Metacloud, the leading provider of OpenStack-based private cloud solutions, today announced its emergence fromstealth with an investment from Storm Ventures. Founded by large scale infrastructure veterans who managed the massive infrastructures behind Ticketmaster and Yahoo!, Metacloud provides the industry's first fully managed OpenStack-based private cloud solution with enterprise capabilities for availability, management and scale that give IT organizations the benefits of the reliability and predictability of the best solutions on the market. Building on top of the OpenStack cloud computing project, Metacloud is already in production deployments at companies such as Tableau Software and other Fortune 500 company.

"We founded Metacloud with the firm belief that cloud is not a buzz word, nor should it be hard to deploy and manage.Businesses can't wait for months or years for results and cloud implementations shouldn't take that long," said Steve Curry, CEO of Metacloud. "Despite popular misconceptions, IT organizations can have the best of both worlds: a cloud customized to their requirements, deployed quickly and cost effectively.  IT organizations shouldn't have to keep buying proprietary hardware or software that locks them into an increasingly expensive cycle.  Nor should they have to put up with costly public cloud services that can't scale with their data center operations or business needs."

Despite the strong appeal of cloud computing, many companies have struggled to find a viable solution to meet their needs.  Enterprises frequently cite data locality, cost and pre-existing capital investment as top concerns that keep them from moving to a public cloud. Companies considering a private cloud environment, which market research firm IDC projects as an $11.8 billion* market by 2014, are confronted with a different set of challenges. Commercial solutions are proprietary, cost prohibitive and susceptible to vendor lock-in. Open source-based solutions deliver the robust multi-tenancy and self-service feature-set demanded by enterprise companies but can be extremely complex for many organizations to implement and maintain.

The Metacloud private cloud solution is secure, scalable and cost effective - typically deployed in customer production environments in one-tenth the time of a proprietary cloud implementation at half the cost of alternative solutions.

The benefits of Metacloud's private cloud include:

• High Availability - The Metacloud distribution of OpenStack is optimized to provide automated fail-over of critical OpenStack support services.
• Automated Scalability - The Metacloud distribution is tightly integrated with a rapid deployment framework, allowing for the automated build and subsequent scale of compute, cloud management and storage services.
• High Performance - Metacloud "Swift Direct-Path" optimizes the route to object storage services for clients internal and external to the managed cloud, ensuring high-performance object storage I/O.
• Network Optimization - An enhanced OpenStack networking model conserves datacenter VLANs while maintaining secure tenant separation.
• Simplified Management - The Tenant Invite System is an Active Directory enhancement that enables tenant membership to be easily and securely delegated across the entire enterprise. Tight coupling with the Zabbix Monitoring System enables Metacloud to report real-time performance metrics.

Co-founders Steve Curry and Sean Lynch draw upon their previous experience managing large-scale infrastructure for Yahoo and Ticketmaster to develop Metacloud. Curry founded the Yahoo! storage team, which managed more than 300 petabytes of production storage. Lynch served as SVP of Technical Operations at Ticketmaster, where he designed and deployed Ticketmaster's global systems infrastructure (Ticketmaster is the third largest ecommerce system in the world, servicing 11,000 clients).

"With Metacloud, the enthusiasm around cloud in the enterprise finally has a solution worthy of the hype," said Ryan Floyd, founding general partner at Storm Ventures. "While other vendors in this space are talking about what they plan to deliver, IT organizations now have a fully functional solution from Metacloud with all the reliability and predictability of the best enterprise class virtualization solutions on the market."

Learn about Metacloud at OpenStack Summit San Diego 2012. During the Summit, attendees are invited to visit the Metacloud booth and build an OpenStack cloud through Metacloud Test Drive, a fully featured interactive product demo.  For additional information, visit testdrive.metacloud.com.