Cloud Computing Conference Provider Round Up

A number of leading cloud computing providers descended on the Santa Clara Convention Center last week for the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo. Here's our round-up of the most exciting and interesting providers that were at the show.

3tera
3tera announced the release of AppLogic 2.7, which adds automatic diagnostic and self-healing capabilities to their cloud computing platform. AppLogic is an integrated cloud platform that can be deployed via a browser. It can be used to create a private cloud within an enterprise and, also by service providers looking to deploy a cloud platform for use by their end-user customers. 3tera claims its platform leads the industry with the lowest cost of operation.

For more, check out our profile on 3tera.

AppZero
AppZero solves one of the big roadblocks of wider adoption of cloud computing: vendor lock-in. AppZero's Virtual Application Appliance makes it easy for customers to move applications from one cloud to another, regardless of vendor, and without modification to the application, while separating it from the operating system (OS) and the underlying infrastructure. As result, customers gain control over their deployments and the freedom to move applications easily from the data center to the cloud and back and/or to another cloud provider.

Akamai
Akamai's solutions help improve the reliability, scalability and security of Web sites and applications delivered over the Internet. Akamai is to cloud computing what BASF is to consumer products: they don't provide cloud services, but they work to make those services better. Web and application performance are critical when it comes to cloud computing, especially as more businesses and consumers become accustomed to having a flawless user experience with cloud-based services.

A new partnership with Verizon Business seeks to capitalize on Akamai's strengths by delivering them as part of a complete managed service offering.

For more, check out our profile on Akamai.

CloudSwitch
CloudSwitch helps solve some of the big issues that keep customers from adopting cloud computing: data security, application portability and vendor lock-in. CloudSwitch is delivered as a software appliance deployed within the customer's data center. It enables applications to remain integrated within the enterprise and managed as if they were running locally. As a result, applications can be easily moved to the cloud and back again, while maintaining security and control, and avoiding lock-in.

For more, check out our profile on CloudSwitch.

CSS
CSS delivers a variety of tools to help companies manage their storage deployments on Amazon S3. Their Cloudbuddy platform includes a desktop tool for managing data in the cloud, a web-based analytics tool and an automation tool for application deployment. Their Cloud Wizard is a software as a service (SaaS) solution for creating Lotus Notes applications. 

GoGrid
GoGrid offers a fast, flexible, and highly-scalable way to deploy and manage server and storage infrastructure. Customers pay based on the amount of RAM deployed and data transfer used; there are no set up fees or long-term contracts. Free real-time f5 load balancing and 10GB of storage are included. They also offer an extensive library of server images that improves application deployment. GoGrid can also be used to create a hybrid cloud environment that accesses a public cloud during peak times.

For more, check out our profile on GoGrid.

Intel
Intel is developing a cloud computing strategy based on "growing the cloud from the inside out," as they look to leverage on-demand infrastructure and software as service solutions, with plans to develop their own private cloud environment. Intel's goal is to use cloud-based services in order to drive agility and lower cost, whether those clouds are external or on-premise.

At the same time, they're focused on building processors purpose-built for cloud providers of all stripes. In fact, their technology can be found in the data centers of many of today's leading and largest cloud computing providers. As the company states, while the processor and architecture may appear as a small concern, in reality, it is one of the core elements of it since it plays a big role in performance and efficiency.

NeoAccel
NeoAccel is another provider looking to solve one of the big cloud computing issues of the day: security. NeoAccel helps eliminate the risk of putting corporate data in the cloud by protecting the data at its origin, in transit, and at destination nodes. They provide end-to-end security from Windows, Macintosh, and Linux end-points all the way to application servers, whether physical servers or virtual servers running VMware or Xen.

New Relic
New Relic RPM is an on-demand application performance management solution for web applications developed in Java, Ruby, and JRuby, whether running in a public cloud or on-premise in a data center. New Relic was built for cloud computing, allowing for automatic detection of new application instances, while instantly correlating them into a single view of your environment with instant reporting of performance data. Setup takes minutes and access is via a web browser or iPhone. To date, over 2,500 companies are using New Relic to monitor more than 25,000 application instances

For more, check out our profile on New Relic.

Objectivity
Objectivity is not a newcomer to the database world, but its object-oriented database could be the perfect fit for cloud computing. The Objectivity/DB was architected as a completely distributed and federated database platform that leverages the commodity hardware model associated with cloud-based environments. It can support up to 64,000 separate nodes each with its own database within a single federation, and provides a single logical view of the databases. Data integrity and performance are maintained since there's no need to add a front-end, in memory caching layer. It also handles a variety of data management features and hooks for whatever security mechanism is needed.

OpSource
OpSource covers cloud computing in two major categories. The OpSource Cloud delivers on-demand server infrastructure to customers through a private network to extend the capabilities of an enterprise datacenter.  OpSource On-Demand is a complete platform – hardware, software, application management and end-user support – companies can use to deliver applications over the Web. Essentially, OpSource becomes the customer's partner and advisor, and together with the OpSource platform, the services are delivered under the name and brand of the customer. Features include on-demand billing services, customer usage analytics, and end-user support. OpSource Connect handles the integration of legacy applications with SaaS-based applications.

For more, check out our profile on OpSource.

ParaScale
ParaScale provides cloud computing infrastructure services that allow companies to aggregate disk storage on commodity Linux hardware to create pools of storage at low cost with high performance. ParaScale Cloud Storage can be used by enterprises to build private cloud storage and service providers to create cloud services. ParaScale's software-only solution leverages commodity servers to drive down cost and provide a more effective way to manage storage capabilities. It delivers a storage cloud that is highly-scalable, has massive capacity, and parallel throughput.

For more, check out our profile on ParaScale.

PerspecSys
PerspecSys tackles the issue of data security by allowing companies to run their applications in the cloud, while maintaining their data behind the corporate firewall. PerspecSys runs between the user's desktop and their datacenter's firewall. It intercepts the data moving to a public cloud and dynamically replaces the "real" data with "replacement" data. This is particularly important for sensitive and restricted data that cannot move outside the company or, due to regulatory compliance, cannot move beyond state, federal or national borders.

For more, check out our profile on PerspecSys.

Rackspace
The Rackspace Cloud is a suite of three cloud computing infrastructure services -- Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers, and Cloud Files -- that can be used for web hosting, spinning up capacity-on-demand virtualized servers, and online storage for all types of media content. Cloud Sites is billed as a "load-and-go" platform that provides essentially unlimited scalability for web sites hosted on the platform. With Cloud Server, users get a cost-effective way to customize, provision, and manage servers quickly and easily and with full root access to the Linux servers. Cloud Files gives customers a reliable, scalable, and affordable storage solution for backing up and archiving static media.

For more, check out our profile on Rackspace.

RightScale
RightScale's solution helps customers get onto the cloud fast with their Cloud-Ready ServerTemplates and best practices architectures. Complexity and administration are decreased as automation is provided across the cloud-deployment life cycle. Visibility is achieved at all levels of the deployment, allowing customers to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot applications with complete control. RightScale's platform "eliminates lock-in with cloud portability" by allowing customers to choose their development language, environment, stack, data store, and cloud provider.

For more, check out our profile on RightScale.

SOASTA
SOASTA occupies a sweet spot in cloud computing. First, the proliferation of Web sites, Web-based and on-demand applications means that testing and performance is more important than ever. Not only can these be difficult to diagnose but also it will continue to grow in importance. Secondly, load and performance testing is a perfect fit for cloud computing, since the infrastructure required doesn't need to reside in the enterprise, thus freeing up data center resources for use in driving the business.

SOASTA's CloudTest addresses these issues by providing affordable load, performance, functional, and UI/Ajax testing capabilities that simulate real world scenarios. It supports all of the most commonly used browsers and the most common protocols (Soap, Http(S), Html, Ajax, etc). While it was originally "built on the Cloud to test inside the Cloud," CloudTest is also available as a standalone appliance for testing behind your firewall.

For more, check out our profile on SOASTA.

Switch and Data
Switch and Data has provided network neutral data center and Internet exchange services supporting the needs of the world's leading online brands. Switch and Data provides safe and secure network exchange points to connect with each other, their customers and the Internet. The company is to be acquired by Equinix and will combine Switch and Data's 34 data center in 22 markets in North America with Equinix's North American, European and Asia Pacific operations, to form a global operation that spans 34 markets around the globe.

Unisys
Unisys is known for building and managing mission-critical computing environments. It's natural that their cloud computing solutions are focused on enterprise customers, where issues of security loom large when it comes to using a public cloud. Unisys Secure Cloud is their public cloud offering with added security features that allows customers to tap server resources on-demand. Customers can also deploy new and existing applications on the Secure Cloud platform.

The Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution, announced at the Cloud Computing Conference, provides a way to build a private cloud within the enterprise. Enhanced security can be achieved with their Stealth data protection technology, which "cloaks data from detection as it moves through the network."

For more, check out our profile on Unisys.

Yahoo!
Yahoo! is one of the most popular Web sites in the world with 600 million unique visits per month. A big reason it can manage such volume has to do with Traffic Server, which enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for an entire cloud computing environment – at incredibly high scale.

Yahoo! made big news at the Cloud Computing Conference by announcing it would open source this technology. They hope to create a virtuous circle among the open source community and organizations of all types that are looking to use the cloud.

Also, Yahoo! announced an update to Hadoop with new features and bug fixes continue to improve robustness, security, performance, and operability of Hadoop for ongoing large-scale deployments. Hadoop continues to grow in popularity and, today, provides the framework for Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and several content and ad services.

Zetta
Zetta has tackled one of most popular areas of cloud computing: on-demand storage. But what sets Zetta apart is they built it from the ground up for enterprise customers looking to the cloud for storage capacity. While it looks and acts a lot like a local file server, Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage is accessed over the Internet via standard protocols such as NFS and CIFS. Through the service, customers can store and retrieve up to hundreds of petabytes of unstructured data, without purchasing any hardware or paying for unused capacity.

For more, check out our profile on Zetta.