451 Group Cartika/Flexiant analysis

Flexiant raises money, releases Cloud Orchestrator v3 with app provisioning
Analyst: Rachel Chalmers
15 Jan, 2013

Cloud orchestration software vendor Flexiant has raised £3m (roughly $5m) to support
continuing expansion, including the launch of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator version 3. The latest release of its software introduces four new licensing models tailored to the hosting and service-provider market and designed to give companies of all sizes access to the product. The latest version also adds Bento Boxes, a new feature that delivers preconfigured application provisioning. Bento Boxes let service providers offer their customers prepackaged application stacks that are ready to share and deploy.

The 451 Take
We’ve struggled with how to categorize Flexiant. On the one hand, its software is called Cloud Orchestrator and it does overlap functionally with management and automation products like enStratus, Nimbula, ServiceMesh and VMware vCloud Director. On the other hand – and reflecting the company’s heritage – the software is also a true cloud OS, and is most often compared with CloudStack, OnApp and OpenStack. Whichever way you look at it, Flexiant is proving itself in the market.

Cartika Selects Flexiant as Cloud Platform

Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator selected to deliver Cartika an enterprise grade cloud computing solution

Toronto, Canada and London, UK – 28 November 2012 – Cartika IT Solutions Inc., a leader in application hosting and advanced clustering technologies, has selected Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V3  over OnApp V3, CloudStack, OpenStack, and in-house development for its on-demand, fully automated provisioning of cloud services.

Both from an internal company requirement and to meet its customers’ expectations of a more automated and flexible solution, Cartika recognised the need to offer a more complete infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. Cartika’s legacy system was home-grown, aging and lacking the features required to effectively deliver cloud services to its customers in an automated, profitable way

Storage – the backbone of the cloud. To centralize or distribute?

Cloud giants like Amazon and Google are initiating a massive push towards distributed and replicated storage solutions for cloud computing. Their assertion is that the storage backbone for the cloud should be done via replicating data across commodity type of local storage hardware. Essentially, they are talking about network based RAID across multiple local storage servers. Amidst their claims that distributed storage concepts will one day make SAN solutions obsolete, I am strangely reminded of similar claims by Intel and others regarding the future of mainframe computers when 1U pizza boxes hit the market. At the time, it was postulated that distributed processing found in these intel based machines would be preferable to the centralized compute model offered by mainframes, and inevitably would spell the end of mainframes and the concept of consolidated computing. Clearly distributed processing did not put an end to consolidated mainframe computing, as many enterprises today utilize a hybrid approach to computing. Rest assured, the distributed storage model being so heavily promoted by several cloud giants today will not spell the end of consolidated SAN storage platforms. Having said this, there are clear benefits and disadvantages to each approach that must be considered when building a storage backbone for your cloud.

Canadian Cloud Launched by Cartika Built on ZFS Storage Platform – Cartika Canada Further Evolves Cloud Computing with Next Generation Storage Systems

Canadian Cloud launched by Cartika is built on the Open Standards ZFS storage platform. Simply the most reliable, resilient and flexible storage platform available anywhere with Cloud Computing. All Cloud data is automatically replicated locally, as well as, offsite between the Cartika United States Cloud and Cartika Canada Cloud for the purposes of disaster recovery.

Toronto, Canada (PRWEB) September 12, 2011

Cartika recently launched its Canadian Cloud from within their NOC in Toronto, Canada. In addition to being able to deliver a 100% Canadian based Cloud solution, the Cartika Canadian Cloud boasts a revolutionary storage solution built on Open Standards and Open Source ZFS Storage Platforms.