His topic: Managing complexity: The next great frontier for cloud computing. Arsalan’s talk will address the fact that now that we have virtual, physical and cloud environments all pulling various duties in various capacities in the datacenter, are we truly prepared to manage the complexity that comes with these disparate modes of enterprise computing?

With apologies to Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about cloud computing, but nobody says anything about complexity .”

Well, we will be talking about it and we invite you to join us in the discussion. Arsalan will be talking at 2:45 PM as part of the “Enterprise Cloud Computing” track.

See you in Santa Clara.

ConVirt Enterprise Cloud provides a set of sophisticated tools capable of managing an entire virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single console, including private clouds, hybrid clouds, traditional virtual machines as well as public cloud resources such as Amazon EC2.

“As we developed this product and worked with our beta customers, we kept hearing the same thing again and again: customers are concerned about the potential for complexity, fragmentation and workload management issues that come with adding cloud resources,” said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. “Until now, users of KVM and Xen did not have a management layer that provides a unified means of viewing and managing their entire traditional, virtual and cloud-based environments. With ConVirt Enterprise Cloud, IT staff can manage the complex, properly allocate computing resources and deliver real ROI for the organization.”

ConVirt Enterprise Cloud builds on the success of ConVirt Open Source and ConVirt Enterprise, which are currently in use by organizations worldwide to manage KVM and Xen-based virtual datacenters. ConVirt Enterprise Cloud adds management support for private and hybrid clouds side-by-side with the rest of the virtualized environment.

A full set of features and capabilities can be found at http://www.convirture.com/products_cloud.php

Availability and Pricing

ConVirt Enterprise Cloud is available now directly from Convirture. It is a commercially licensed product.  Pricing for ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise starts at $1,495 per host for up to 10 hosts, with volume pricing available for larger environments. Pricing for ConVirt Enterprise Cloud is available by contacting Convirture at http://www.convirture.com/contact.html.

About Convirture

Convirture was founded in 2007 to help organizations effectively manage open source virtualization platforms. More information is available at www.convirture.com.

ConVirt Enterprise Cloud manages virtualized datacenters and enterprise cloud deployments from a single console. It provides full visibility into the datacenter environment and enables fast response to changing business demands by enabling IT administrators to manage the mix of how datacenter resources are allocated between traditional enterprise applications, private clouds and public cloud resources such as Amazon EC2.

“Enterprise clouds are the natural next step in the evolution of the virtualized datacenter and IT staff should be able to manage cloud-based computing resources right along with existing virtual machines,” said Arsalan Farooq, founder and CEO of Convirture. “Our customers are not interested in a ‘rip-and-replace’ approach, which leads to the separation of the infrastructure used to deliver cloud services from the rest of the virtualized environment. With ConVirt Enterprise Cloud, IT staff can build out a virtualized data center in the most flexible and cost-effective way. By managing traditional virtualized workloads side-by-side with cloud operations, ConVirt ensures a holistic view of the entire datacenter and allows IT staff to react quickly to changing business priorities.”

ConVirt Product Family: Open and Enterprise Ready

ConVirt Enterprise Cloud is the newest addition to the ConVirt product family, which is being used by tens of thousands of users worldwide.

ConVirt Open Source provides the core functionality for managing virtualized environment, including monitoring, configuration management, templates-based provisioning, and live migration. ConVirt Open Source is free to download and use, while support from Convirture is there when needed.

ConVirt Enterprise extends ConVirt Open Source with advanced automation and scalability features, such as high availability and dynamic resource allocation, necessary to run large scale or mission critical virtualization environments. ConVirt Enterprise is a commercially licensed product.

ConVirt Enterprise Cloud adds management support for private and hybrid clouds side-by-side with the rest of the virtualized environment. ConVirt Enterprise Cloud is a commercially licensed product. Features include:

• Ease of private cloud setup – Designate which parts of an existing infrastructure (server pools, networks, storage, and templates) should be used for the cloud deployment and ConVirt will take of the rest.
• Hybrid cloud support – Integrate Amazon EC2 deployments into the ConVirt console. View and provision new virtual datacenters and virtual machines from within ConVirt.
• Virtual datacenters – Provision new cloud clients within seconds, by specifying how much compute, network, and storage capacity to allocate to the each virtual datacenter. Each client gets access to ConVirt’s highly interactive web-based user interface, where they can manage their virtual machines without having any visibility into the underlying physical infrastructure.
• Resource quotas – Limit the compute, storage, and network resources that cloud clients can use, ensuring that they do not go above the allocated quota.
• Flexible service offerings – Pre-configure a set of service offerings, such as small, medium, large virtual machines, and make those available to cloud users. Alternatively, allow users to create and upload their own templates. Whether using public or private templates, cloud users can provision new virtual machines with a few simple clicks.
• Full multi-tenant security – ConVirt Enterprise Cloud delivers fine-grained, role-based access control, allowing sharing of infrastructure resources among multiple clients while ensuring full isolation.
• Advanced networking – Provides flexibility in setting up networking for cloud clients. Administrators can choose to put a client on an existing corporate network, pre-configure VLANs for them, or allow them to create their own VLANs within a specified quota. ConVirt Enterprise Cloud also manages allocation and configuration of Public IP addresses.
• Optimized cloud resource usage – Optimize cloud resource usage in accordance with business priorities. Define high-level policies, such as “run the cloud in the power saving mode” or “distribute load evenly across the cloud”, and ConVirt Enterprise Cloud will automatically re-allocate resources to meet business objectives.
• Highly available cloud – Protect clients against virtual machine and server failures by using ConVirt’s high availability features.
• Enterprise integration – Use ConVirt’s comprehensive set of APIs to achieve tight integration with enterprise applications, such as self-service portal.
• Support for third party private cloud infrastructure platforms – Integrate existing private cloud infrastructure deployments, such as Eucalyptus and OpenStack, into ConVirt to gain a centralized view of a virtualized datacenter.

“OpenStack has achieved great momentum and has a broad ecosystem of partners and vendors that support it,” said Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack Project Policy Board Chairman. “A management toolset such as ConVirt Enterprise Cloud delivers more choice to users looking to build their cloud infrastructure on open standard technologies.”

Availability and Pricing

ConVirt Enterprise Cloud will be generally available in September 2011. Pricing will be announced at that time.

About Convirture

Convirture was founded in 2006 to help organizations effectively manage open source virtualization platforms. More information is available at www.convirture.com.

ConVirt is sophisticated, enterprise-grade software for managing virtualization and private-cloud environments based on open platforms such as Linux, Xen and KVM. The software is available both as free ConVirt Open Source, as well as the commercial version, ConVirt Enterprise, which adds advanced automation and scalability features.

More than 40 judges from a broad spectrum of industry voices from around the world participated, and their average scores determined the 2011 Golden Bridge Business Awards winners. Winners were honored in New York on Wednesday, August 10, 2011, during the 3rd annual awards dinner and presentations.

“ConVirt is great software for anyone looking for the best way to manage open source-based virtual machines, and we’re pleased to be acknowledged as such by the judges,” said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. “We promise our customers, however, that we will not rest on our laurels and that new versions of our software will continue to deliver the features and capabilities that are required of a modern datacenter in a virtualized, cloud-centric world.”

About the Golden Bridge Awards

Golden Bridge Awards are an annual industry and peers recognition program honoring Best Companies in every major industry from large to small and new start-ups in North America, Europe, Middle-East, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin-America, Best New Products and Services, Best Innovations, Management and Teams, Women in Business and the Professions, Case Studies, Customer Satisfaction, and PR and Marketing Campaigns from all over the world. Learn more about The Golden Bridge Awards at www.goldenbridgeawards.com.

About Convirture

Convirture was founded in 2006 to help organizations effectively manage open source virtualization platforms. More information is available at www.convirture.com.

Calling Convirture an “[important] upstart,” CTO Edge notes that ConVirt 2.0 “highlights how heterogeneous virtualization management will evolve.”

We couldn’t agree more!

This is great validation for our vision, and all our efforts so far. Of course, ConVirt 2.0 wouldn’t exist as it does today without the involvement from our community and feedback from our customers … so a big thanks goes out to you!

This is a great conclusion to 2010. For 2011, we have even more exciting plans in store. Stay tuned.