According to Network Computing Reports' recently released "Research: Private Cloud Vision vs. Reality," 21% of 414 respondents currently have private clouds, and an additional 30% have plans under way to launch clouds. Vendors are responding with upgrades and new tools to manage and deploy clouds--Eucalyptus Systems and NetSocket are two of the latest.
On-premise cloud provider Eucalyptus is rolling out a new version of its open source product today that aligns the OS community and enterprises on the same platform so they can contribute, build, run and manage cloud development and deployments. NetSocket recently announced its Cloud Experience Manager (CEM) IP product, geared at managing the end-user experience in different types of environments.
One of the new features in Eucalyptus 3.1 is FastStart, which enables users to deploy on-premises, Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service clouds in less than 20 minutes, the company said.
Other enhancements include Eucalyptus 3 source code availability on GitHub, enterprise platform deployments for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vCenter 5 and community project management capabilities that provide support for defects, fixes and feature requests.
With the release of version 3.1, organizations will be able to accelerate their on-premises, private cloud deployments, says Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos. "Most private cloud platforms can support a high-availability application, but in addition to that Eucalyptus takes care of its own" cloud so that if anything goes down there's a copy running on another machine that steps in immediately, he says.
"Long term, everything will run on clouds--both private public and hybrid. But the most common use today is scalable Web services," says Mickos.
Sporting goods company Puma was using a variety of hosting platforms, including AWS, for several of its websites without a lot of documentation, which created headaches, says Jay Basnight, team head of digital strategy at Puma. "What we saw was by deploying on a managed hosting platform with Eucalyptus, we could save 35 to 50%" in costs, he says.
Puma began by migrating its website to Eucalyptus 2 and relaunching it on a private cloud. "We built it from the ground up; we wanted control," Basnight said. With Eucalyptus, "We could do a lot of different things like use load balancers instead of a one-size-fits-all" model, whereas when the company had so many sites hosted on AWS, there was no "well-defined chain for accountability if something went wrong." Puma was also concerned about maintaining privacy since it collects a lot of user information and didn't want its data misused.
Puma has since moved to Eucalyptus 3, which Basnight says is more robust. Version 2 "had some rough edges, and when we moved to [version] 3 we handled those issues." With version 2, for example, the company wasn't able to launch new virtual machines inside the cloud environment, he says.
Now, says Basnight, Puma centralized all of its systems "into one data center, with one flexible environment where our agencies and other programmers can have a little more freedom and flexibility, and we can maintain some tight technical brand infrastructure."
The new features are available to customers today.
Next: NetSocket Launches Cloud Management Tool
