New Members Join Linux Foundation, Participate in Open Virtualization Alliance

Autonomic Resources, Bloombase, BlueCat Networks, op5, Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, Scale Computing and 6WIND Advance Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

SAN FRANCISCO, February 11, 2014 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced that Autonomic Resources, Bloombase, BlueCat Networks, op5, Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, Scale Computing and 6WIND are joining the organization.

Representing a variety of cloud-enabling technologies, The Linux Foundation’s newest members will maximize their investments in collaborative development by participating in the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), which recently became a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation and works to promote Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). 

The OVA Collaborative Project receives finance, legal, operations and advocacy support from The Linux Foundation, which allows the Alliance to focus on its goals to increase awareness, adoption, interoperability and best practices for KVM.

As an alternative to expensive, proprietary virtualization solutions, OVA members believe KVM and open source are essential to the cloud services of the future. More information about today’s newest Linux Foundation members:

Autonomic Resources is a government-only cloud service provider headquartered in Cary, N.C. Autonomic advocates for open cloud standards and offers a range of cloud services that are utility priced, easily managed, highly reliable, and cost effective for its government clients. The company hosts solutions in its FedRAMP and Department of Defense authorized cloud: Autonomic Resources Cloud Platform (ARC-P).

“Autonomic has a long history supporting open source and standards as the best way to deliver flexible, secure, accredited and cost-effective IT solutions to our federal users,” said John Keese, CEO at Autonomic. “With the backing of the Linux Foundation, we’re confident OVA will help us spur greater adoption of open cloud and virtualization technologies within government agencies.”

Bloombase is an innovator in next-generation data security solutions from physical/virtual data centers through big data and to the cloud. The company provides turnkey, non-disruptive, defense-in-depth data at-rest encryption protection against dynamic cyber threats in heterogeneous storage environments, while simplifying the IT security infrastructure.

“Enterprises that power their data center with KVM are leveraging Bloombase to securely encrypt virtual machines and virtual storage systems far beyond what is possible with traditional hardware protection products,” said Sean Xiang, CEO at Bloombase. “With heightened sensitivity to data security top-of-mind, our work with the OVA and KVM is bringing much-needed new levels of information security and data encryption to virtualized, big data and cloud infrastructure.”

BlueCat connects virtual machines, clouds, mobile devices and applications in a dynamic and scalable environment. With unified mobile security, address management, automation and self-service, BlueCat offers a rich source of network intelligence to protect the network, reduce IT costs and ensure reliable service delivery. 

“With business requirements accelerating cloud adoption, BlueCat ensures that cloud solutions are properly integrated into the increasingly complex enterprise network architecture,” said Andrew Wertkin, CTO at BlueCat. “Supporting KVM and the OVA, allows us to continue to expand our solutions for automating, securing and managing virtual data centers and cloud services within Linux-based enterprises.”

op5  is a developer of open source based, unified IT monitoring solutions, based out of Sweden. The product op5 Monitor is a fully supported package that serves business-critical IT with the ability to monitor with a focus on performance, availability and scalability, handling control from the local IT department to large IT environments with thousands of distributed hardware, applications and services. op5 developed a KVM plug-in to monitor KVM virtualization infrastructure that allows organizations to have better capacity planning, which enables the provisioning of usage of resources such as storage, CPU, and memory more proactively — all in a unified manner. 

“op5 engineers are already active KVM contributors, helping to push the technology forward,” said Jan Josephson, CTO at op5. “The OVA’s work in spreading best practices for open virtualization and KVM technology is helping shape the future of the data center and cloud computing. As Linux Foundation and OVA participants, we’ll be able to actively engage the market on the need for network monitoring within highly virtualized environments.”

Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH is an open source software provider of powerful, efficient server solutions.  With more than 55,000 global installments, the Proxmox solution Proxmox Virtual Environment is widely used in organizations regardless of size or industry, as well as in NGOs and education.

“Proxmox VE is an extremely flexible and easy-to-use virtualization solution combining KVM and containers on one platform,” said Martin Maurer, CEO at Proxmox. “As a virtual host system, Proxmox VE allows users to easily set up and manage KVM and containerized virtual machines on the same host. This versatility and unified management capability are driving rapid adoption of Proxmox’s software and support.”

Scale Computing develops hyperconverged infrastructure for the data center.  Its HC3 platform seamlessly integrates servers, storage and virtualization into a single platform that is easy to use and highly scalable, dramatically lowering the barriers and costs involved in keeping applications running in a highly available and scalable manner.  By making complex infrastructure appear like a single server, it is the growing choice for hundreds of IT organizations across a range of vertical markets.

“While already a highly adopted, mature and supported technology, we believe the KVM ecosystem will grow even bigger through the Linux Foundation,” said Peter Fuller, VP of Alliances and Business Development at Scale Computing. “In order to achieve the software defined environment the industry is moving toward, it’s necessary to leverage an enterprise-class hypervisor like KVM.  Scale Computing takes the best of KVM, an enterprise class hypervisor, and delivers it in HC3 for simplified IT.”

6WIND’s commercial software solves performance challenges for network vendors, mainly on an OEM basis, that serves telco, enterprise and cloud infrastructure markets. The company’s 6WINDGate packet processing software is optimized for cost-effective hardware running Linux with multicore processors to deliver a wide variety of networking and security protocols and features. 6WIND is a founding member of http://dpdk.org, which is a major open source community that enables high performance network applications such as network functions virtualization (NFV).

“We are excited to work with the Linux Foundation on solutions that solve Linux networking bottlenecks within the OVA to enable the promise of high-bandwidth, flexible applications within virtualized environments,” said Eric Carmès, Founder and CEO at 6WIND. “Our 6WINDGate packet processing software solves critical data plane performance challenges caused by layers of overhead, enabling a cost-effective value proposition with software-defined networks (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV) and multicore system-on-a-chip (SoC) architectures.”

“The development of open virtualization welcomes participation from a broad number of contributors who are able to test and incorporate new technology faster than a single proprietary virtualization vendor ever could,” said Amanda McPherson, Vice President of Marketing, The Linux Foundation. “With data centers nearly filled to capacity, virtualization and cloud computing have never been more important. The OVA consortium is committed to accelerating KVM as an open, flexible, and highly scalable virtualization technology primed for enterprise adoption.”

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo, Tizen, and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.