Eucalyptus Delivers Next Generation Open Source Cloud Software

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Eucalyptus Systems, creator of the most widely deployed on-premise cloud computing platform, today announced a new version of its product that aligns the open source community and enterprises on the same platform to contribute, build, run and manage cloud development and deployments. The release features performance improvements and several new capabilities, including FastStart, which enables users to deploy on-premise AWS-compatible IaaS clouds in under 20 minutes. Eucalyptus 3.1 brings numerous community development and contribution enhancements, such as Eucalyptus 3 source code availability on Github, enterprise platform deployments for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vCenter 5, and community project management capabilities that provide management support for defects, fixes and feature requests.

"Hybrid cloud computing is the next phase of enterprise cloud adoption; however, one of the most challenging aspects of this approach is having the solutions in place to quickly deploy and manage the implementation," said Thomas Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner. "A majority of large enterprises consider speed, agility and scalability to be the primary benefit of private and hybrid cloud adoption."…

With this release, Eucalyptus accelerates on-premise cloud innovation by making it easy for open source community development of enterprise-grade on-premise IaaS clouds. New features in Eucalyptus 3.1 include:

— Enterprise Platform Deployment: Enables enterprise on-premise cloud
deployments on the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with
EC2, EBS, S3 and IAM using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and
VMware virtualization platforms. This provides the most comprehensive,
enterprise platform for on-premise cloud deployments.

— FastStart: Provides users with a self-service, automated solution to
be up and running with a Eucalyptus IaaS cloud in under 20 minutes.
FastStart can be deployed on CentOS 5 with Xen or CentOS 6 with
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). With FastStart deployed clouds,
users can easily browse and install euStore images to experience their
first cloud usage on their own infrastructure. For more advanced
users, Eucalyptus offers SilverEye, a suite of installation tools that
allows installation and configuration of more complex Eucalyptus
deployments.

— Advances in Community Development & Participation: The complete
source code for Eucalyptus 3.1 is now publicly available on Github.
All new development activity will occur on Github as well. Defect and
feature tracking will also be publicly available so that any member of
the Eucalyptus community may file a bug report, request a feature, or
simply keep track of the progress of the latest release.

"Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization delivers a comprehensive virtualization platform that offers compelling high performance and scalability that provides benefits for cloud deployments, both private and hybrid. Eucalyptus 3.1 combined with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers Eucalyptus customers the most cost-effective way to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows guests with full certification. We’re pleased to see Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offered as a back-end virtualization platform for Eucalyptus customers," said Mike Evans, vice president, Business Development at Red Hat.

"Eucalyptus 3.1 brings enterprise-grade cloud computing to the open source communities of the world and sets the stage for a true architecture of participation. This release draws from production experience with customers such as Puma, Inter-Continental Hotels Group, NIST, NASA, Cornell University and others," said Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus Systems CEO. "Highly available, thoroughly tested, and with its industry-standard AWS API, Eucalyptus 3.1 is the leading open choice for on-premise and hybrid clouds."

The new features will be available to customers on June 27 and build upon Eucalyptus 3, which boasts high availability features, Amazon Web Services API extensions, rapid instancing, elastic block storage (EBS) improvements, expanded support for Windows images, re-designed administrative console and improved command-line administrative tools. For more information, including detailed pricing, please visit www.eucalyptus.com or call 866-456-3822 (EUCA).

Eucalyptus 3.1: What Customers & Partners are Saying:

David Lifka, director, Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Computing

"Eucalyptus provides economies of scale to Cornell Red Cloud users, and allows us to fulfill our mission of providing best of breed high-performance computing solutions to customers. Eucalyptus has the features we need, such as strong AWS API compatibility, to operate a research-oriented cloud service. As we attract new customers, the new Eucalyptus features will further enable us to quickly scale and manage resources based on growing demand."

Gregor von Laszewski, assistant director of cloud computing, Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Institute

"For the last several years, Indiana University has used Eucalyptus as one of the key technologies to offer IaaS as part of its FutureGrid cloud solution. We’ve recently conducted numerous performance tests that have shown that Eucalyptus 3 delivers significant performance improvements in contrast to Eucalyptus 2, as well as a more simplified install process. These improvements are highly beneficial for our users who run many virtual machines in parallel in order to coordinate large scale scientific calculations."

Jay Wampold, vice president of marketing, Opscode

"Creating enterprise IT platforms with innovations coming from open source communities, Eucalyptus is laying the foundation for new levels of collaboration in driving the future of cloud computing. The automated, FastStart capabilities of Eucalyptus 3.1 parallel Opscode’s vision for getting work done in the cloud and we’re excited to join with Eucalyptus to make self-service IT an open source project."

Teyo Tyree, co-founder, Puppet Labs

"The integration between Eucalyptus and Puppet Labs enables enterprise customers to drastically reduce the resources needed to quickly create and manage on-premise IaaS clouds. By granting users the ability to quickly access scalable, highly elastic and AWS-compatible private clouds, Eucalyptus’ new FastStart feature and open source community capabilities further advance an open approach to cloud computing."