Abiquo, the leading Enterprise Cloud software company, today announced a major release of its award-winning software solution, which allows customers to build and manage global, robust, fully automated and governed self-service clouds. Version 2.0 will be demonstrated live at Abiquo's booth at the Ninth International Cloud Computing Expo, which opens today at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Enterprises have widely deployed virtualization in an effort to deliver capex savings through higher utilization, but with limited success. Next generation Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions have the potential to significantly increase utilization, as well lowering opex, to drive down direct costs, as well as providing many intangible benefits such as dramatically improved agility, flexibility and reduced time to market. Abiquo 2.0 delivers on this promise by considering the needs of all stakeholders, providing enterprises with a highly flexible, robust and scalable solution to fully meet the self-service provisioning requirements of application and development teams, the control and visibility needs of IT Operations, and the governance and efficiency requirements of Compliance and the CFO.

Abiquo version 2.0 deepens its capabilities in management, automation, self-service and governance, as well as extending functionality to include unlimited multi-currency pricing models for chargeback, show-back and show-forward, a new customizable portal to enable "fast-track" provisioning services, and enhanced orchestration and automation features, including full integration with Opscode Chef.

"The majority of enterprise IT decision makers expect self service provisioning and cloud computing will help improve operational efficiency, drive down costs and improve business agility in the coming months and years. As organizations move from proof of concept to production scale cloud operations, they will need unified portals and automated provisioning engines that can easily integrate with existing, heterogeneous compute, network and storage resources and are able to scale up as needed over time," explains Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President Enterprise Systems Management Software at IDC. "With the release of 2.0, Abiquo is significantly extending the scope and complexity of the cloud environments it can manage in order to address the increasingly complex needs of its customers."

"Abiquo's version 2.0 represents a clear step forward in enterprise cloud technology," said cloud industry analyst, Bernd Harzog of The Virtualization Practice. "We are particularly impressed at the way Abiquo continues to focus on the needs of a broad range of stakeholders within the enterprise, as well as providing new features specifically aimed at achieving cost saving and ROI goals."

NEW FEATURES

Abiquo helps enterprises address these new cloud consumption model challenges by enabling each stakeholder - application and development teams, IT Operations, Compliance and the CFO - with functionality aligned to deliver against their requirements for a successful cloud experience.

Opscode Chef Integration

Integration with Opscode Chef allows suitably permissioned users to individually customize virtual machines at deployment time. Abiquo presents available Chef "recipe" options, and then passes the selected machine configuration to the Chef server for seamless customization to the user's exact requirements -- all from within the Abiquo GUI. This offers even the most complex enterprises with greater opex savings through streamlined automation. By combining Abiquo's infrastructure automation with a "write once, deploy many" Chef recipe, users significantly cut the amount of time and effort needed to set up new environments. Additionally, the Opscode expert community can be leveraged to help build the right recipes, saving even more time.

Fully Customizable End User Portal

Many enterprise and MSP customers want to provide a sub-set of users with a simplified deployment portal customized exactly to their needs. Abiquo now provides a complete portal, which leverages the Abiquo API, for self-service creation of virtual enterprises (tenants), virtual datacenters (sub-tenants) and virtual appliances (applications), and is fully customizable for "fast-track" implementations, as well as delivery of a simple service catalog. The portal also supports an optional approvals workflow including full email integration for "one-click" management.

Infinitely Flexible Self-Service Storage Options

Abiquo 2.0 supports the widest range of self-service storage options. Each virtual machine image volume, and each of its attached data volumes, can be self-provisioned on storage protocol agnostic hypervisor datastores, or as persistent block level storage in a fully managed tier model, supporting a wide variety of storage devices, including NetApp Multistore enabled storage systems.

Unlimited Multi-Currency Pricing Model Engine for Chargeback/Show-back/Show-forward

Abiquo 2.0 supports an unlimited number of pricing models, each in any international currency and with any combination of individually defined resource, application and standing charges, which can also vary by storage tier and physical datacenter. Each tenant can be assigned to any defined pricing model for ultimate flexibility. Pricing models are used not only for chargeback and show-back, but additionally "show-forward" allowing users to be fully informed and optionally notified of the exact cost of each virtual appliance before it is deployed. Coupled with Abiquo's complete self-service model, this encourages "just-in-time provisioning," whereby users consume only the virtual resources they actually need, dramatically increasing utilization and lowering costs.

Jaspersoft Open Source Reporting Integration

Abiquo 2.0 includes full integration with the Jaspersoft open source business intelligence platform. A range of sample reports, rebranded "skin" and Abiquo authentication plug-in are all provided in open source form, allowing customers to extend or customize reporting to meet their own requirements.

Extended Self-Service Networking Capabilities

In addition to automatic provisioning of isolated private networks and self-service provisioning of both additional private networks and public IP addresses, Abiquo 2.0 supports multiple pre-defined external networks, allowing IP address pools to be shared among multiple virtual datacenters in an enterprise. Any private or external network can be used as the default for each virtual datacenter, providing automatic address assignment.

Extended Hypervisor, NetApp and Cisco UCS Support

Building on the industry's broadest hypervisor support, Abiquo 2.0 extends support for the newest editions emerging including VMware vSphere 5 and Citrix XenServer 6. Additionally, Abiquo continues to enhance its enterprise support for Cisco UCS. In version 2.0, support is extended to include assignment of Service Profile templates to each blade in a UCS chassis, as well as power and location ID functions.

Extended Localization

Abiquo's award-winning GUI has also been further localized into eight international languages "out-of the-box," including English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

For more information on Abiquo 2.0 visit http://www.abiquo.com/products/abiquo-2.0.php