Open Virtualization Alliance Garners Strong Participation with 65 New Members

The Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies, including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), today announced broad industry support and adoption with the addition of 65 new members to the consortium.  With this, the consortium has achieved nearly ten-fold growth in membership since its establishment just one month ago, and today includes members across a wide spectrum of hardware, software, services and cloud computing businesses.

In May, technology leaders BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, Inc. and SUSE announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance. The goal of the alliance is to provide education, best practices and technical advice to help businesses understand and evaluate their virtualization options, including open source alternatives such as KVM.  Since the formation of the consortium, leaders throughout the virtualization industry have quickly expressed strong interest in participating in the Open Virtualization Alliance.

Today, the following companies join as general members of the Open Virtualization Alliance: Abiquo, AdaptiveComputing, Afore Solutions, Arista Networks, Arkeia, autonomicresources, B1 Systems, BlueCat Networks, Brocade, Carbon 14 Software, Cfengine, CheapVPS, Cloud Cruiser, CloudSigma, CloudSwitch, CodeFutures, CohesiveFT, Collax GmbH, Convirture, Corensic, Dell, enStratus, EnterpriseDB, Everis Inc., Fujitsu Frontech, FusionIO, Gluster, Inc., Grid Dynamics, Groundwork Open Source, HexaGrid Computing, IDT us, Infinite Technologies, Information Builders, Killer Beaver, LLC, Likewise, Mindtree Ltd, MontaVista Software, Morph Labs, nanoCloud, Neocoretech, Nicira Networks, Nimbula, novastorm, One Convergence, OpenNebula / C12G Labs, Providence Software (XVT), Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, Qindel, RisingTide Systems, ScaleOut Software, SEP Software, Shadow Soft, Smartscale, StackOps, stepping stone GmbH, Storix, UC4, Unilogik, Univention, Usharesoft, Virtual Bridges, Vyatta, Weston Software Inc, XebiaLabs and Zmanda.

With industry support continuing to grow, the OVA is rapidly moving forward with its mission including:

• Industry Ecosystem: The OVA is promoting the growth of an ecosystem of solutions around KVM. New members offer software and services in many areas including virtualization management, cloud computing, storage management, datacenter automation, network management and business solutions. Combined with the broad portfolios of the founding members including offerings for systems management, web application servers, information management, application development, collaboration, cloud computing and business analytics, there are hundreds of offerings already available around KVM. As part of its outreach to the wider community, the OVA is also encouraging  ISVs to support their applications on KVM.

• and through specific open virtualization and KVM webpages. In addition to analyst white papers, there are resources on KVM security, how-to suggestions on configuration, and shared advice on best practices for KVM. These efforts are part of a broader library of resources that members are developing to help speed the adoption of KVM for organizations of all sizes.

• . KVM is now the hypervisor used in 9 out of the 14 SPECvirt results and has demonstrated leadership in 20-core and 40-core systems and is the sole submitted benchmark for an 80-core system. SPECvirt_sc2010 is the SPEC benchmark for evaluating the performance of datacenter servers used for virtualized server consolidation..

The Open Virtualization Alliance continues to develop rapidly, and plans to hold its first formal Board meeting at the end of June.

For more information about the Open Virtualization Alliance and its members, visit www.openvirtualizationalliance.org.

For more information about joining the Open Virtualization Alliance, visit http://www.openvirtualizationalliance.org/contact/.


About Open Virtualization Alliance
The mission of the Open Virtualization Alliance is to foster the adoption of KVM as an open virtualization alternative, accelerate the emergence of an ecosystem of third-party solutions around KVM, increase overall awareness and understanding of KVM, encourage interoperability, promote best practices and highlight examples of customer successes.  Founding members of the Open Virtualization Alliance include BMC Software, Eucalytpus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, Inc. and SUSE.

Quote Sheet:

"Adaptive Computing has a long-standing commitment of promoting flexible, open and interoperable solutions that provide businesses with a broad set of choices. We see KVM and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as key components to providing open cloud solutions that help IT organizations avoid vendor lock-in.  For this reason, we are excited to support the objectives of the Open Virtualization Alliance and extend its influence to the intelligent automation of dynamic cloud solutions."
- Lane Franks, VP Strategy and Operations, Adaptive Computing

"Arkeia Software is thrilled to join the Open Virtualization Alliance. Support for KVM is consistent with Arkeia's strategy to offer backup and disaster recovery for the widest coverage of virtualized and physical environments.  KVM is an important virtualization technology and we look forward to offering Arkeia's Progressive Deduplication™ technology to protect KVM-based hypervisors."
- Arkeia

"When the Open Virtualization Alliance reached out to us to explain the strategic mission, we immediately understood the opportunity we collectively had to promote standards. Autonomic's government cloud message is one of focused on standards one that helps protect agencies from the re-creation of stacks that promote vendor lock-in. We are working to assure the days of "sticky, embedded and hard to rip-out" are numbered."
-John Keese, President of Autonomic Resources and provider of the ARC-P cloud platform for Government

“B1 Systems is committed to provide the most suitable solution to the customers' needs with regards to open source technologies. B1Systems has done numerous consulting and support around open source virtualization and has gained a lot of valuable experience with Xen, KVM and Open Stack. With joining the Open Virtulization Alliance, B1 Systems can contribute its experience and even more improve the customer satisfaction with open source technologies in business-critical enterprise environments.”
- Ralph Dehner, CEO, B1 Systems

“The growing need for IT cost reduction and automation is driving the adoption of virtualization and private clouds – both of which require solutions capable of connecting a company's workflows with the hypervisor itself. As a leading provider of IP Address Management (IPAM) software solutions, BlueCat Networks is thrilled to join the Open Virtualization Alliance. With broad support for virtual infrastructures and scalability to accommodate the growth of virtual machines and expansion into the cloud, our solutions provide a solid and resilient foundation upon which to virtualize data centers and build clouds.”
- Thomas Borrel, VP Cloud & Virtualization Strategy, BlueCat Networks

"Brocade has been proactive in supporting industry initiatives that advance the development and adoption of open software and hardware architectures.  The resulting technologies will enable our customers to build highly scalable, highly efficient systems that are optimized for the target applications, are simple to operate, and that protect their existing and new IT investments.  Our new Open Virtualization Alliance membership perfectly aligns with the Brocade One strategy to reduce network complexity and support distributed applications within highly virtualized cloud optimized environments."
-  Dave Stevens, chief technology officer at Brocade

“Carbon 14 Software makes heavy use of KVM as the platform that underpins all of our infrastructure.  We believe it is a reliable, mature and flexible virtualization platform.  Along with other open technologies, KVM is at the core of what we do.  This platform choice provides us with reliable virtual computing services that are cost-effective, efficient and scalable.”
- Jason Isitt, Director, Carbon 14 Software

“We welcome and support all initiatives that strive to create a better and more relevant offer for all businesses realizing their IT strategy through cloud technology. CFengine operates in a large variety of ecosystems and technologies, and we're pleased to be part of the OVA initiative, both to help drive the industry momentum forward and to ensure new and current CFengine users can seamlessly take advantage of the open virtualization technologies that will be solidified within the OVA framework.”
- Christian Figenschou, Director of Products and Services, Cfengine

“At CheapVPS, we are excited to be participating in the Open Virtual Alliance as we believe that KVM will play an important role in the future of virtualised environments, providing more efficient use of hardware, which will benefit the world over.”
- Michael Follett, Business Development Manager for Dedicated Hosting, CheapVPS

“Cloud Cruiser provides cloud cost management solutions across heterogeneous cloud computing environments.  As enterprises look to diversify beyond homogeneous solutions to avoid vendor lock in, KVM becomes an increasingly compelling alternative as a leading open source hypervisor.  The OVA ensures KVM's success with the a large ecosystem community in support of an open standard.”
- Sean Casey, VP of Business Development, Cloud Cruiser

“CloudSigma is delighted to participate in the Open Virtual Alliance. As a company we are strongly committed to open software and the open source movement in general and support a number of communities with free resources within our cloud. For virtualisation, stability and security are two critical elements, elements which open source software has time and again proven to be the best at delivering over the long term. Kernel Virtual Machine as a hypervisor was the clear choice for our company due to its mainstream Linux developer support and rapid innovation.”
- Robert Jenkins, Co-Founder, CloudSigma AG

“Virtualization is at the heart of cloud computing, whether for public or private use. Moving this vital function into the kernel makes tremendous sense, providing better support, reliability and easing implementation requirements -- driving the very future of cloud computing advancements.”
- Cory Isaacson, CEO and CTO, CodeFutures Corporation

“We at Collax are proud and excited to participate in the Open Virtualization Alliance because of our long-standing commitment and belief in the importance of open source on both up-and-coming and stable businesses.  We believe that enterprise software should not only be for rich and wealthy, but also for the smaller growing organisations too. That is why the success of the Open Virtualization Alliance is so important, not only in making Kernel-based Virtual Machine successful, but also as a market changing landmark in the shifting attitude to business software.  Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a wonderful example of enterprise only software that can now be accessed by smaller companies. Companies that now have the opportunity to provide similar business stability and flexibility that, in the past, was only attainable by very large organisation. We at Collax have invested greatly in KVM as we see this as the future of virtualization and high availability in the business market as a whole, helping smaller organisations compete on a level playing field as the big boys.”
- Bernd Boente, General Manager, Collax

"Clearly, KVM is coming into its own as a better choice for enterprise virtualization and cloud deployments. We are pleased to be teaming with our fellow members of the Open Virtualization Alliance to ensure that IT buyers know about their choices and understand the power of KVM."
- Arsalan Farooq, Founder and CEO, Convirture

"Corensic is excited to join the Open Virtualization Alliance and looks forward to integrating our unique thin hypervisor technology with KVM. Once the two technologies are integrated, the hypervisor can now become a programmable layer in the stack. The first example of a thin hypervisor application is Jinx, our software quality tool that activates itself below the operating system and dynamically analyzes software to identify concurrency errors. With our participation in the OVA, Corensic will enable Jinx to work on systems that use KVM."
- Peter Godman, Founder and CEO, Corensic

"The goal of enStratus is to provide unified cloud management and governance across all leading public and private cloud platforms. The mission of the Open Virtualization Alliance is very much aligned with our goal we look forward to participating in the program going forward."
- George Hadjiyanis, VP of Sales and Marketing, enStratus

“We're happy to partner with Red Hat, HP, Intel, IBM and others in joining the Open Virtualization Alliance. EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus Cloud Server allows developers to create, implement and maintain scalable cloud database systems with point-and-click ease. By joining the Open Virtual Alliance, we will provide customers a choice of virtualization technologies and take advantage of Kernel-based Virtual Machine’s award-winning performance to further optimize our PostgreSQL cloud database in the private cloud.”
- Karen Padir, Vice President of Engineering and Development, EnterpriseDB

“We at Everis Inc. are excited to participate in the Open Virtual Alliance. We have strived to teach our customers, both in government and industry, the importance that virtualization plays in both security and consolidation. We have and will continue to support KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) because we understand its importance in creating a robust, stable and standardized solution for virtualization.”
- Joe McCoy, President, Everis

"Joining the Open Virtualization Alliance signifies Fujitsu's willingness to embrace the values that underscore its mission. We felt compelled to participate in assisting the OVA meet its objectives for open source KVM architecture, including awareness and education, and fostering an ecosystem of third-party solutions to meet the diverse demands of the emerging cloud marketplace. We are proud to be a member and look forward to working with our co-members to advance awareness and meet the objectives of the alliance."
- Vic Herring, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Fujitsu Frontech North America

“Fusion-io is participating in the Open Virtualization Alliance to support the open source community and to foster the adoption of KVM as a virtualization solution.”
- Chris Kenney, Program Manager, Strategic Alliances, Fusion-io

"We are excited to join other leading open source software vendors in the OVA. Storage is going through the same process of virtualization as traditional computing and the combination of KVM and GlusterFS enables organization to accelerate their adoption to the cloud, leverage their current infrastructure assets to deliver scale out linear performance to meet storage demands."
- Lori Budin, VP Channel Development, Gluster

"KVM is an essential component of the modern, open cloud ecosystem and a core piece of our private cloud strategy. We believe that the Open Virtualization Alliance can propel its adoption to a much higher level."
- Stan Klimoff, Director of Cloud Services, Grid Dynamics

"Hexagrid enthusiastically joins the OVA in support of KVM technology.  Having recently received the Cloud Computing World Series Award for Best Virtualization Product, we credit KVM for providing a solid foundation upon which Hexagrid can build innovative cloud solutions.  The future of KVM is bright and Hexagrid is excited to be aligned with its success.”
- Suresh Mandava, CEO, HexaGrid Computing

"Killer Beaver team is excited to participate in the Open Virtual Alliance. Over the past two years we've been actively promoting Kernel-based Virtual Machine to the local IT community and to our clients. We are currently developing a robust IaaS platform and have chosen to use KVM at its core. After evaluating a multitude of different virtualization platforms, we came to a conclusion that the Kernel-based Virtual Machine is the only solution that is truly capable of delivering enterprise-level scalability, performance, and stability when it comes to building a next generation public or private cloud."
- Vyacheslav Yanson, CTO, Killer Beaver

"Likewise is a long-time supporter of open source software and open standards. We have been dedicated to ensuring our products work across a broad spectrum of virtualization technologies, so we are very pleased to be working with long-time partners like Red Hat and the rest of the members of the Open Virtualization Alliance to help take KVM to the next level and ensure its success as another choice for customers when building their virtualization strategies."
- Ken Cheney, VP of marketing and business development, Likewise

“MontaVista sees the Open Virtualization Alliance as a significant step forward in educating and supporting businesses with their virtualization options. MontaVista has been very active in creating multiple virtualization options for embedded Linux including capabilities around KVM.  Joining the Open Virtualization Alliance helps us advance the knowledge and reach of these capabilities and removes the barriers to adoption allowing the marketplace to take advantage of the performance and economic benefits of KVM.”
-  Jim Ready, CTO and Founder, MontaVista

"By participating in the OVA, Morphlabs is able to engage a rich ecosystem around KVM and collaborate around open source activities and operational optimization that best addresses are customer requirements."
- Winston Damarillo, CEO, Morphlabs

"nanoClouD is convinced that KVM is the best alternative to obtain a powerful virtualization responding to the highest attends in cloud computing and enterprises needs. Indeed, numerical experiments on large servers showed us that the performances of KVM are almost equal to native performance of hosting physical systems. Furthermore, active development of multimedia protocol such as SPICE, makes the rise of a new family of virtual desktops very promising. nanoClouD is excited to participate to this open, interoperable and outstanding virtualization engine, and aims to help any user to benefit from it."
- Dominique Rodrigues, CTO, nanoClouD

“Supporting KVM as a hypervisor since day one, Nimbula Director is a robust, scalable and highly automated Infrastructure-as-a-Service software platform for both enterprise and service provider customers. We are thrilled to be participating in the Open Virtualization Alliance as it is very much aligned with our strong commitment to offering an open and extensible platform to our customers.”
- Reza Malekzadeh, VP of Marketing, Nimbula

"We at Novastorm are excited to participate in the Open Virtualization Alliance. We don't want to miss the opportunity to be an active part in promoting the Kernel-based Virtual Machine technology and to benefit from its dynamic, flexibility and high security standard as an open source solution. These are all qualities we feel important as computing moves into the cloud."
- Christopher Scholz, Founder and Technology Specialist, Novastorm

“We at One Convergence are excited to be part of the Open Virtualization Alliance as we believe KVM provides a compelling value proposition for the cloud and is also emerging as the hypervisor of choice for virtualization of data center networking appliances. One Convergence is focused on building intelligent IO platforms for inline/offload data-path acceleration for packet classification, DPI, Security and other functions to achieve scalability for virtual appliances in KVM environments.”
- Prasad Vellanki, CEO, One Convergence

“We are excited to join an interoperable ecosystem of components around KVM. These are also great news for the OpenNebula community where KVM is already a popular virtualization platform. Thanks to its open and modular architecture, OpenNebula can easily leverage KVM and integrate the OVA ecosystem to provide enterprise-grade cloud solutions."
- Ruben S. Montero, Chief Technology Advisor, C12G Labs and Chief Architect of OpenNebula

“Providence Software is pleased to partner in the Open Virtual Alliance program.  Our flagship product, XVT has provided cross-platform GUI support for over 20 years.  XVT is a toolkit that facilitates and reduces cost for porting and provides RAD GUI development, making the decision for Linux easier than ever.”
- Dan Hanes, President, Providence Software

"QVD is a highly scalable, cost-effective, easy-to-manage, open source VDI solution built on top of KVM."
- Nicolas Arenas, Qindel

"We have been excited to work together with Red Hat and IBM to improve the IO throughput of KVM VMs to approach the hardware capabilities. We now look forward to working with the Open Virtualization Alliance to establish KVM as the highest-density virtualization platform in the industry, complementary to the adoption of LIO as the highest-performance unified open-source storage platform."
- Marc Fleischmann, CEO, RisingTide Systems

“SEP Software, Inc. is pleased to announce its new membership with the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA). SEP sesam is the most economical, functional and easy-to-use tool to provide backup and recovery in virtual environments.  SEP Software and its affiliates have a long history of working successfully with Red Hat and its partners, including SEP sesam, SEP’s flagship product, being named as Red Hat’s ISV Partner of the Year at the EMEA Red Hat Summit held in Valencia, Spain in 2010. SEP Software plans to work closely with the OVA, just as it has worked closely with open source community since its inception. We have one of the most, if not the most, comprehensive backup solution for enterprise class customers in the Linux world. Our software works the same on a single server as it does on tens of thousands of servers. We continually strive to provide the most complete and reliable set of backup tools and modules for the Linux community, as well as UNIX and Microsoft.”
- Crissi Gutierrez, Director of Marketing & Vendor Relations, SEP Software, Inc.

"We're excited to be a member of the Open Source Virtualization Alliance. The adoption of KVM open source virtualization technology is vital because it provides customers with industry-leading performance, flexibility, security and lower total cost of ownership compared to any other virtualization solution in the marketplace. As more and more organizations begin to consider a hybrid cloud model, KVM-based solutions like Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization are able to quickly scale from local servers to large public clouds offering enterprises an evolutionary path to the cloud."
- Erik Wallin, co-Founder of Shadow-Soft

"The Open Virtualization Alliance really helps us move the state of the art forward on KVM and open hypervisor.  As a cloud manager you want stability, consistency, security and performance and that's what the OVA is doing with KVM."
- Ray Nugent, CEO of Cloud Management Vendor, Smartscale Systems

"We think KVM is key in our strategy of standarization and definition of a scalable Reference Architecture built on top of Openstack Nova based only on open source components."
- Diego Parilla, CEO, StackOps

“As a co developer of the web based FOSS-Cloud [1], building upon the Linux, KVM and SPICE ecosystem, we have a strong interest in the further development and broader support of these technologies.”
- Michael Eichenberger, CEO, stepping stone GmbH

"With the added cost savings and increased system manageability offered through virtualization, it is no surprise more organizations are headed this direction; and with Storix System Backup Administrator's inherent ability to easily do physical to virtual migrations, participating in the Open
Virtualization Alliance to foster the adoption of KVM is a natural fit for Storix."
- Storix

“UC4 is pleased to support the Open Virtualization Alliance and KVM technology, enabling customers with deployed KVM-based solutions to realize substantial savings through reduced complexity. The UC4 Automation Platform is the industry’s only solution that unifies business processes, application and infrastructure in a single platform, automating processes as well as decisions through a layer of intelligence. UC4 will enable customers to fully realize the benefits of KVM virtualization and cloud computing.”
- Siddharth (Sidd) Mallannagari UC4 SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development, UC4

“UC4 is pleased to support the Open Virtualization Alliance and KVM technology, enabling customers with deployed KVM-based solutions to realize substantial savings through reduced complexity. The UC4 Automation Platform is the industry’s only solution that unifies business processes, application and infrastructure in a single platform, automating processes as well as decisions through a layer of intelligence. UC4 will enable customers to fully realize the benefits of KVM virtualization and cloud computing.”
- Siddharth Mallannagari UC4 SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development

"Univention is a leading vendor of scalable open source IT infrastructure solutions. The portfolio consists of a Debian-based Linux-distribution for enterprises (Univention Corporate Server, UCS) and solutions for desktop-, client- and virtualization-management. UCS includes a sophisticated
management system for identities, IT-infrastructure and virtualization, which allows central-driven IT operation even in complex environments."
-Nico Gulden, Director of Product Management, Univention

"UShareSoft's UForge Appliance Factory has supported KVM since we launched it, enabling ISVs and enterprise IT teams to quickly build and deliver software for KVM-based virtual infrastructures. Joining the Open Virtualization Alliance is a great way for us to take our support to the next level and help encourage a strong KVM ecosystem."
- James Weird, CTO, UshareSoft

"KVM is the real deal, offering the scalability, security and top-notch performance that growing organizations need. We've been using it since VERDE first launched in 2008 and are thrilled to see it gain traction as the hypervisor of choice for desktop solutions. As a VDI vendor built on open source, we're proud to support this community. We look forward to working with the Open Virtualization Alliance to drive further awareness and adoption of KVM."
- Jim Curtin, CEO, Virtual Bridges

“Vyatta shares the Open Virtualization Alliance commitment to delivering open virtualization solutions to the enterprise. We are excited to share our virtual network security and compliance expertise with a community of vendors and customers supporting KVM-based environments in the datacenter and cloud.”
- Tom McCafferty, vice president of marketing, Vyatta Inc.

"I am proud to announce that Weston Software Inc. is joining the Open Virtualization Alliance. Linux is the ultimate proof-point for open source, and KVM is the heart of Linux. WSI's heterogeneous management technology will always deliver services rapidly and effectively on, and to, KVM-powered environments, platforms and devices."
- William Malik, CISA, Weston Software

“We were excited to see this new community come together and we support the open approach for the Enterprise.  Platforms like OVA are key for defining a Enterprise Best Practices, and we are glad to be a part of this. Our own deployment automation platform is an open solution, enabling efficiency and speed for the Enterprise deployment lifecycle, but adding the flexibility to support multiple middleware and cloud environments."
- Oonagh O Regan, VP of Marketing, XebiaLabs

“Zmanda helps its customers run their businesses on open platforms with confidence. We support backup of applications running in a KVM-based environment, and look forward to working with OVA alliance members to grow adoption of KVM.”
- Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda