Nebula, Open Source, OpenStack, Venture Funding

Nebula Gets $25 Million for OpenStack Cloud Enabling

Nebula, the cloud systems company, has closed its Series B financing round, involving over $25M of additional equity and debt financing. The new round was led by Comcast Ventures, the venture capital arm of Comcast and NBCUniversal, with significant participation from Highland Capital Partners and included Kleiner Perkins, Innovation Endeavors and industry luminaries Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram. Investors that participated include Harris Barton, William Hearst III, Scott McNealy and Maynard Webb. Additionally, Silicon Valley Bank is providing additional debt and credit facilities to the company.

“We’re delighted to have the support of investors who have such remarkable track records of success as we continue on our path to make on-premise private cloud computing a reality for all businesses,” said Chris C. Kemp, Nebula CEO and co-founder.

Nebula is now powering next-generation cloud infrastructures in market-leading biotech, financial services and media companies in a private beta program that began in March. This investment will allow Nebula to expand the number of companies that will be able to participate in the beta, continue to expand its product and engineering teams, build a petascale test system, and accelerate development and testing of its product.

“We invest in companies that innovate with open source projects and teams that are focused on creating game-changing disruption,” said Louis Toth, Managing Director at Comcast Ventures. “After spending several years looking at this market, we are confident that Nebula is the company that will bring private cloud infrastructure to the enterprise.”

Nebula, co-founded by former NASA CTO and OpenStack co-founder Chris C. Kemp, has assembled a team of more than 50 engineers inspired by the opportunity to pioneer a new era of enterprise computing. In addition to Dave Withers, former Dell Executive and Senior Vice President of Field Operations, and Jon Mittelhauser, Netscape co-founder and VP of Engineering, Nebula now employs four OpenStack project technical leads, and the engineers responsible for a large percentage of the code in OpenStack.


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Oracle’s Cloud – An Enterprise Cloud for Business-Critical Applications

For enterprise class cloud services, companies need a broad, comprehensive and flexible platform for their applications. The Oracle Cloud, which offers a broad set of best-in-class, integrated services that are secure, elastic, and 100% open standards-based, offering organizations choice in development and deployment of business critical applications. In his General Session at Cloud Expo New York, Sandeep Banerjie, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Public Cloud, discusses how these subscription-based services can speed your application development and deployment time, offer the flexibility of application portability, and the ease with which you can access, use, and manage them.

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Announcing the Cloud Maturity Model for RFPs

Following a number of months of work with a team effort of industry experts and requirements from key user groups like government agencies here in Canada, version 1.00 of our Cloud Maturity Model for RFPs is now complete and available for purchase.
Many businesses are at the point they believe the Cloud does indeed offer them considerable ROI potential but are finding that the supplier landscape and multitude of industry terminology is confusing and daunting.
This means it will slow their procurement and so both customers and suppliers lose out.

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Miscellaneous IT

Mind the Gap – Service-Oriented Management

IT management used to be about specialization.  We built skills in a swim-lane approach – deep and narrow channels of talent where you could go from point A to B and back in a pretty straight line, all the time being able to see the bottom of the pool.  In essence, we operated like a well-oiled Olympic swim team.  Each team member had a specialty in their specific discipline, and once in a while we’d all get together for a good ole’ medley event.

And because this was our talent base, we developed tools that would focus their skills in those specific areas.  It looked something like this:

"Mind the Gap"

But is this the way IT is actually consumed by the business?  Consumption is by the service, not by the individual layer.  Consumption looks more like this:

"Mind the Gap"

From a user perspective, the individual layers are irrelevant.  It’s about the results of all the layers combined, or to put a common term around it, it’s about a service.  Email is a service, so is Saleforce.com, but both of those have very different implications from a management perspective.

A failure in any one of these underlying layers can dramatically affect to user productivity.  For example, if a user is consuming your email service, and there is a storage layer issue, they may see reduced performance.  The same “result” could be seen if there is a host, network layer, bandwidth or local client issue.  So when a user requests assistance, where do you start?

Most organizations will work from one side of the “pool” to the other using escalations between the lanes as specific layers are eliminated, starting with Help Desk services and ending up in the infrastructure team.  But is this the most efficient way to provide good service to our customers?  And what if the service was Salesforce.com and not something we fully manage internally? Is the same methodology still applicable?

Here is where we need to start looking at a service-level management approach.  Extract the individual layers and combine them into an operating unit that delivers the service in question.  The viewpoint should be from how the service is consumed, not what individually makes up that service.  Measurement, metrics, visibility and response should span the lanes in the same direction as consumption.  This will require us to alter the tools and processes we use to respond to events.

Some scary thoughts here, if you consider the number of “services” our customers consume, and the implications of a hybrid cloud world.  But the alternative is even more frightening.  As platforms that we do not fully manage (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) become more integral to our environments, the blind spots in our vision will expand.  So, the question is more of a “when” do we move in this direction rather than an “if.”  We can continue to swim our lanes, and maybe we can shave off a tenth of a second here or there.  But, true achievement will come when we can look across all the lanes and see the world from the eyes of our consumers.

 

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NuoDB Releases New Beta

“A major goal in developing NuoDB has been the ability to scale elastically on hundreds of cores while also providing better performance than traditional centralized OLTP databases like MySQL,” said Barry Morris, CEO and Founder of NuoDB, as his latest start-up recently released Beta 8 of its groundbreaking web-scale SQL database.

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EAT Signs Contract with NaviSite

NaviSite, Inc., a provider of enterprise-class hosting, managed application, managed messaging and managed cloud services, has been selected by EAT, a high street food retailer, to provide the NaviCloud platform Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for its new customer facing web system.

Following a period involving continuous expansion, EAT decided to launch a new customer facing web application. An external host facility was sought to meet high availability and flexible resource demands, whilst providing advanced security for customer transactions. EAT has long operated on a private cloud platform, allowing its 2000+ employees across 120 stores to work on a secure private network, but in order to launch the customer facing application, the hosting solution had to meet a strict set of requirements including full PCI Compliance, VMware compatibility, high availability and private VPN capabilities. All of this had to be achievable in a very short time scale. Navisite accepted the challenge and delivered.
Since the launch of the first EAT shop in 1996, EAT is now able to offer a full range of good, fresh and handmade food and drinks to customers online. With the new web application, customers can order their food to be delivered directly, Monday to Friday. The new platform also enables customers to place lunch orders on the same day as delivery, before 10am.

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Demystifying Amazon Web Services [infographic]

Our friends at Newvem are at it again. They’ve just released an incredible infographic on Demystifying Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The new infographic demonstrates the size of Amazon’s cloud and reveals usage analysis including a deep dive on reserve instances.

And, since this comes from Newvem – the experts in usage analytics – it also provides recommendations for how to reduce costs and make your AWS cloud more efficient!

Dome9 secures AWS EC2 instances by providing automated and centralised security management, with on-demand secure access. Learn more at http://www.dome9.com/amazon-aws-ec2-security.

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Database Scalability Needed for Full-Blown Cloud Applications

“We have seen excellent strength in social networking and gaming apps, the growth has been phenomenal,” observed Cory Isaacson, CEO of CodeFutures Corporation, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Most consumers have no idea they are ‘playing in the cloud,’” Isaacson continued, “but that is where a majority of these apps are hosted – and very successfully so.”
Cloud Computing Journal: How fast will the last remaining barriers to enterprise-wide cloud adoption melt away – are secure public clouds feasible, for example, or only private ones?
Cory Isaacson: The barriers are evaporating quickly, but the database tier still remains a big issue. The reliability and performance need to improve so that enterprise customers feel comfortable trusting their environment to the cloud. Another factor that will help is using the cloud as a disaster recovery (DR) backup – that will be a smart strategy and a good early move for many enterprise organizations.

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Cloud Encryption and Process-Level Control

If you know a bit about software and operating systems (OS), you’ve heard about “processes”. Modern operating systems, such as Linux or Windows, will run your software applications inside separate processes. This is an OS technique for isolating different software. For example you can make sure that whatever your web server is doing – it cannot touch the memory of your database server; and vice versa.
This sounds like a good thing for security, and it is. It is also essential for reliability and stability. Bugs in one software application will less often cause trouble in other software applications, even if they are running simultaneously in the same physical memory, due to being separated into different “processes”.

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The cloud news categorized.