virtualization.info

As virtualization.info increases its coverage of vendors in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) cloud computing market, new startups enter our Radar, which will be soon updated to include a brand new category.

Today we cover a European firm based in Spain, Abiquo, which just relocated its HQ in Redwood City, California, leaving the R&D facility in Barcellona.

The company was founded in 2006 by Diego Mariño,  Vice President of Community Solutions, and Xavier Fernández, Vice President of Engineering.
Mariño comes from a short experience as President of a Spanish consulting firm, while Fernández comes from a consulting experience for a multinational.
The company, counting 25 employees at today, is now led by Pete Malcolm, the founder and former CTO of Orchestria, a data loss prevention firm that was acquired by CA in early 2009.
Malcom covered the role of Vice President of Engineering at CA for less than a year before moving to Abiquo.

Abiquo secured a series of small rounds from multiple sources (Spanish government, angel investors and Kreos Capital) for a grand total of $5.1 million.

The company offers an open source (LGPL v3) management portal for IaaS cloud computing platforms that supports multiple hypervisors, including VMware ESX/ESXi, Xen, KVM and even the hosted virtualization platform Oracle/Sun VirtualBox.
Version 1.5, just announced, will also introduce support for Microsoft Hyper-V.

As expected by a cloud management platform, the Abiquo solution supports multi-tenancy (and control delegation), resource limits enforcement, a virtual machines catalog, and open standards (OVF).
It is also capable to be instrumented by multiple API directives, supporting programming interfaces from 3rd parties, including the VMware vCloud.
And just in case customers want to use a hybrid cloud approach, Abiquo can plug in public clouds like Amazon EC2. 
The company claims that its infrastructure manager can handle up to hundreds of thousands of virtual machines.

While the solution doesn’t have a strong focus on security, it features a workload management engine, in charge of VMs dynamic provisioning for load balancing, that can be used to enforce security compliance (available only in the upcoming Enterprise Edition of version 1.5).

A key aspect of this solution is the capability to design the cloud infrastructure through a graphical dashboard:

With version 1.5, Abiquo will also introduce the capability to migrate VMs from a hypervisor to another (for example from ESX to Hyper-V and vice versa) through a transparent virtual to virtual (V2V) migration.
This feature, available only in the Enterprise Edition, seems especially useful while the cloud computing industry still lacks of accepted standards that allow seamless migrations of VMs across multiple providers and their platforms of choice.

Last but not least, Abiquo 1.5 will have the capability to discover and save in its catalog the virtual machines found in new virtualization hosts that administrators add to the cloud infrastructure.

The open source, free edition of the product is limited and it seems more a virtual infrastructure manager on steroids than a proper management console for IaaS clouds, but it includes at least three valuable features: support for multiple hypervisors, multi-tenancy and basic workload balancing.