Toronto-based startup Breqwatr has released a second version of its turnkey OpenStack cloud appliance. 

The Cloud Appliance 2.0  is a hyper-converged (ie integrated) hardware unit which includes servers, storage and networking to make up an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform for private clouds. 

Curated cloud

The idea is to offer a “curated” OpenStack more accessible, according to founder and CEO John Kadianos: “At Breqwatr, we’re dedicated to empowering the enterprise to take full advantage of private clouds. With the Breqwatr Cloud Appliance, we are removing the guesswork and helping enterprises realize the quickest time to value available for private cloud today.”

The Breqwatr Cloud Appliance includes components for virtual machine management, as well as hardware management for the physical components through a browser intgerace. The company says it offers linear expansion, and has a consumerized user interface so IT departments can operate a self-service model - with full chargeback and resource based quota models.

External storage can be added. 

Not everyone is convinced there is a need for this sort of thing right now, when the OpenStack world seems to be consolidating. In recent months, several early OpenStack startups have come to the end of their run: Nebula planned to offer an enterprise version of OpenStack but closed in April, with Oracle snapping up its engineers; Piston, whose CloudOS also supported non-OpenStack loads, was bought by Cisco earlier this month, while IBM bought OpenStack service provider Blue Box.

“There’s no way to put this nicely: recent months have seen carnage in the OpenStack community,” commented Ben Kepes on Forbes. “Some of those companies are dead and buried while others have been acquired in a manner which questions their commercial success. So to see a new entrant stand up and try and commercialize the ’OpenStack in a box’ model is either really gutsy or else sadly ill-informed.”