Cloudware Vendor Solutions - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 348

• Deployment and interface : Users can manage their clouds with a user-
friendly Web-based interface, command-line tools, or through a
RESTful API. CloudStack provides a feature-rich out-of-the-box user
interface that implements the CloudStack API to manage the infra-
structure; it is an AJAX-based solution compatible with most Web
browsers. A snapshot view of the aggregated storage, IP pools, CPU,
memory, and other resources in use gives users comprehensive sta-
tus information about the cloud.
• Hypervisors : CloudStack is compatible with a variety of hypervisors
including VMware vSphere, KVM, Citrix XenServer, and Xen Cloud
Platform (XCP).
• Reliability : CloudStack is a highly available and scalable IaaS solu-
tion, in that no single component failure can cause cluster or cloud-
wide outage. It enables downtime-free management for server
maintenance and reduces the workload of managing a large-scale
cloud deployment.
• OS support : CloudStack supports Linux for the management server
and for underlying computing nodes. Depending on the employed
hypervisor, CloudStack supports a wide range of guest operating
systems including Windows, Linux, and various versions of Berkeley
Software Distributions (BSDs).
• Scalability : CloudStack is capable of managing large numbers of serv-
ers across geographically distributed data centres through a linearly
scalable and centralized management server. This capability elimi-
nates the need for intermediate cluster-level management servers.
It supports integration with both software and hardware firewalls
and load balancers to provide additional security and scalability to
a user's cloud environment (such as F5 load balancer and Netscaler).
• Cost : CloudStack itself is a free software licensed under the Apache
License; however, using a commercial hypervisor will incur corre-
sponding costs.
CloudStack is one of the leading open-source cloud solutions with its rich
functionality and user-friendly Web-based graphical user interface. Many
leading telecommunication companies are using Citrix Cloud Platform
powered by Apache CloudStack, including British Telecom (BT), Nippon
Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), Tata Communications, and Korea Telecom.
16.4.5 Apache Hadoop
Hadoop is an open-source software platform that allows to easily process
and analyze very large data sets in a computer cluster. Hadoop can, for
example, be used for Web indexing, data mining, log file analyses, machine