OStatic

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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.?