OStatic

Yesterday, GigaOM's Structure 09 conference took place in San Francisco, focused on cloud computing. At GigaOm.com, you can find a number of good posts on what everyone from venture capitalists to Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff had to say about cloud computing. Notably, more than a few of the speakers at the conference expressed caution toward the cloud, and, as we've pointed out on a number of occasions, quite a few of the cloud pundits clearly recognize that open source solutions and more favorable economics are essential to a healthy cloud ecosystem.

Last summer, OStatic broke the news about Eucalyptus, an open source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly. The project rose out of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has made quite a few waves for its innovative, cost-saving and open approach to cloud computing infrastructure. Fast forward to today, and Eucalyptus Systems is announcing its debut as a commercial company. Eucalyptus Systems has just closed a $5.5 million Series A round of venture financing led by Benchmark Capital with BV Capital also participating. Here's what the company offers.