Elastra
A Dual-Purpose Server

Elastra straddles the line between public and private clouds. Its Elastra Cloud Server--a software bundle for designing, deploying, and managing cloud applications--can be used to deploy databases in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, and Cloud Server will work in similar fashion inside data centers once an enterprise version tuned for VMware virtual machines is released in a few months.

The ability to design an application that runs in a public cloud, private cloud, or both will appeal to IT pros who want that kind of flexibility for software development, testing, redundancy, or other purposes, says Elastra founder and CEO Kirill Sheynkman. "Using public and private clouds together, that's the thing," he says.

Most of Elastra's customers are Web companies, software-as-a-service companies, and traditional software companies, such as Palo Alto Software, a developer of business-planning software. Palo Alto Software uses Cloud Server with Amazon EC2 to offer its e-mail management app, Email Pro Center, as a service to small businesses.

Alex Boone, Palo Alto's senior software design engineer, says he turned to Elastra because it offered tools for deploying and managing databases in EC2 beyond what was available from Amazon. "They were first movers," he says.

About 10 of Elastra's early adopters are corporate users. Sheynkman says IT departments in big companies are slower to adopt cloud technologies because of concerns over data security, governance, and reliability. "Businesses should be cautious," he says. "I shouldn't be saying this, but take your time. You can start small."

One challenge all startups face is establishing credibility, and Elastra just took another step in that direction. In addition to having 60 customers, it has big-name investors, including Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Bay Partners. On Aug. 5, the 22-employee company revealed it had secured $12 million in second-round funding and that Amazon is among its investors. The money will go toward research and development, increasing sales, and expanding its sales channels. Before the Amazon investment, Elastra planned to offer Cloud Server on other public clouds. That hasn't changed, Sheynkman says.

Elastra's management team has a track record in the enterprise software market. Sheynkman was co-founder and CEO of Plumtree Software and, before that, of Stanford Technology Group, both of which were acquired by larger vendors.

Sheynkman, 41, went into early retirement after Plumtree went public in 2002, moving from San Francisco to New York, where he traded stocks by day and enjoyed the city life. Then he had an "epiphany" about cloud computing: The ability to easily combine databases, application servers, and other software components into virtual IT systems would be a breakthrough, he reasoned. So he moved back to Silicon Valley last year to launch Elastra.

The company got started by offering Cloud Server on EC2, where it charges a premium over Amazon's monthly licensing fees to deploy MySQL, Postgres, and EnterpriseDB in Amazon's cloud. The forthcoming enterprise version of Cloud Server will be licensed on a pay-as-you-go basis as well. Using its Elastic Compute Units, a type of software metering system, Elastra charges customers based on the number and type of software components they deploy.

Elastra's tuning Cloud Server to work with other software layers in the open source LAMP stack, and in August it came out with support for Eucalyptus, open source clustering software. A future possibility is a software stack for building data warehouses in the cloud.

-- John Foley

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