Cloud News: Amazon, Nasuni, Nirvanix

Here’s a roundup of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing industry:

Amazon CloudFront announcements. Amazon made three announcements Tuesday about CloudFront, its AWS content delivery network.  The first announcement is that CloudFront is entering General Availability.  Secondly, CloudFront can now be used with any origin server for content, where previously it had to be an Amazon S3 instance. There is no additional charge to use a custom origin server. The last announcement is that Amazon is providing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for CloudFront, with a service commitment of 99.9 percent availability.

Nirvanix names CEO and closes $10M B round.  On Wednesday Nirvanix announced the appointment of Scott Genereux as President and CEO and a capital infusion of an additional $10 million from primary investors Intel Capital, Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and Winward Ventures. Genereux joins Nirvanix from QLogic Corp. where he most recently served as senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing. "Nirvanix is well positioned to further expand its cloud storage service lead, particularly in the entertainment and health care sectors and Fortune 1000 enterprises," said Charles Curran, General Partner, Valhalla Partners. "Scott brings a history of consistent, systematic execution and proven sales management skills balanced with an aggressive, dynamic approach that will be a strong addition to the Nirvanix executive team."

Compuware launches CloudSleuth. Compuware (CPWR) announced the official launch of CloudSleuth, a partner-driven cloud community specifically built to spotlight the performance of the cloud's federated infrastructure. CloudSleuth gives partners the opportunity to provide third-party verification of the reliability of their services. "With our unique position in the industry providing outside-in visibility across the entire enterprise-Internet application delivery chain, it makes sense for us to start a community like CloudSleuth. We look forward to an open exchange of ideas, information and resources that will benefit the market," said Mark Hillman, VIce President of Strategy and Product Line Management at Compuware. In addition to blogs, forums and other resources, CloudSleuth will have a Global Provider View application and Cloud Performance Analyzer application available.  Initial partners in CloudSleuth include OpSource, CDNetworks, GoGrid, Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) and Teklinks.

Nasuni adds XenServer support.  Cloud gateway provider Nasuni announced full support Tuesday for Citrix XenServer, making the Nasuni Filer available to more than 50,000 XenServer production sites worldwide and rounding out Nasuni's support on all three major server virtualization platforms. “Deploying the Nasuni Filer as a virtual appliance on XenServer with unlimited primary capacity to the cloud radically alters the value proposition of NAS file servers by eliminating costly, proprietary NAS hardware, simplifying storage administration and providing unlimited primary storage to the cloud,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni.