Highlights From This Week's Cloud Expo in Silicon Valley

by Sam Dean - Nov. 09, 2011Comments (0)

Through tomorrow, Nov. 10, in Santa Clara, California--right in the heart of Silicon Valley--the Cloud Expo conference is in full swing. Cloud Expo has been held in multiple locations in recent years, including California, New York, Prague, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, and is the leading enterprise IT event focused on cloud computing. There are numerous sessions and events going on at the Santa Clara event, including many sessions of interest to the open source community. In this post, we discussed many of the events going on at the conference, and supplied information on how OStatic readers can gain free admission. Here, find out about some of the significant announcements from the show.

Toward Private Clouds. Rackspace has announced Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition, an OpenStack-powered cloud platform featuring managed services and--most important of all--operational support. The solution is specifically aimed at helping enterprises deploy and manage private cloud applications, and it will compete directly with Eucalyptus Systems' platform. At Cloud Expo, a number of partners in Rackspace's initiative, including Opscode and RightScale, are making related announcements. We covered all of this here.

In the Data Center. Abiquo, an enterprise-focused cloud software company, has announced ecosystem partnerships designed to make enterprise datacenters more efficient and cost-effective. Several vendors are extending Abiquo's existing software tools for automating cloud deployments and applicaitons, including Opscode. Also, Abiquo has announced support for more hypervisors serving up virtualization options, including VMware vSphere 5 and Citrix XenServer 6.0.

McAfee in the Mix. McAfee is leveraging Cloud Expo to showcase its new McAfee Cloud Security Platform. Security is a growing concern for many IT departments with cloud deployments. The McAfee Cloud Security Platform now includes new identity management, data loss prevention, and email and web gateway features.

First, Test It. At Cloud Expo, Interxion has announced the latest updates to its Cloud Testlabs, including Microsoft's Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit (DCC), and the recently announced Cloud Testlab in the U.K., based on Flexiant Extility. The Cloud Testlab enables cloud hosting providers to develop cloud services and virtualized environments before deploying them. Using the lab, both enterprises and service providers can prepare services before unleashing users on them.

Keynote Highlights. There are a number of interesting speakers at Cloud Expo. As Wired reports, Rackspace’s CTO John Engates told the audience to be very cautious about cloud deployments and upgrades: "Just wait a bit, because the cloud isn’t quite ready yet.” Oracle’s VP of Cloud, Tyler Jewell, also noted several alleged advantages to the recently announced Oracle Public Cloud.