Abiquo Keynote at Cloud Expo

Abiquo software for Cloud computing environments, on Tuesday unveiled Abiquo 1.5.

The new version of Abiquo’s flagship product was announced in conjunction with the company’s re-launch as a U.S.-based company (see news release, Abiquo Opens New U.S. Headquarters with $5.1 Million in New Funding). Abiquo 1.5 changes the Cloud management market as the first product to allow IT managers to automatically convert virtual machine images built for one hypervisor technology to any other supported hypervisor including the conversion from VMware to Microsoft Hyper-V, through a single drag-and-drop operation.

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As the only product to support all five of the major hypervisor types, this, along with other new features, brings Abiquo significantly closer to its unique vision of delivering to IT organizations a platform for managing fully interoperable, vendor-neutral public and private Clouds.

Abiquo is an open source product offered through the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 3. IT operations managers responsible for physical hardware use Abiquo to create and manage pooled computing resources, or Resource Clouds, from any server virtualized with any hypervisor. These providers can then provision or sell the Resource Clouds to enterprise users (i.e. consumers) of those resources. Consumers use Abiquo to create virtual datacenters through which they can deploy instantly bundled virtual servers, storage and other physical resources, and applications from public or private virtual image libraries. This is done through a highly visual, drag-and-drop user interface.

“While server virtualization technologies are relatively mature, they do not provide the complete management infrastructure required to create a private cloud service,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner. “A production oriented private or on-premise cloud architecture should have four key components: access management, service management, resource management and the underlying resource tier.”

“The Cloud computing market is saturated with technology hype and incomplete offerings that don’t deliver enterprises the practical Cloud management solutions they desperately need,” said Pete Malcolm, CEO, Abiquo. “In contrast with other vendors, Abiquo includes all the required components to provide immediate business benefits. For example, delegating virtual datacenter control provides a significant reduction to an IT organization’s workload and immediate user empowerment benefits, eliminating IT bottlenecks. In addition, Abiquo allows IT to maintain management and control of their IT infrastructure, achieve full elasticity of computing resources, and eliminate virtualization and Cloud vendor lock-in. Abiquo has been extensively tested by both the open source community and by early commercial adopters including Global 1000 enterprises.”

Abiquo’s Complete Solution

Key new features in Abiquo 1.5 include:

• Microsoft Hyper-V Support
• Automatic “drag and drop” Virtual Machine (VM) conversion between all supported hypervisor types
• Auto-discovery of machine resources and managing existing live VMs
• Capture and store of stateful VMs

“As enthusiastic users of the current Abiquo solution, we are excited to learn of the new features in version 1.5,” said Jordi Mas, CEO, Nexica, a leading European hosted infrastructure provider (www.nexica.com). “We are particularly impressed by the hypervisor conversion and automatic provisioning, which will allow us to save significant time and resources.”

The new features build on the unique benefits Abiquo provides:

• Multi-tenancy with delegated provisioning and management of Virtual Enterprises
• Enforceable Resource Limits to ensure risk-free operation
• Policy-based Workload Management with automatic VM assignment
• Hypervisor agnostic, supporting VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM and Virtual Box hypervisors
• Image Libraries (public, shared and private) for VM images and bundled appliances
• Web-based graphical user interface with role-based context
• Fully support for open standards including OVF and Stream Optimized Format

Pricing and Availability

Abiquo 1.5 will be available within 45 days. Abiquo is making it easy for IT to try and buy by providing a Community Edition for free download at http://download.abiquo.com, and by publishing a complete set of pricing information on its Web site at http://www.abiquo.com/resources/pricelist for the Enterprise Edition.