Eucalyptus Systems Bridges Private and Public Clouds
On the heels of the launch and funding of open source cloud computing player Eucalyptus Systems, the company has now announced its first commercial product. The Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE) enables customers to implement an on-premise Eucalyptus cloud with VMware'VSphere virtualization platform, and ESX hypervisor.
VSphere is VMware's cloud operating system. Not only will Eucalyptus' EEE solution allow on-premise Eucalyptus clouds on VMware's platform, but it also supports other hypervisors, including Xen and KVM. With EEE, users can leverage all of these environments, and additonally develop applications compatible with Amazon's EC2.
“Eucalyptus Systems’ mission has been to support the open source Eucalyptus on-premise cloud platform while also delivering solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments,” said Dr. Rich Wolski, Eucalyptus Systems co-founder, CTO and former director of the Eucalyptus research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
OStatic first spoke with Wolski when we broke the story of the Eucalyptus platform in this post, and he shared more of the company's long-term plans with us in this post. In that post, he discussed how many companies that are focused on virtualization want hybrid environments, and don't want to be locked into just one platform. He also made the point that companies are combining private, on-premise cloud applications with public ones:
"Companies were coming to me and saying 'we're running Eucalyptus in our data center, and we'd like to pay you' for help. They're doing a variety of things, but a lot of them are basically interested in Eucalyptus for doing the same kinds of things they're doing in Amazon AWS, such as business logic applications, where part of the attraction of Eucalyptus is that they can use it as a platform for seamlessly running their public cloud applications and their on-premise cloud apps."
The new EEE offering will further the company's goal of offering hybrid solutions, and can be thought of as a set of bridges between cloud platforms and virtualization environments. "EEE represents the first step toward broader Eucalyptus-enabled cloud interoperability that leverages multiple virtualization environments and technologies,” said Wolski.
With EEE, Eucalyptus leverages vSphere, ESXi, and ESX virtualization technologies for on-premise clouds. EEE also includes an image converter that helps users develop VMware-enabled Eucalyptus applications that are compatible with Amazon EC2. And, the added support for KVM and Xen means that users can choose the most appropriate software stack for each cloud application, while maintaining a single cloud API that is Amazon compatible.
Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition is available now, and will be licensed based on the number of processor cores on the physical host.