes any external USB drive “cloud-enabled” with secure backup and syncing.

Nasuni delivers the Nasuni Filer, a software-based virtual appliance that resides on a customers local server and employs encryption and various deduplication and encryption options before making use of one or multiple public cloud providers. The company is focused on file access protocols and currently servers the Windows market exclusively.

Oxygen has little information on its website other than a sparse splash page about its virtual file system and several public cloud providers. Its product is expected in July.

A couple of public cloud storage providers have gone so far as to provide this kind of gateway functionality themselves. For example, Nirvanix offers a CloudNAS software product in the category of “standard-based access” that enterprises can install on a local server. Iron Mountain offers its own gateway products as well that customers can deploy on site.

Gateway products are generally a win for all sides. The public cloud storage providers get another on-ramp to further the footprint of their services reach.  End customers get to take advantage of public cloud storage functionality without having to become cloud computing API experts. And the gateway providers get to broker these transactions. It’s too early to tell who will lead the pack, but all will play an instrumental role in growing the cloud storage market.

To learn more about cloud computing, join us tomorrow and Thursday at Structure here in San Francisco.

Gary Orenstein is host of The Cloud Computing Show

Howtoforge: "This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on a Fedora 13 server. I will show how to create image-based virtual machines and also virtual machines that use a logical volume (LVM)."(author unknown)00435779240360818060

Help Net Security: "IEEE announced the ratification of IEEE 802.3ba 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s Ethernet, a new standard governing 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s Ethernet operations."(author unknown)0056313341619808454211138767068493577019015638881336344922550651457521918499360507963736612539851918

NTT America, a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), and a global IP network services provider, today announced the company’s Global IP Network Business Unit vice president, Michael Wheeler, will speak at the OTTcon East conference at the Atlanta Conference Center Holiday Inn Select in Atlanta, Georgia. Mr. Wheeler will speak on the topic of “Leveraging Infrastructure Assets to Get with the Program,”on Thursday, June 17, 2010 from 3:15 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. EDT.
Complete info at Benzinga, FoxBusiness and MarketWatch.(author unknown)

A week of World Cup mania has passed and the traffic online and at sites like Twitter have reached some impressive highs. In Twitter’s case, the network hit a record during the Japan-Cameroon game on June 14 of 2,940 tweets per second, only to be surpassed last night at the end of the Lakers/Celtics basketball championship game, which averaged 3,085 tweets per second. On a normal day, that number stands closer to 750.

Many of those who were tweeting up a storm about the vuvuzelas and the bad calls by referees may have been at work: Cisco’s ScanSafe SaaS Web security service notes that corporate web traffic was up 27 percent globally during World Cup matches taking place during working hours. The Cisco note goes on to say that malware tied to the World Cup is on the rise as well (both hackers and bloggers are all aware of the key word effect, apparently), although that could just be a pitch for the company’s security software.

More on Social Networks

• Twitter Annotations Are Coming — What Do They Mean For Twitter and the Web? Tech Insider
• Is Quora Blocking Access by Facebook Employees? Tech Insider
• Facebook Revenue May Be Approaching $1B Tech Insider
• When Is a Twitter Trend Not a Trend? When It’s Promoted Tech Insider

Cisco calculated that on June 11, the day the games began, of the roughly 80.6 billion spam messages that were sent, 257 million of those sent each hour were related to the World Cup. That led Cisco to estimate that more than 3 billion such messages were sent — or 4 percent of all global spam.

In other data points, Akamai’s continued look at the World Cup’s effect on overall Internet traffic continues at its specialty site. The content-delivery network, which beefed up its infrastructure leading into the tournament in expectation of record traffic, said that on average, World Cup-related traffic has been driving close to 1Terabit/second of traffic. And that’s on top of the content Akamai already delivers. AlertSite, a website performance measurement company, also noted that site load times for major portals, news providers and live streaming sites slowed down during gameplay.

A week of World Cup mania has passed and the traffic online and at sites like Twitter have reached some impressive highs. In Twitter’s case, the network hit a record during the Japan-Cameroon game on June 14 of 2,940 tweets per second, only to be surpassed last night at the end of the Lakers/Celtics basketball championship game, which averaged 3,085 tweets per second. On a normal day, that number stands closer to 750.

Many of those who were tweeting up a storm about the vuvuzelas and the bad calls by referees may have been at work: Cisco’s ScanSafe SaaS Web security service notes that corporate web traffic was up 27 percent globally during World Cup matches taking place during working hours. The Cisco note goes on to say that malware tied to the World Cup is on the rise as well (both hackers and bloggers are all aware of the key word effect, apparently), although that could just be a pitch for the company’s security software.

More on Social Networks

• Tweeting About an Execution: Why Not? Tech Insider
• Twitter Annotations Are Coming — What Do They Mean For Twitter and the Web? Tech Insider
• Is Quora Blocking Access by Facebook Employees? Tech Insider
• Facebook Revenue May Be Approaching $1B Tech Insider

Cisco calculated that on June 11, the day the games began, of the roughly 80.6 billion spam messages that were sent, 257 million of those sent each hour were related to the World Cup. That led Cisco to estimate that more than 3 billion such messages were sent — or 4 percent of all global spam.

In other data points, Akamai’s continued look at the World Cup’s effect on overall Internet traffic continues at its specialty site. The content-delivery network, which beefed up its infrastructure leading into the tournament in expectation of record traffic, said that on average, World Cup-related traffic has been driving close to 1Terabit/second of traffic. And that’s on top of the content Akamai already delivers. AlertSite, a website performance measurement company, also noted that site load times for major portals, news providers and live streaming sites slowed down during gameplay.

Forrester released their new wave report:  The Forrester Wave™: Elastic Caching Platforms, Q2 2010 where they listed GigaSpaces, IBM, Oracle, and Terracotta as leading vendors in the field. In this post I'd like to take some time to explain what some of these terms mean, and why they’re important to you. I’ll start with a definition of Elastic Data Grid (Elastic Caching), how it is different then other caching and NoSQL alternatives, and more importantly -- I'll illustrate how it works through some real code examples.

You can read the full story here.

Source: WTF is Elastic Data Grid? (By Example) (http://natishalom.typepad.com/nati_shaloms_blog/2010/06/wtf-is-elastic-data-grid-by-example.html) by Nati Shalom

Nati Shalom17300705355592364067139668151858381027041757844913523521992307959025796482674936136594638644301496511792211373539068100717639983208334300460

ServerWatch: "The Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP software of the popular LAMP stack used by Web servers that the SM10000 is optimized around, will run unmodified on the SM10000, no recompile needed. 'We are a LAMP stack crushing machine,' boasted Feldman."(author unknown)

Eucalyptus Systems, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based cloud computing startup, has launched a new commercial version of Eucalyptus, an open-source private cloud software. Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE) 2.0 is a major upgrade to the commercial edition launched in September 2009. The big news in the new Eucalyptus EE 2.0 is that is supports Windows virtual machines (VMs). Eucalyptus now supports all most major hypervisors — VMware, KVM, and Xen and Microsoft’s Hyper V.

“So far all the apps we supported ran on Linux and with this release we can now support Windows-based apps,” said CEO Marten Mickos, pointing that with this new version, the company has “improved scalability.” He explained that the company is currently focused on capturing the on-premise private cloud market, and support for Windows applications has been one of the most requested features for the paid version of the software.

The new version of the EE software also adds new accounting and user management features. It allows folks to switch from Amazon’s EC2 to VMware-based cloud offerings. Eucalyptus EE 2.0 also comes with a SAN adaptor that allows folks to connect a Eucalyptus cloud directly to a high-performance Storage Area Network (SAN), which comes with increased IO (input/output) performance and scalability, thereby allowing for much larger-scale clouds.

More on World Cup

• Technology Quiets the Vuvuzela in Real Time Tech Insider
• Why the World Cup Matters to Carriers Tech Insider
• I’ve Got the Whole World (Cup) in My Hands! Tech Insider
• Akamai Beefs Up Network Ahead of the World Cup Tech Insider

“Most customers want that (Windows compatibility) and flexibility,” added Mickos, who joined the company in March 2010. He has been focusing the open-source-based company on enterprise customers, perhaps in order to justify its rumored $100 million valuation. Eucalyptus is trying to carve out a niche in an increasingly crowded marketplace that includes other open-source offerings such as Open Nebula. Startups such as VMops nee Cloud.com are also vying for the same market, not to mention larger players such as VMware. To learn more about cloud computing, join us at Structure 2010 June 23 & 24 in San Francisco.

Related content from GigaOM Pro:

1. For Open Cloud Computing, Look inside the Data Center.
2. Infrastructure market in review, Q1 2010

Photo of Marten Mickos courtesy of James Duncan Davidson via Flickr

nixCraft: "KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions Intel VT or AMD-V. How do I install KVM under CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.5?"(author unknown)1269559154520718004704178037229928216641152240762753697602560150295735273082175500263100095345470774

Two storage startups have launched in as many days this week, both offering variations on the theme that more data requires more storage, and faster networks (and impatient end users) require faster access to stored data. The trend has been building for years and I’ve covered it before, but between these two startups, the money going to other storage companies this year and the rumors of IBM buying Storwize, storage is quietly adapting to the data tsunami and changes in customer (and end user) demand.

Anobit's solid-state drives

Anobit, a startup backed by Battery Ventures and Pitango Ventures, launched this morning touting its use of MultiLevel Cell (MLC) Flash-based solid-state drives. MLC Flash is cheaper but generally less reliable than the more common Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash drives, so Anobit’s technology — which improves reliability — enable cheaper solid-state storage options for the enterprise, where reliability matters.

Yesterday saw Kaminario, a Sequoia and Pitango Venture Capital-backed startup, emerge from stealth mode offering its K2 appliance. It delivers faster access to more information via a blade-based DRAM array, which has cost advantages over Flash solid-state drives. Startup Violin Memory, maker of Flash and DRAM storage appliances, plans to make a big announcement tomorrow.

More on World Cup

• Technology Quiets the Vuvuzela in Real Time Tech Insider
• Why the World Cup Matters to Carriers Tech Insider
• I’ve Got the Whole World (Cup) in My Hands! Tech Insider
• Akamai Beefs Up Network Ahead of the World Cup Tech Insider

Fundamentally the trend in storage is about bringing memory closer to the processor and packing in as much information while optimizing for either cost or speed. Increasing the reliability of faster Flash-based solid-state hard drives and reducing the cost of such drives, as Anobit does, is also occurring. There’s also a fundamental shift in the way some companies think about storage — that is, not requiring that all data be persistent or written to a drive somewhere — that could help some startups out.

So in case you’ve been filtering out all the storage tidbits, it’s worth pointing out that storage is sexy once again. We’ll be discussing storage and other data center hardware trends at our Structure 2010 conference next week in San Francisco.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub req’d): Data Domain and the Storage Market

Two storage startups have launched in as many days this week, both offering variations on the theme that more data requires more storage, and faster networks (and impatient end users) require faster access to stored data. The trend has been building for years and I’ve covered it before, but between these two startups, the money going to other storage companies this year and the rumors of IBM buying Storwize, storage is quietly adapting to the data tsunami and changes in customer (and end user) demand.

Anobit's solid-state drives

Anobit, a startup backed by Battery Ventures and Pitango Ventures, launched this morning touting its use of MultiLevel Cell (MLC) Flash-based solid-state drives. MLC Flash is cheaper but generally less reliable than the more common Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash drives, so Anobit’s technology — which improves reliability — enable cheaper solid-state storage options for the enterprise, where reliability matters.

Yesterday saw Kaminario, a Sequoia and Pitango Venture Capital-backed startup, emerge from stealth mode offering its K2 appliance. It delivers faster access to more information via a blade-based DRAM array, which has cost advantages over Flash solid-state drives. Startup Violin Memory, maker of Flash and DRAM storage appliances, plans to make a big announcement tomorrow.

More on World Cup

• Why the World Cup Matters to Carriers Tech Insider
• I’ve Got the Whole World (Cup) in My Hands! Tech Insider
• Akamai Beefs Up Network Ahead of the World Cup Tech Insider

Fundamentally the trend in storage is about bringing memory closer to the processor and packing in as much information while optimizing for either cost or speed. Increasing the reliability of faster Flash-based solid-state hard drives and reducing the cost of such drives, as Anobit does, is also occurring. There’s also a fundamental shift in the way some companies think about storage — that is, not requiring that all data be persistent or written to a drive somewhere — that could help some startups out.

So in case you’ve been filtering out all the storage tidbits, it’s worth pointing out that storage is sexy once again. We’ll be discussing storage and other data center hardware trends at our Structure 2010 conference next week in San Francisco.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub req’d): Data Domain and the Storage Market