Abiquo, a leading provider of Cloud management software solutions, today announced that Abiquo 1.6, the latest release of its revolutionary Cloud management software, will be generally available within 45 days. This release includes industry-standard APIs for Cloud administration and Cloud services consumption, which speeds Cloud adoption by enabling enterprises to leverage existing resources. Other key features in this groundbreaking release include extended vendor independence support and enterprise-class network management and multi-datacenter remote services.

“Abiquo’s latest release further demonstrates that we already deliver the management glue that Global 2000 enterprises and service providers need to connect virtual infrastructure resources for any hypervisor to create private clouds,” said Pete Malcolm, CEO of Abiquo. “We’re the first and only offering that delivers this while others are now only talking about vendor-specific solutions that won’t be available until 2011.” “With Abiquo 1.6’s new APIs and other advanced capabilities, companies of all sizes can now seamlessly connect and cost-effectively manage their internal and external virtual enterprises, datacenters, and processes from a single GUI.”

Leveraging Existing Resources for the Cloud

With version 1.5, Abiquo provided the industry’s first strategic cloud management solution, which manages all aspects of the virtualization infrastructure, including the physical cores, network and storage resources. Abiquo is vendor agnostic, supporting all of the popular hypervisors and will convert one supported hypervisor type to any other in a simple drag-and-drop operation, ending vendor lock-in. Abiquo will capture and store stateful virtual images in shared, private, and public image repositories. The repositories allow customers to view all virtual images, centrally load gold images from an enterprise’s existing storage systems, and immediately deploy. As a result, enterprises no longer needed to start from scratch on the Cloud; they could leverage and deploy existing images.

Now with version 1.6, Abiquo ensures enterprises can leverage their existing systems and processes as well. Using VMWare’s VCloud (Cloud User API) standard, Abiquo is offering a Cloud Service API enabling self-service administrators to migrate existing VMs and other resources into the Resource Cloud quickly and easily.

Abiquo 1.6 is also offering a Cloud Operator API, inspired by Sun Public Cloud (Resource Cloud API), enabling an Operator to run a dynamic, scalable cloud that is configured based on automated capacity rules. With these interfaces, Abiquo has removed one of the biggest obstacles to adoption namely leverage and scalability because enterprises can now bring existing images, system management tools, and services into the Cloud and cost-effectively deploy and manage the growing Cloud resources centrally.

Extending Vendor Independence

Abiquo 1.6 increases vendor independence by adding Cloud management support and virtual to virtual conversion enablement for Citrix XenServer to Abiquo’s existing support for VMWare ESX and ESXi, Microsoft HyperV, KVM, VirtualBox and Xen hypervisors.

In addition, Abiquo 1.6 now offers extended Logical Volume Manager (LVM) storage support on Linux based Servers to manage iSCSI LUNs, adding to the existing support for OpenSolaris ZFS storage technology. The new LVM storage connector is ideal for small deployments or testing environments.

Increasing Enterprise-Class Capabilities

Abiquo 1.6 provides extended multi-datacenter remote services support, which allows the deployment of multiple datacenters without any special, high-end infrastructure requirements.

In addition, Abiquo 1.6 includes advanced network management capabilities including support for 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking, multiple NICs per Virtual machine, multiple Virtual LANS (VLANs) per virtual datacenter, named networks, fully configurable address spaces, Allocation Policy management based on VLAN availability, physical NIC customization, and support for DHCP Relays. These new capabilities are added to Abiquo’s existing network management capabilities including the ability to identify, purchase and assign public IP addresses at a targeted location as well as the ability to centrally track all networks running in virtual enterprises.

Combined, these new network management and multi-datacenter remote services capabilities increase the robustness and scalability of Abiquo’s vendor-independent cloud management solution.