Eucalyptus Systems, an open source cloud infrastructure provider, announced the company's first commercial offering, the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE), which enables customers to implement an on-premise cloud with VMware's virtualization technologies, including vSphere, ESX and ESXi.
EEE is built on Eucalyptus, a software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization's own IT infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a cloud that is controlled and customized by local IT. Eucalyptus supports the same APIs as public clouds, and Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure.
"Eucalyptus itself is an open source cloud computing platform. It is freely available and grew out of the University of California, Santa Barbara [UCSB], as an open source research project and commercialized as an open source company," Dr. Rich Wolski, Eucalyptus Systems co-founder, CTO and former director of the Eucalyptus research project at UCSB, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Our first commercial offering is the same cloud platform abstractions and semantics but using VMware's virtualization technology as the underlying virtualization layer."
For EEE, Eucalyptus leverages VMware products to provide an on-premise cloud in the data center. EEE also includes an image converter that helps users develop VMware-enabled Eucalyptus applications that are compatible with Amazon EC2. Eucalyptus also supports popular open source hypervisors such as KVM and Xen, enabling EEE customers to choose the appropriate software stack for each cloud application while maintaining a single cloud API that is Amazon compatible.
"We are specifically designing our commercial offerings to be useful in enterprise data centers. The open source offering is like many open source projects before it, available to everyone," says Wolski. "But from the commercial side, we are really focusing on enterprise data centers and the specific need they have for managing their infrastructure as a cloud." For more information, go here.