Cloud.com (formerly VMOps) is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing startup that was founded in August 2008 by Shen Liang, the former Vice President of Engineering at SEVEN Networks. Earlier in his career, Liang was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.
The company, which counts 40 employees according to its Linkedin corporate profile, raised $6.6M in Round A led by Index Ventures, and another $11M in Round B, led by Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Nexus Ventures.
The Cloud.com management team also includes Kevin Kluge (Vice President of Engineering), who come from Yahoo! where he was the Senior Director of Engineering, Shannon Williams (Vice President of Business Development), who was the Vice President of EMEA operations at Solidcore Systems, and Peder Ulander (Vice President of Marketing), who was the Senior Vice President of Marketing in Sun.
Quite interestingly, the board of director, includes just one outsider: Rosen Sharma, CTO of the Systems and Virtualization Business at McAfee.
The company comes out of stealth mode with an open source management console for IaaS cloud architectures, that supports VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Xen and KVM (support for Microsoft Hyper-V will come next): CloudStack.
CloudStack offers many of the capabilities you’d expect from a cloud management interface: virtual machines self-service provisioning, dynamic workload management, virtual network fencing and routing, usage metering and billing, support for snapshots and rollbacks, ISOs and VM templates library, delegate administration, multi-tenancy and of course web access.
It supports Windows and Linux guest operating systems.
Cloud.com published a short 8-minutes video to demonstrate the product in action:
CloudStack can leverage standard x86 physical machines and their local RAID-based hard drives turning them into aggregated storage nodes.
The platform, which starts at version 2.0, comes in three edition: Community, Enterprise and Service Providers.
The open source Community edition, which is available here, is almost features-complete. What it misses are the so-called Enterprise Connectors, the virtual machines High Availability, the metering and billing framework and the capability to customize the look & feel as for other white-label solutions.
CloudStack also supports 3rd party cloud APIs, like the Amazon EC2 Web Services APIs, the Citrix Cloud Center (C3) APIs and the VMware vCloud APIs, but customers are welcome to use the Cloud.com APIs too, which provide a lower level access to the infrastructure.