OpenNebula's Toolkit Helps Tackle Challenges in the Cloud

OpenNebula, an open-source project aimed at building the industry standard open source cloud computing tool for managing distributed data center infrastructures, released Version 2.0 of its OpenNebula Toolkit for cloud computing.

The newly released toolkit is an offshoot of close collaboration with Leading IT Organizations that have used OpenNebula to build large-scale production cloud infrastructures in industry and academia. As a result, the toolkit includes features that many enterprise IT organizations need for private and hybrid cloud adoption.

Its flexible architecture and the emphasis laid on standardization, interoperability, portability and scalability coupled with the fact that it can accommodate practically any hardware and software combination in a data center, gives cloud users and administrators the option to choose between several popular cloud-interfaces and hypervisors.

"This new version has matured thanks to an active and engaged community," Ignacio M. Llorente, co-lead and director of the OpenNebula Project, said, in a press release. Llorente added that by virtue of its being open source extensible architecture, several users had been able to add innovative new features, while others had suggestions on how to improve the toolkit.

OpenNebula is downloaded several thousands of times per month from its Web site, and is widely used across multiple industries, such as Hosting, Telecom, HPC, or e-Government.

Ruben S. Montero, co-lead and chief architect of the OpenNebula Project, commenting on the toolkit said that it was the result of many years of research and interaction with some major players in the Cloud arena. OpenNebula had been designed to be flexible enough to adapt to any infrastructure environment and to scale to hundreds of thousands of virtual machines and cores.

OpenNebula was first established as a research project in 2005 and made its first public release in March 2008. OpenNebula is being used as an open platform for innovation in several flagship international projects to research the challenges that arise in cloud management, and also as production-ready tool in both academia and industry.