May 2nd, 2008
Enomaly's open source virtual platform moves VMs in the cloud
Enomaly is a software developer in Toronto whose open source cloud computing platform is getting a lot of attention these days.
The platform, Enomalism, is a virtual infrastructure tool that allows customers create their own cloud capacity and move virtual machines from one’s data center or from anywhere on the cloud to virtually any location. It is similar in some respects to VMware’s VirtualCenter VM management platform but is designed for larger capacity computing and managing applications in the cloud.
It is self funded but investors are taking notice. “We’re getting a lot of interest from VCs and private equity firms, “ said chief technologist and founder Reuven Cohen. “Our competitors are doing that so we might have to go down that road.”
The 16-employee company – which also built its own elastic compute cloud engine and remote storage product– has been working closely with service providers including Amazon and its Elastic Computing 2 (EC2) platform and another unnamed internal telecommunications provider that boasts 175 million customers worldwide. Roughly 60 percent of the interest comes from hosting providers and 40 percent from Fortune 500 companies that are strained for capacity.
Cohen, who founded Enomaly as a consulting firm four years ago, said he prefers Linux’s built in kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) technology but emphasizes that his platform (which was initially built using the Xen API) supports Xen, KVM, OpenVZ and Sun’s VirtualBox with plans to support VMware and Microsoft’s forthcoming HyperV. “We’re trying to be agnostic,” he said.
Enomaly’s next generation 2.0 platform, in beta testing, is based on a new Python framework and middleware that intelligently orchestrates how large scale applications are deployed in the cloud. Version 2.0 is a complete rebuild and its final release is expected in June, Cohen said.
Enomalism is a cloud enabler, whose virtual infrastructure layer is used by cloud providers.
Enomaly is sponsored (but not financially supported) by Intel. It is released under the AGPL license, sort of a GPL3 implementation for hosted solutions, Cohen said.
In some ways, Enomaly competes against VMware and 3terra but Cohen contends that the economics of proprietary solutions won’t fare well in the cloud computing arena. “It’s not cost effective with large scale capacity,” he said. “For them to compete against Amazon at 10 cents per hour is impossible. Open source makes it more attractive.”
Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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