I’m a big fan of Icelandic cloud vendor GreenQloud (more on them here) for a number of reasons – firstly they’ve managed to differentiate what they do without resorting to post-Snowden fear mongering. In GreenQloud’s case it’s all about the fact that they’re a carbon-neutral cloud vendor. On top of this however they’re doing really interesting stuff – their QloudSync product was an interesting Dropbox-like offering that piqued my interest when it was launched a year or so ago.

The company keeps on doing interesting things and today it’s the announcement of QStack. a hybrid cloud software stack that enables organizations to build private clouds as well as scale and migrate workloads to GreenQloud’s clean, renewable energy-powered public cloud. Essentially QStack is a GreenQloud answer to Microsofts private/public cloud offering – it gives organizations who want their own private cloud the ability to build one, but to do so with a stack that allows them seamless migration of workloads over to GreenQloud’s public offering.

Interestingly, and bucking the trend towards OpenStack being the open source cloud stack most heard about, GreenQloud have built Qstac on top of CloudStack using open source components like the KVM hypervisor and (optionally) 3rd party commercially supported software such as VMWare and Scality object storage. By going the hybrid route, GreenQloud is able to broaden its revenue base – while Qstack is a subscription-based services, GreenQloud also offers optional technical services and contracted customizations

With data centers in Iceland and the US, matched to this new hybrid offering, GreenQloud are likely to appeal to organizations that have sustainability as a core focus – that’s a big pool of customers in Europe, but it will be interesting to see if the same goes for the US.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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