Rocking the cloud at VMworld

Last week we showcased Abiquo at VMworld in Barcelona. The event was a great opportunity for everyone in the industry to come together in the name of cloud. The Abiquo stand was a success receiving lots of visitors. Many were tempted to the stand by our ‘AC/DC’ style T-shirts which were hugely popular- we know what we’ll be taking with us next year!

To get to know customers of Abiquo better we held a drinks reception with a twist. We hired a yacht and set sail for a two hour cruise with Barcelona as our backdrop, it was great to see our customers and prospects having such a relaxed evening.

As well as introducing ourselves and having a great time, we got down to business and conducted a survey at VMworld where we made some intriguing discoveries.

After interviewing 68 industry professionals we found that out of 75% of  delegates questioned, who stated that their company offered private, public or hybrid cloud services to customers just 15% of these provide a self- service interface.  A self- service interface for the provision of services is a key component of any cloud strategy! Customers were also seen to have to wait for a long time to bring their cloud services online, with the average being three days as a standard waiting time for requests to deliver a new service in the cloud. Just 15% of those questioned committed to providing their cloud services to customers within three hours. We have to face the facts- technology has moved on and how we provide it has to move with it in order for cloud to reach its full potential. The delivery of a private Cloud has numerous benefits, at the very basic level it can be the delivery of a more efficient infrastructure….but its more…much more if the ultimate consumer of the services in the Cloud and be provided with great services in faster timeframes. The days of IT services built by engineers for engineers are gone- we can see that in every aspect of technology today. It is time to adopt a different mindset and put the power of IT in the hands of users, only this way will the full potential of cloud be realised.

We thoroughly enjoyed all the VMworld activities and look forward to being there again next year. Thanks to all the Abiquo team for making this year a success.

Abiquo is nominated for UP cloud awards – vote for us!

We are delighted to announce that Abiquo has been nominated in the ‘Best Industry Application’ category at the third annual UP cloud awards. This is a great achievement for us and we are privileged to be in a category with some of the best in the business such as Dell.  You can vote for us here:  bit.ly/T877jf

The awards follow the UP cloud conference which takes place on the 12th December 2012 in San Francisco. This conference is one of the biggest and oldest cloud events with a world class line-up of speakers, so it’s great to be a part of it.  The event welcomes new comers to the cloud as well as those who have been working within the cloud for some time, to come and learn about the latest technology in this area. There will be discussions on all areas of cloud including Enterprise Automation and DevOps., Infrastructure and Operations, Business Agility and Continuity, Cloud Mobility and cloud adoption.

Abiquo 2.2 – Improving ESX capabilities

Abiquo users in Proof of Concept and Production environments send us a large number of requirements, features, improvements and other comments that we evaluate and try to include in our roadmap in order to better cover and fit our customers’ needs.

In Abiquo 2.2, we decided to further investigate and engage with some of these requirements and incorporate them into the product. In particular, the idea of these features is to cover use cases and daily situations that our customers face. In some cases we have taken a first step to helping our customers before incorporating a complete feature in later versions.

These features have been developed for ESX because it is our major installation base. Although, as always, we will incorporate them for other hypervisors in future releases.

The features are:

Abiquo 2.2 launches this week

This week, Abiquo is launching Abiquo Enterprise Edition 2.2, our most enhanced software platform to date; but what does it all mean for businesses considering a cloud platform or for those currently using Abiquo?

As Abiquo’s customers extend their deployments into more datacenters and geographies they need a greater level of control over the administration rights that will be delegated to the local teams. Abiquo 2.2’s administration feature allows customers to control delegated administration to parts of the physical infrastructure. The same feature also provides greater control over customer administration, allowing enterprises to better delegate user and customer administration and allowing service providers to support a better reseller model.

Abqiuo 2.2’s pluggable storage architecture extends Abiquo’s self service storage capabilities beyond NetApp, Nexenta and Linux LVM to any iSCSi based storage with a compatible API. The architecture allows for a new plugin to easily be created with a full API, sample code, and documentation. Enterprises or service providers will then be able to add additional value or new revenue streams to their platform by adding multiple storage tiers, from high end, high speed (and expensive) storage to more cost effective commodity storage.

 In 2.2 Abiquo continues to extend its hypervisor agnostic approach. There is improved support for VMWware vCenter/ESX features (including vMotion and DRS), that allows customers to seamlessly add Abiquo as a management layer to their existing VMWare deployment without having to compromise on functionality. Abiquo 2.2 also includes support for the KVM hypervisor on CentoS 6, allowing customers to take advantage of improvements in the community hypervisor.

Abiquo 2.2 has been built specifically with the customer in mind, with features designed to enhance the usability of the user interface, increase simplicity and improve overall efficiency.  The open architecture of the Abiquo cloud management platform is purpose built to integrate with any infrastructure which supports all hypervisors. Customers can use existing hardware, avoiding a major challenge that many face when moving to the cloud and any unnecessary investment in hardware.

Abiquo 2.2 – Branding (white labelling) Web Application

It’s time everyone got into Abiquo branding! Our customers can completely re-brand the whole product and adapt the platform to their logos, brands and corporate style.

But before Abiquo 2.2, this capability required time, effort and knowledge. Users had to know how to work with the Flex files, folders and logos and compile the user interface themselves. We are sure that many users were frustrated by this process. This is the typical project that starts out as a great proposal from the marketing department but quickly becomes a nightmare for someone with too much on their plate and too little time!

That’s why Abiquo has created the first release of the Abiquo Theme Generator (ATG) that allows anyone to edit and configure branding themes that can be easily incorporated and used in Abiquo.

The tool is very easy to install and use. It’s a web app that allows anyone to visually edit and prepare themes. It was created in the labs for everybody to use and it will really help out by simplifying the branding process.

The Abiquo Theme Generator is completely open source and we’d be happy to receive your feedback to help us continue improving it.

You can follow the documentation on our wiki, including the user guide here. And you can use our bugtracking system to report your issues and requests. All the code is hosted in a git repository.

It’s simple, easy and most importantly: useful! Get to work on styling your Abiquo now!

Abiquo is packed and ready for VMworld 2012, are you?

Abiquo will be attending VMworld in Barcelona from the 9^th– 11^th October 2012. This is the largest virtualisation specific event around and I’m really excited to be there rubbing shoulders with the top technology providers in the cloud.  The team and I are looking forward to meeting current users of our platform as well introducing new customers to Abiquo.

VMworld is an important milestone for Abiquo as we will be releasing Abiquo 2.2; an updated version of the platform with added features to make the cloud orchestration experience even easier for our customers.  The upgraded platform will also enable complete choice over the cloud storage volumes that can be managed through our software.   Customers get to reuse their existing hardware and carve their own path into the cloud without any unnecessary infrastructure investment.

After a tech-filled second day of VMworld, we’re going to heading off into the sunset, hosting a drinks reception with a twist!  We’re going to be aboard the Southern Cross looking back over Barcelona from the Mediterranean on a couple of hours sailing. I’m hoping to get to know our customers and meet the customers we don’t yet know in a pleasant evening environment.

If you’re heading to VMworld next week, you can find Abiquo at booth N100– Drop by and find out how to make your cloud life easy!

Abiquo 2.0 from 1000 feet

Would you like to know how a cloud management platform is built? What is its architecture? What modules and technologies are used to build the platform and for intra-platform communications?

Last year we had to face some serious scalability and robustness issues with our platform: how could we manage multiple datacenters with remote services, storage systems, hypervisors and network configurations in a scalable way? How could we configure our platform to be distributed through a (probably) highly complex architecture? All of these problems along with a pack of new features led to our most important version so far: Abiquo 2.0 (codenamed Tao Pai Pai)

After many meetings and discussions, we designed a new architecture and refactored some of our core modules, especially what we call the virtualfactory. We also introduced some new technologies we hadn’t used before, such as  Redis, Akka or RabbitMQ. And we went through a demanding integration and QA process until we were all happy with the result. Our main challenges were implementing an actor-based programming model (codenamed Tarantino), designing and completing our RESTful API, and using asynchronous operations wherever possible.

Take a look at these slides introducing our platform architecture and its modules!

Meanwhile, we’ll be writing some posts explaining certain sections more deeply so stay tuned for more!