Specialized Cloud Software Providers

Appistry
Appistry delivers Cloud IT infrastructure to the enterprise, for intelligence and defense organizations, and to ISVs and SaaS providers.

Appistry supports public, private, and hybrid clouds. Appistry serves large enterprise customers, including FedEx, Sprint, and the U.S. government.
Web site: www.appistry.com


BMC Software
BMC Software is a venerable software vendor dating from the early mainframe days. The new BMC product, dubbed Cloud Lifecycle Management, primarily addressed towards management of private clouds, also supports hybrid configuration. It provides self-service management, provisioning, and unified management. It includes:


� A Service Catalog, purpose-built for cloud offerings

� A Self-Service Portal, allowing service owners to perform basic administrative activities on their own services (and only on their own services), and to request new services with . . .

� A Service Request Wizard, permitting customized, on-demand provisioning of services, within constraints defined and controlled by the catalog designer, service retirement and resource reclamation.

� Pre-built workflows that integrate with existing IT management systems, allowing organizations to introduce Cloud while continuing to leverage existing policies, processes, people, and tools

� Automated full-stack layered provisioning across heterogeneous platforms

Source: http://communities.bmc.com/communities/community/bsm_initiatives/cloud/blog/2010/05/25/introducing-cloud-lifecyclemanagement

BMC states that the new product was created in conjunction with several (unnamed) strategic design partners�both enterprise and service providers in the United States as well as in EMEA and APAC countries� and further validated by an additional 25 customers. Working closely with such a broad set of customers during the design and implementation has helped BMC ensure that the resulting product meets clear and compelling customer needs and delivers immediate real-world value.
Web sites:

� http://documents.bmc.com/products/documents/18/26/141826/141826.pdf

� www.bmc.com/Cloud

� http://documents.bmc.com/products/documents/32/99/133299/133299.pdf


Nasuni
Nasuni is an intereresting offering for cloud data storage. Nasuni has partnered with four cloud providers (Amazon AWS, Iron Mountain Digital, Nirvanix, and Rackspace) to provide encrypted, portable file storage. Data is encrypted by the Nasuni Filer on the client premises, using OpenPGP with AES-256, and remains encrypted in the cloud. This guarantees end-to-end data protection, as the data is never visible to anyone at Nasuni or the cloud.

Customers can escrow their encryption keys with Nasuni or a trusted third party, or they can generate and store their own keys. The Nasuni Filer also functions like a traditional NAS, retaining such NAS functionality as Windows Shares and Active Directory. Shares are created and access control is managed in a familiar way. You can also consolidate any number of NAS boxes into one Nasuni Filer.

Nasuni�s charges vary by the cloud provider. Monthly storage costs are $0.15 on AWS and on Rackspace per GB, $0.48 per GB for Nirvanix, and $0.65/GB for Iron Mountain. The last two provide various value-added services, which justify their higher charges. For example, Nirvanix�s standard service utilizes RAID 6, striping files to three separate discs to ensure data integrity. Customers have the option of replicating data on multiple nodes where each node utilizes RAID 6. This process is automated using Nirvanix�s policy-based Checksum operations on data uploads, along with frequent
internal integrity checks to preserve the integrity of data in transit and at rest. Moreover, every file copy or transfer within the Storage Delivery Network is validated against a stored MD5 hash to verify that the additional copy has not been corrupted in transit.

The ability to move data easily among its providers and the customer�s facilities helps prevent lock-in.
Web site: www.nasuni.com

Source of Information : Implementing and Developing Cloud Computing Applications 2011