Global Hosting Providers Select Abiquo for Enterprise Cloud Management

A number of hosting providers around the world, including Blackmesh, Bluefire, i2k2 Networks and Vivavo, have selected Abiquo’s Enterprise Edition as their Platform of choice for Enterprise Cloud Management. Each of them are now true customers, paying fees under a full enterprise license agreement, another show of Abiquo’s increasing lead in the market.

Our  platform allows these providers to sell a set of compute, network, and storage resources as a Virtual Enterprise, giving their customers complete control of their own independent computing infrastructure, without the capital cost or maintenance requirements of physical infrastructure. Customers can request additional resources at any time, which can be allocated by the hosting provider in seconds.

“The Abiquo solution is both deeper and broader than any of the competitive solutions we tested,” said Jason Ford, CTO, BlackMesh. “We were particularly impressed by the flexibility and ease of use it will offer our customers, as well as by its support for all hypervisors, and the ability to seamlessly convert virtual images between them in a single drag and drop operation.”

After rigorous evaluation of multiple options, Abiquo was unanimously and independently selected by each of these leading service providers as the platform of choice. Abiquo’s Enterprise Edition provides a number of unique features that set it apart from competitive products

“We have extensively evaluated products from all the Cloud management vendors over the last six months,” said Jason Serda, managing director and CIO of BlueFire, a leading hosting provider and Dimension Data Group company. “Abiquo’s solution was the clear winner, providing superior capabilities particularly for our enterprise customers. For example, our clients will be able to automate the provisioning of virtual infrastructures available across six of our primary datacenter facilities. The combination of the Abiquo platform and IP developed in conjunction with our partners has enabled BlueFire to today provide a no compromise approach to give our customers complete flexibility to define their own environments – just like a physical datacenter, but without the need to maintain the infrastructure.”

It should come as no surprise that leading service providers want to offer Virtual Enterprises as a new line of business. According to IDC, Cloud computing is projected to reach $100.4 billion by 2016 or a 27 percent annual growth rate, which is more than five times the growth rate of the traditional, on-premise IT delivery/consumption model.

“We have seen the demand for managed private Clouds increase exponentially in 2010. With Abiquo’s Cloud management platform, we can sell and implement managed private Clouds to large enterprise customers quickly, while leveraging our existing infrastructure and billing system,” said Raj Vrach, CTO of i2k2 Networks. “We believe that many enterprises will eventually move to a managed hybrid Cloud model and Abiquo will enable i2k2 Networks customers to make that transition seamlessly.” i2k2 Networks will be deploying its managed Windows, Linux and Zimbra email hosting solutions to the Cloud in India and Canada using Abiquo’s platform.

Our solution is equally effective for enterprises of all sizes, providing complete control and management of both on-premise and globally deployed infrastructure through a single interface. Encompassing public, private and hybrid Cloud models, we can isolate the provision of infrastructure from the consumption of computing resources. Each application group can be assigned their own Virtual Enterprise, over which they have total control, but within assigned resource limits, eliminating any risk to the physical infrastructure.

The Abiquo solution allows hosting providers to sell Virtual Enterprises to their traditional customer base. They can also provide resources to Abiquo’s enterprise customer installations, providing them with on-demand elasticity and flexibility. Abiquo’s business policies address security and compliance concerns and enable customers to control deployment and movement according to performance, utilization, and data sensitivity.

Abiquo partners with NetApp and Nexenta

Abiquo has partnered with NetApp and Nexenta, bringing new integration with their respective storage systems. We have, since our first enterprise release, managed storage resources using standards such as OpenSolaris ZFS and LVM/iSCSI, allocating them to Virtual Enterprises and allowing Enterprise Administrators to perform volume management tasks as well as allocation to specific virtual machines. The new integration builds on this integral management of storage as a cloud resource and NetApp and Nexenta storage systems can now be managed through Abiquo’s centralized cloud management console. We also provide additional storage connection and management options such as compatibility with Red Hat iSCSI targets, an ideal storage connector for small deployments or testing environments.

Virualization technologies have, since their beginnings, failed to deliver the cost saving benefits that they promised but now, through the cloud, there is a chance to put this right. Kennedy Brown, marketing manager at Intel, claimed in his Sept. 7, 2010 Server Room Blog post that the best way to achieve the benefits of virtualization is to maximize the utilization of servers. We support this but believe that there are other elements too, the best way to maximize server utilization is to increase utilization rates for other key infrastructure resources such as networks and storage. These are equally as important for achieving IT cost savings and delivering on the promise of cloud computing. These motions were backed by George Crump, author of the InformationWeek storage blog, who claimed that most datacenters still only use 25 to 35 percent of their actual capacity for storing real data, and therefore these companies can reduce their purchases, power, cooling and floor space costs by as much as 75 percent.

The reason these technologies have, so far, fallen short is that there has not been a system that offers smart, business policy-driven automation. Abiquo does offer this; CEO Pete Malcolm said “The Abiquo solution increases storage utilization rates and helps deliver on the promise of cloud computing overall. Companies are only now starting to realize that storage utilization is just as important as server utilization in establishing true cloud computing, and Abiquo can deliver both from a single console.”

The addition of NetApp and Nexenta improves our ability to increase storage utilization rates and allows us to provide a single management console that incorporates multiple, industry-leading storage systems.