Clear Skies Ahead: 10 Demystifying Cloud Computing Products From Cloud Connect

Cloud Connect was held this week in Santa Clara, Calif. A place for folks to gather and learn more about the cloud and how it can ease business and reduce costs, Cloud Connect kicked off Monday. But the show also acted as a launch pad for a host of new cloud computing products aimed at taking some of the mystery out of the cloud.

Here we take a look at 10 new products that took Cloud Connect by storm.

Application Performance Management vendor AppDynamics unveiled a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery option for its APM solution. Now, AppDynamics offers it both in on-premise and SaaS formats. AppDynamics lets enterprises manage the performance of their cloud applications and virtual and physical environments. It enables cloud orchestration, application mapping, transaction flow monitoring and code-level diagnostics for applications and the new SaaS delivery model lets AppDynamics users quickly troubleshoot and diagnose problems; take advantage of immediate upgrades and new versions; and leverage a pay-as-you-go subscription model.

Piggybacking on IBM launching Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, Navajo Systems joins the party with a VPS (Virtual Private SaaS) solution to alleviate security and data concerns.

The Navajo Systems VPS, which is a virtual appliance, addresses security concerns around cloud applications. It can be implemented on the enterprise LAN or WAN or as a cloud service to transparently encrypt all SaaS application data deemed sensitive by a company before it is transmitted from the enterprise to the SaaS provider.

Software vendor InMage used Cloud Connect 2010 to unveil new solutions for the midmarket and large enterprises in need of cloud-based disaster and application recovery tools.

When launched as part of a cloud provider's or managed service provider's cloud offerings, InMage's technology can support a host of heterogeneous environments including physical servers, virtual servers and storage architectures. The hybrid recovery architecture scales easily without changes to client-side configurations. InMage also offers multi-tenant management.

InMage can address local backup, remote disaster recovery and application high availability requirements while offering continuous data protection, heterogeneous asynchronous replication over IP, application failover/failback, WAN optimization and disk-based recovery in cloud infrastructures.

Cloud computing application platform Appistry at Cloud Connect unveiled new storage capabilities to its CloudIQ offerings. The launch of Appistry CloudIQ Storage gives VARs and systems integrators a scalable, fault-tolerant and affordable storage option that can be used as a stand-alone or in conjunction with Appistry's CloudIQ Engine to enable Computation Storage, which unifies applications and data by storing data across commodity servers and migrating application processing the machines that contain the relevant data.

CloudIQ Storage is built for petabyte scale and adds the ability to deliver storage to both private and hybrid clouds. The architecture is fully-distributed, meaning there is no single point of failure and Web-scale data sets and loads can be serviced and files can be distributed across multiple machines. The new storage feature from Appistry also allows servers to be used for computation purposes as well as for file storage, as opposed to traditional methods that rely on the transfer of data files over bandwidth-constrained interconnects.

At Cloud Connect, Hubspan showcased its cloud-based integration platform as part of IBM's cloud computing initiatives. Hubspan's joint solution with IBM, the WebSpan SaaS Integration Platform is a cloud-based solution tying together key components of IBM WebSphere software and Hubspan's integration platform and managed services. WebSpan eases the move to the cloud, helping solve integration challenges like file transfer and e-invoicing to EDI and eCommerce integration. For IBM users, WebSpan adds a new dimension to WebSphere and offers an integration solution delivered in the cloud and available via a SaaS model.

For IBM customers, WebSpan takes WebSphere to a new arena, providing an integration solution delivered via the cloud and available in a SaaS model.

vBC Solutions showed off its virtual Business Continuity (vBC) Cloud solution, which offers uptime and optimization across servers regardless of application. In a time when downtime is unacceptable, vBC Cloud can instantly and seamlessly redirect network traffic to avoid downtime to keep the business up and running. vBC Cloud user a high-availability infrastructure to offer instant access to a company network from anywhere; automated managed recovery including failover and failback; zero additional demand on internal IT resources; equipment with lower costs and less training; and auditable compliance reporting.

At Cloud Connect, Eucalyptus Solution launched the SAN Adapter for Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition, which lets cloud users connect a Eucalyptus cloud directly to a high-performance SAN. The capability lets Eucalyptus deliver increased I/O performance and scale, meaning it can handle much larger clouds.

According to Eucalyptus, the SAN Adapter gives its clouds more reliable and responsive access to networked storage volumes and enables direct access to existing SAN devices via iSCSI, which lets Eucalyptus-managed virtual machine instances connect directly to the SAN.

RightScale this week added new enterprise features to its RightScale Cloud Management Platform beefing up authorization and permissioning controls, cost-tracking and overall management of running virtual servers in the cloud across large organizations with multiple users, departments and projects. The new features also support the creation of IT self-service and execution of corporate governance strategies in the cloud that match internal IT policies.

The new features in RightScale Enterprise Edition include: new user roles and permissions, in which two new roles have been created; Enterprise Manager and Lite User; stronger cost controls, meaning RightScale now supports master enterprise accounts and views which offer access to current and projected costs by project or department and IT teams can review month-to-date expenditures in real time along with monthly project costs; IT self-service, which lets system administrators build standardized cloud application stacks and offer them through a user interface to end users for direct access to RightScale-managed cloud applications without having to go through IT; and best practices retention and sharing, through which a RightScale user can build a repository of corporate cloud computing best practices and a corporate CMDB of configured application stacks and components.

Automated Managed Hosting provider StrataScale used Cloud Connect to unveil three new offerings: Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Hybrid Hosting.

According to StrataScale, the Hybrid Hosting solution lets customers integrate physical managed servers and virtualized cloud servers on-the-fly in the same network and cross connected with client collocation infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Private Cloud and Public Cloud offerings deliver hypervisor-based virtual machine instances running CentOS, Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Windows.

StrataScale also unveiled a storefront that lets its cloud users make purchases and changes to their existing servers to scale up and scale down and add new machines and IT components.

StrataScale's new Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Hybrid Hosting services will be available through the StrataScale storefront on April 1.

Virtualization software company CloudOptix revealed its new line of MeghaWare products and solutions, a portfolio that offers public and private clouds and the ability to connect and unify them into a personal cloud.

At Cloud Connect, MeghaWare, which goes to market through VARs and OEMs, showed off its MeghaConcierge offering, a multi-vendor unified cloud management application that is available as a free version for personal use and a fee-based commercial version. MeghaWare also showcased MeghaCenter, a cloud appliance that is user deployable and eliminates public cloud availability and speed issues. Users can install a version on their PC disk for free or add fee-based support. Additionally, MeghaCenter can be purchased through MeghaWare's OEM or VAR partners.