On the heels of appointing a new CEO, Abiquo (News - Alert), which offers a cloud software platform for enterprise and service providers, has launched its Enterprise Edition 2.2, which includes a pluggable architecture for storage integration.

The open architecture of the Abiquo cloud management platform, which integrates with all major vendors, is designed to integrate with any infrastructure and now provides iSCSI storage plugins that allow enterprise and service providers customers, third parties and storage vendors to create their own storage volumes, according to Jim Darragh, CEO at Abiquo.

“We are the only software provider that allows customers to build private clouds on their terms – and this applies to any hypervisor, any infrastructure and any storage through the pluggable iSCSI architecture,” Darragh said in a company statement. “It means our customers can reuse existing hardware and take their own path to the cloud without risking the straightjacket of vendor lock-in or unnecessary investment in new infrastructure.”

The Abiquo 2.2 release also includes features designed to enhance the award-winning usability of the user interface, reduces complexity and improves the operational efficiency of running a private cloud environment. Abiquo touted the following features of version 2.2 including:

 Pluggable Storage: Abiquo has exposed its iSCSi storage architecture allowing users to create plugins for their iSCSi storage.

Controlled infrastructure: Abiquo’s delegated administration capabilities can include one or more physical data centers, which allows for controlled delegation of the physical infrastructure.

Support for KVM 6: The Abiquo platform supports the virtualization infrastructure KVM 6, allowing customers to take advantage of improved KVM features relating to IP throttling and security.

Customizable design: The design of the Abiquo platform is customizable through its Branding Web Application, which can create new branding themes for service providers or enterprises offering white label services.

Improved ESX integration: Abiquo support with VMWare technology includes: improved ESX deployment efficiency; non-default port for vCenter communications; support for VMWare DRS and vMotion; support for DVD virtual hardware allowing for easy installation or upgrade of VMWare tools; selectable VNC keyboard mapping; and system disk resizing.

In addition,Abiquo 2.2 is now compatible with jClouds, the open source library for developing clouds. The jClouds API allows businesses to create integrations that may be portable between cloud providers and cloud software stacks. The java-based API is allows Abiquo customers to create their own self-service cloud portals.

Last month, Darragh was appointed CEO of the Redwood City, Calif.-based company following his tenure with the Stingray business unit at Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology, a role he began in July 2011 following his stint as CEO at Zeus Technology.

“My mission is to take full advantage of a great product in a high growth market and compete hard for market share. Our focus will be on the enterprise and managed services cloud software sectors and we intend to shake up the status quo to give IT leaders a simple decision to make,” Darragh said at the time of his appointment.  “We want Abiquo to be the first name in private cloud. We are hypervisor agnostic which gives us unique ability to enable self-service cloud provisioning for any business looking to build, use or sell enterprise cloud services. The market landscape is wide open for us and I’m hugely excited at the prospect of aggressively growing our global footprint.”