GroundWork and Eucalyptus Systems Partner for Private Cloud App Management

Commercial open source network management software vendor GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (GWOS) announced it's partnered up with Eucalyptus Systems, an open source infrastructure for cloud computing to produce application management coverage to private clouds. GWOS has launched a beta program for GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud (MEC), and is currently looking for users to test out the service.

The new enterprise cloud package provides:

* Server, middleware and application-level availability and performance monitoring across data-centers, public clouds and private clouds.

* Automatic monitoring configuration for cloud instances.

* Automatic discovery of cloud topology.

* Capacity monitoring for Eucalyptus and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud infrastructure.

The partnership is a smart idea that brings together useful components of both companies. Eucalyptus is best known for turning data center resources like networks and storage systems into a locally-controlled cloud. By contrast, GWOS is popular for its flagship product GroundWork Monitor, an application designed to provide real-time system performance information and management tools for environments with up to 100 devices.

The combination of both GWOS and Eucalyptus offers users a way to build and monitor private and hybrid clouds within your existing environments or other public clouds. Users are also able to run Amazon Machine Image instances on VMware-baed hypervisors, as well as environments with multiple hypervisors like Xen, KVM, vShpere, and ESX).

To apply for the beta program, you'll need to fill out a brief survey and, if chosen, you'll be able to start testing MEC on April 14th, 2010. Applicants who aren't chosen will be placed on a wait list and contacted for participation in future program testing.