Startup Cloud.com introduces open source IaaS software

This was a busy week for Cloud.com. The company came out of stealth mode, changed its name from VMOps to Cloud.com, raised an $11 million Series B round of funding with a new lead investor Index Ventures, and launched a new solution called CloudStack, which is described as a comprehensive open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management, and configuration of multitier and multitenant private and public cloud services for enterprises and service providers.

More and more organizations are looking to the cloud to provide answer for many of their IT initiatives. However, cloud technologies and use cases are fast changing and quickly evolving, so companies would do well to plan things out and possibly take a heterogeneous and open approach when designing their strategy. Companies may start out sticking their big toe in the water by building out a private cloud solution, and then migrate or span over into a public cloud down the road.

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Cloud.com’s CloudStack offering is an open source solution, but is not limited to open source virtualization hypervisors. Sure, it supports Xen and KVM, but it also supports VMware out of the box. The infrastructure as a service solution comes in three distinct products: CloudStack Enterprise Edition, CloudStack Service Provider Edition, and CloudStack Community Edition. And through the implementation of common cloud frameworks like the Amazon Web Services API, Citrix Cloud Center (C3) and VMware vCloud initiative, Cloud.com provides an open, hybrid environment that interoperates with a user’s existing cloud initiatives.

This week, I had the chance to speak with Peder Ulander, the CMO at Cloud.com, to find out how they look at the cloud and how open source technologies could play a major role in making the cloud possible.

InfoWorld: There’s a lot of news lately around the cloud computing market. Why do you believe it is an important trend, and can you talk about some of the benefits?

Ulander: The cloud computing industry is still very much an emerging market, but one that is growing rapidly. Global service providers and enterprise IT teams are turning toward the cloud for two distinct reasons. Service providers are looking to offer cloudlike services to increase revenue opportunities while enterprise IT teams are looking to deploy private clouds to increase both the efficiency of IT operations as well as to provide the elastic computing environments users are demanding.

CIOs and service providers expect that the cloud computing model will offer a better, more cost-effective means for organizations to acquire and utilize IT. Cloud computing promises reduced CapEx and less capacity management and planning, resulting in significant cost savings. In addition to cost savings, cloud computing delivers higher efficiency, limitless scalability, and faster and easier deployment of new services and systems to the end user by shifting the delivery of IT resources to an on-demand model.

InfoWorld: What should organizations think about when looking to deploy an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud?

Ulander: Today, enterprises and service providers trying to build their own IaaS clouds face a daunting challenge. First they must integrate a patchwork of software, including hypervisor, management software, user interface, network virtualization, and storage management. Once the software stack is put together, they are faced with a costly requirement to build using specialized storage and networking equipment that supports proprietary extensions required by hypervisor vendors.

To avoid this, CIOs and service providers should think about finding an IaaS solution which can be seamlessly deployed into their existing environment. Key attributes should be:

• Support for multiple hypervisors, storage platforms, and network architectures.
• An architecture that supports complete isolation of users’ machines, storage, and traffic.
• A scalable architecture that can support thousands of servers and multiple data centers.

InfoWorld: What role do you believe open source has played in the momentum of the cloud computing market?

Ulander: Open source virtualization platforms, such as the Xen and KVM hypervisors, have driven the emergence of cloud computing and are playing a huge role. The biggest public clouds today are built on Xen, and now we have large enterprises that are very excited about leveraging Xen in the enterprise. Ultimately, we believe open source will play the same role in the booming IaaS cloud market.

Web 2.0 services, social gaming sites, research organization, and government are already building or operating open source clouds. It is very likely that the next Twitter or YouTube will be built on open source cloud platforms.

InfoWorld: Can you explain how charge back and billing occur in a multitenant cloud and what should users know about?

Ulander: Billing and charge back are critical considerations for anyone deploying a cloud. For public cloud providers, it is necessary to have detailed usage records that provide granular data on how customers are consuming everything from storage and VMs to IP addresses and network bandwidth. Licensing of software is also fundamentally changing with the emergence of cloud computing. Many public clouds are now selling software instances by the hour with the click of a mouse, and many software vendors are embracing this model.

InfoWorld: Security comes up a lot in almost any discussion around the cloud.  How comfortable should users be with the security of the cloud?

Ulander: It is important for end-users to understand that public cloud environments can be architected to offer a very high level of isolation and security, certainly equal to any other managed service. Despite this, it is one of the most common concerns voiced when companies consider moving applications and data to public clouds. Cloud environments, when built correctly, can offer complete isolation between guests at the memory, CPU, storage and network level. Some public cloud providers even are offering “hosted private clouds,” in which users are segregated onto their own physical infrastructure to accommodate compliance requirements.

For companies looking to keep everything inside the corporate data center, private clouds can provide this same level of isolation and security. This can be important for organizations that are looking to limit access to environments, or meet specific regulatory requirements for privacy or security.

InfoWorld: What role does open source play within your solution, and how does it fit into your strategy?

Ulander: Cloud.com is an open source company, so open source software plays an enormous role in our product and our company DNA. Our core platform, CloudStack, is an open source product, which can be downloaded. Not only have we made our platform available under the GPLv3 license, we also support many other open source products, including storage platforms, open source hypervisors such as Xen and KVM, and popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and Fedora.

There is incredible demand today for an open source cloud platform that is production quality, feature rich, and easy to administer. With the success we’ve had building production-quality environments for large organizations, we’ve learned a lot about building stable and scalable software. We’re very excited to put this tool into the public domain and see the different types of use cases that it generates, and we look forward to incorporating lots of feedback and hopefully code contributions from the community.

InfoWorld: This week, you made a big announcement around Cloud.com and open source. Why is this significant, and what can we expect from it moving forward?

Ulander: This week, we announced Cloud.com as our new company name (we were formerly VMOps) as well as our open source, service provider, and enterprise editions of CloudStack, our IaaS cloud management software. This new offering is simple to deploy and yet incredibly feature rich. Because of this, it allows anyone to build, deploy, and manage a massively scalable and multitenant IaaS computing cloud. In addition, we are announcing an open source community where developers can go to share their ideas and realize the potential benefits of CloudStack. Through the implementation of common cloud frameworks like VMware’s vCloud initiative and Amazon EC2-style interfaces, CloudStack provides an open environment that interoperates with a user’s existing cloud deployment.

Thanks again to Peder Ulander for speaking with me.

This article, “Startup Cloud.com introduces open source IaaS software,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter and on your mobile device at infoworldmobile.com.