Eucalyptus Bets On High Availability With Their Exclusive Enterprise Focus

Image Credit: Matlab Central

Eucalyptus Systems (previous CloudAve coverage), the cloud platform player with a core enterprise focus, today announced the forthcoming release of Eucalyptus 3.0. With this new release, Eucalyptus is taking the “high availability” mantra to lure enterprises when the buzz around the cloud world is the Amazon outage. More than the buzz surrounding the outages, Eucalyptus is clearly focussed on the fact that enterprises are more interested in moving the legacy applications to the cloud platform in the short term. With other cloud platform providers, both big and small, trying their best to capture the marketshare in this nascent market, the high availability mantra could easily find acceptance among the enterprises. The product is not available yet and expected to arrive later this year.

Some of the new features in Eucalyptus 3.0 include:

High Availability: By running redundant hot swappable instances, Eucalyptus 3 is trying to prevent a single point of failure to affect their cloud. Some of the sub-features include notification of IT admin in the case of failure, automated component failure recover, etc.. Eucalyptus takes the opposite philosophy from the greenfield cloud applications that are designed for failure. They offer HA support to applications without any change in the application code. In other words, they offer HA cloud support for legacy applications. This is not something the cloud purists will like but many enterprise decision makers may find it attractive.
Resource Access Control: Eucalyptus 3 will support mapping to pre-existing AD/LDAP service to Eucalyptus’ accounts, groups and users. Now it is easy for accounts to define group of users. It offers enhanced support for control over the usage, a key enterprise focussed feature. Eucalyptus 3 will also support AWS IAM API.
Storage Controller Enhancements: With Eucalyptus 3, storage controllers are also highly available. Additionally, it is now possible to boot images from EBS. Eucalyptus 3 adds support for NetApp and JBOD SAN devices.

Other enhancements include support for Windows VM to integrate with Active Directory. it is now possible to attach AD at the VM boot time. Finally, Eucalyptus 3 will offer support for Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 and KVM.

In spite of the market pressure due to OpenStack and Citrix’s acquisition of Cloud.com, Eucalyptus is confident that they have the necessary momentum to capture the enterprise market. They feel that their singular focus on enterprises without diversifying into the service provider side will help them innovate on the enterprise needs better than others. Even though I don’t disagree with this view of the market, I will still wait and see if they can persuade larger enterprises to embrace their platform (a sector which is actively checking out OpenStack platform).

Another criticism thrown against Eucalyptus is their reliance on AWS while enterprises are still not comfortable with AWS. I asked Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, on it and he offered a valid rebuttal against this criticism. According to him AWS has considerable traction on the web applications front and enterprise customers are not uncomfortable tapping AWS to serve some of their web properties. It makes sense for them to support market leader while also keeping the options open for other public cloud providers. He said they can easily support other public cloud providers once they gain reasonable traction. More importantly, Marten highlighted the importance of embracing the vibrant ecosystem around AWS for their cloud platform. He said having an AWS compatible API makes it easy to support these ecosystem players.

After being relatively quiet after the OpenStack release, Eucalyptus System are showing their hands on where they intend to go. They are going to focus solely on the infrastructure side without getting distracted by the buzz around PaaS. They will work with all PaaS platforms and make them work seamlessly on Eucalyptus cloud. They are going to go deep on the enterprise market and high availability is one of the weapons they are going to tap as they push forward. I have been following Eucalyptus from the time they were an academic project and am keen on seeing how they fare when dust settles down in this competitive space. With Redhat having their own IaaS plans, I will also be curious about their exit strategy.