OStatic

There's news out of Canonical today that the release of Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition -- codenamed Karmic Koala -- is just around the corner. It's the greenest release yet, with a heavy emphasis on power management and cloud computing tools.

Ubuntu 9.10 includes Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a system designed to help users build and support private clouds. It's underlying technology relies on Eucalyptus, an open source infrastructure for implementing cloud computing on clusters.

Yesterday morning, Google's Gmail service went down for what the company claims was a small subset of users. As GigaOm noted, when Gmail goes down, it disrupts many types of businesses, and it's often hard to fathom what is actually going on from Google's terse advisories. Yesterday's outage appeared to affect many users, at least judging by complaints and teeth-gnashing visible on Twitter.

This is a perfect example of why cloud computing is not as perfect as its many proponents claim it is, and why businesses will not just haphazardly keep all their data out in the cloud. Instead, I believe they will reach for combinations of in-cloud and out-of-cloud software solutions, just as many of us do individually. That concept leaves ample room for flexible, cloud-focused open source solutions.

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.

While it may be a completely philosophical debate whether the universe is turtles all the way down, it's a lot less existential to imagine that the internet is clouds all the way up. In April, Canonical previewed its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (affectionately known as UEC), a system designed to simplify the creation, optimization, and management of cloud environments for private organizations. The interface and functionality of UEC is similar to the Amazon EC2 infrastructure, uses in-house hardware running Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04, and is powered by Eucalyptus Systems cloud computing tools.

Today Canonical officially launched the UEC service, including generalized tech support, consultancy and deployment services. Although UEC support is a joint offering from Eucalyptus Systems and Canonical, the Canonical team will act as the primary contact point in order to simplify and streamline support transactions.

Sometimes all-in-one gets a bad wrap. Think about it. They've seen some major improvements over the years but there are still many all-in-one printing/scanning/copying peripherals on the market that don't do any of those tasks particularly well. Outside of technology, think of department stores. Driving out small businesses is a downside, and yet, they're still so annoyingly convenient.

There are times when a streamlined, all-in-one approach to a job is a huge advantage, making simple tasks easier to complete, reducing the chances of error, and taking the stress out of day to day processes, whether they're routine or brand new. Take server management, for instance. Systems administrators have the somewhat unenviable task of shepherding servers (both physical and virtual), watching over the daemons and services they run, with their flock located down the hall, across town, across the country, or any combination thereof.

One of the ideas driving Canonical's Landscape software is to ease, and minimize the risks involved in routine tasks that systems administrators face when managing multiple Ubuntu-powered servers. Landscape not only allows administrators to monitor all in-house server instances through its interface, but also enables them to keep tabs and manage Ubuntu servers deployed on Amazon's EC2 cloud environment.

Last week, we did a story on the open source cloud project Eucalyptus, which was originally an effort out of the University of California at Santa Barbara. As we noted then, the project is now the basis of a well-funded new company, Eucalyptus Systems, which has closed a $5.5 million Series A round of financing led by Benchmark Capital, with BV Capital also participating. (Benchmark Capital is a heavy hitter in funding commercial open source firms, having invested in MySQL, Xen and more.)

Eucalyptus Systems will focus initially on providing Red Hat-like training and consulting services for the Eucalyptus platform, which (under a FreeBSD-style license) provides an infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly. Many companies are already using Eucalyptus as a platform to seamlessly manage their public cloud and on-premise cloud applications, reaping cost advantages over proprietary cloud players. We caught up with Eucalyptus Systems' CTO Rich Wolski, one of the founders of the project, to get details on the company's plans.?