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Juniper Networks and startup Cloudscaling announced last month that Cloudscaling would leverage Juniper’s virtual network controller into its OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure offering. Now Juniper is giving Cloudscaling even more help, contributing to the $10 million the smaller company collected in Round B financing.
Juniper, which like most of its competitors in the networking space is pulling together a software-defined networking (SDN) strategy, is joining storage technology provider Seagate and venture capital firm Trinity Ventures in the latest round of funding for Cloudscaling.
In 2011, Cloudscaling raised $4 million from Trinity.
Cloudscaling, founded in 2006, offers its Open Cloud System infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution that is based on the OpenStack cloud platform. The company aims its offering at enterprises and cloud service providers for such workloads as big data implementations and Web and mobile apps. Leveraging the OpenStack platform and Juniper’s SDN technology, Cloudscaling is looking to offer customers the same cloud capabilities found in cloud solutions from Amazon Web Services, Google and Rackspace.
It can run on the Amazon and Google public cloud. However, the key difference is that Cloudscaling’s solution also can be deployed on an enterprise’s own data center infrastructure.
“The OpenStack platform has matured to a point where enterprises can start to reliably use it to power next-generation computing workloads on their own private clouds,” CEO Michael Grant wrote in an April 15 post on the company’s blog when first announcing the partnership with Juniper.
At the time, Cloudscaling was announcing the latest iteration of Open Cloud System, version 2.5, which leverages the virtual network controller technology that Juniper acquired when it bought startup Contrail Systems in December for $176 million.
Juniper officials initially expected to release its software-based SDN controller in the first half of 2014. However, once they had a deep look at Contrail’s technology, they realized they were further ahead than they expected, Brad Brooks, vice president of business development and marketing at Juniper, told eWEEK earlier this month.
Now they say the JunosV Contrail Controller—a central part of Juniper’s multi-step SDN strategy—will start shipping in the second half of this year. It currently is being tested by AT&T, China Mobile and other companies.
Juniper officials have said that partnerships are a key part of their strategy, and have said they are working with such companies as Cloudscaling, Citrix Systems, Red Hat and Mirantis to create complete cloud-based solutions based on OpenStack and CloudStack. Traditional networks—with their complexity and manual-based operations—have been seen as a choke point in the evolution of increasingly virtualization- and cloud-based data centers. SDN promises to solve that by removing the network intelligence from the underlying physical hardware and putting it into software-based controllers, which will help make networks more flexible, scalable and programmable.
Cloudscaling officials have been talking up some recent customers wins—including EVault, DataFort, Ubisoft and LivingSocial, which Grant in his blog said “will put Cloudscaling at the center of the conversation.”