Cloudscaling has upgraded its Open Cloud System, hoping to lure more service providers and enterprises to use its OpenStack-based platform for private clouds, in part by enabling them to "federate" with public clouds from Amazon Web Services LLC and Google.

OCS 2.0 is intended to support private clouds -- those that operate behind a firewall -- with the scalability of the giant public clouds. Cloudscaling prefers to call that "elasticity," because it includes scaling down as well as up, on demand.

The distinction Cloudscaling makes is between its cloud infrastructure platform and those built primarily on enterprise virtualization software such as VMware Inc.. While the latter work well for internal enterprise apps such as salesforce management, Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant says, newer apps including Web-based businesses (think Netflix), mobility and software-as-a-service require a different kind of cloud, in terms of technology, architecture and performance.

"The architecture of an Amazon-like cloud is very different than an enterprise virtualization cloud and the new apps are best fit for that more elastic infrastructure," he says. "We are providing that elastic cloud solution as a private cloud, behind the firewall, for people who don't want to run their applications on a public cloud infrastructure for reasons such as security, privacy, governance, regulatory reasons or performance optimization."

By offering federation with Amazon's EC2 and S3 clouds and the Google Compute Engine, Cloudscaling offers the benefit of being able to run applications as hybrids, on public and private clouds.

OCS is built on OpenStack and offers a managed option that will incorporate future changes in the open standard.

Why this matters:
Telecom service providers got into the cloud business largely by buying cloud service companies, but as the market evolves, they need to be able to support private and hybrid cloud infrastructures in a way that easily scales up and down, yet allows them to make money in the process.

The Cloudscaling announcement is one of several expected this week as the OpenStack Summit is held in San Diego, but this company is one that is specifically targeting service providers and large-scale implementations.

For more
You can track Cloudscaling's evolution here:

• 5 Takeaways From Carrier Cloud Forum
• Cloudscaling Debuts Open System
• Mgmt World: Battle of the Cloud Gurus
• Mgmt World: KT Puts Commodity Spin on Cloud
• Scaling Clouds With Randy Bias
• Cloudscaling's Bias: Telcos Show Cloudy Thinking

— Carol Wilson, Chief Editor, Events, Light Reading