Eucalyptus Systems, the open source academic project now shaking the private cloud market, has taken another step to go deep in the enterprise cloud market (See Cloud Ave’s previous coverage of Eucalyptus here). Last year, I wrote a post about the release of Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition and I pointed out how it makes interoperability between various cloud computing ecosystems totally seamless.The biggest attraction for me is the open source licensing of Eucalyptus software. I am a strong advocate of the role of open source in a cloud based world and Eucalyptus fits well into this thesis. Even as they moved from an academic project to commercial entity, they are having a very clear philosophy about how to stick to open source roots while, also, making money with it. When I spoke to Dr. Rich Wolski, their CTO during Cloud Connect, he explained to me about their strategy. He said the core of the Eucalyptus platform will always be open source. While the extensions/connectors to open source based services will be free and open source, it will cost money to “connect” Eucalyptus cloud with other proprietary technologies. It makes complete sense to me. If businesses are willing to pay money to proprietary technologies, they should be paying for open source technologies too. It is a very fair philosophy and, also, gives them a very good opportunity to make money. I guess this philosophy is the difference between their Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition and Eucalyptus Open Source Edition.
Today Eucalyptus Systems is announcing the release of Eucalyptus EE 2.0 which now supports virtual machines running Windows Server 2003, 2008 and Windows 7. Along with the support for Windows virtual machines, which I think is a very important part of the announcement, Eucalyptus EE 2.0 also supports fine grained user provisioning and management and accounting. These powerful user management feature will help enterprises control the access based on their role, department, etc.. The accounting feature will help in establishing a charge-back system inside the enterprise. It will also provide a visibility to overall costs. Another interesting addition to this release is a SAN connector that connects Eucalyptus cloud to a SAN network directly.
Well, this is the next obvious step in the evolution of their enterprise edition. They already have support for ESX, ESXi, Xen and KVM. If they have to take a shot at the enterprise market, support for Windows VMs are a must. With this release, they are filling the gap and positioning themselves to go full throttle in their quest to become leading player in the market. With Marten Mickos at the helm, it is not a distant dream.
