Cloud.com launched as open source IaaS provider

Cloud.com was officially launched today as an open source cloud provider.

The company's open source CloudStack, which is available today, is designed to reduce the complexity of building the cloud infrastructure. Cloud.com, which has received more than $17 million in funding, said its solution "accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of multi-tier and multi-tenant private and public cloud services for enterprises and service providers."

It is an open source solution but is not exclusive to open source hypervisors. It supports Xen, KVM and VMware out of the box and will support multiple hypervisors and toolsets, said chief marketing officer Peder Ulander.

Cloud.com was founded two years ago as VMOps and is led by Sheng Liang, who developed the Java Virtual Machine at Sun and co-founded Teros, which was acquired by Citrix.

Originally, the Cloud 1.0 stack was focused on Xen and virtualization management. However, as the industry evolved, executives saw the need to support multiple open source and proprietary hypervisors and to enable enterprise customers and service providers with a full suite of software to deploy private and public clouds.

Cloud.com is not trying to compete head on against the likes of Amazon EC2 - but it is equipping service provider allies that want to do so -- Tata Communications is one of Cloud.com's service provider customers, for instance.

The Cupertino, Calif. company says that 98 percent of the Cloud.com stack is open source under the GPL 3. The rest of the code is proprietary custom connectors for linking in Cisco and EMC systems, for instance, Ulander said.

Ulander, formerly at Monetvista and Sun, said the Cloud.com Platform has a the muscle to provide service providers and enterprises with a hybrid solution for both public and private clouds. He noted that the stack offers network and storage virtualization management.

According to Cloud.com:

"Today, enterprises and service providers trying to build their own IaaS clouds face a daunting challenge. First they must integrate a patchwork of software including hypervisor, management software, user interface, network virtualization and storage management," according to one statement issued by the company.

"Once the software stack is put together they are faced with a costly requirement to build using specialized storage and networking equipment that supports proprietary extensions required by hypervisor vendors.

" Cloud.com Platform provides an integrated solution for delivering virtual datacenters as a service – delivering all of the essential components used to build, deploy and manage multi-tier and multi-tenant cloud applications in a simple to install software package."