Latest version extends storage capabilities and enhanced dynamic workload placement to support a variety of cloud service providers’ different business requirements

London, UK – 25 July 2013 – Leading international provider of cloud orchestration software, Flexiant, today announced V3.1.3 of its trendsetting software, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator. The new release provides, as a technology preview, support for Ceph, a distributed block store, object store and file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability and scalability.

Support for the open source distributed storage technology will allow Flexiant’s customers to store their customer data including disks and images on the Ceph distributed storage system. The benefits include reduced hardware costs and increased scalability by eliminating centralized storage.

Alex Bligh, CTO and COO, Flexiant said, “Storage preferences vary for cloud service providers and customers have different requirements and considerations to balance – cost, scalability, resilience and performance. As a result, we continue to develop various storage options for our customers. While this type of innovative storage solution is not for everyone, it does give our customers more options. Ceph is a disruptive and leading edge technology with significant advantages. Our support for Ceph illustrates Flexiant’s commitment to offer our customers multiple storage options as opposed to railroading them into a single proprietary storage solution.”

Support for Ceph is part of Flexiant’s mission to partner with best of breed companies. Bligh continued, “Storage is a hard problem. Thus we made the choice to work with storage specialists, such as the Ceph development team; development of an entire storage stack in house was not something Flexiant wanted to focus on. We continue to offer the leading cloud management solution and work with specialist companies across the cloud market.”

V3.1.3 also offers enhancements to its dynamic workload placement feature.  Cloud service providers and customers can control virtual machine workload placement based on software licensing, resiliency/SLA management, performance, privacy, single tenancy models and enable even more advanced rules so end users can have complete control over where their workloads run, including introducing virtual private cloud functionality.

Tony Lucas, Founder and SVP of Product, Flexiant, said, “Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V3.1.3’s dynamic workload placement has made the allocation strategy more powerful, with more fine-grained rules and much easier to use. At the server level, for example, customers with 100 servers can use a single inherited rule to place them within a particular group of compute resources.”

These two features further enhance Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator’s ability to make a significant difference on a cloud service provider’s business. The cloud management software has been included in this year’s Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Management Report and also rated by Info-Tech Research Group as exemplary in the “Vendor Landscape: Cloud Management Solutions.”