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Eucalyptus Set To Launch With $5.5 Million In Series A Funding

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Eucalyptus Systems, creators of an open source private cloud platform, today announced that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A round of venture financing led by Benchmark Capital with BV Capital also participating.

The funding marks the launch of Eucalyptus Systems as a private company that will build and service enterprise-grade products based on the Eucalyptus open source privatecloud software. Eucalyptus Systems’ mission is to support the open source Eucalyptus cloud platform and to deliver on-premise private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments.

Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (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. Moreover, a local cloud based on Eucalyptus adds capabilities such as end-user customization, self-service provisioning, and legacy application support to data center virtualization features, making IT customer service easier, more fully featured, and less expensive.

Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure. The Eucalyptus design gives users the flexibility to seamlessly move applications from on-premise Eucalyptus clouds to public clouds, and vice versa. Eucalyptus also makes it easy to deploy “hybrid” clouds, which use public and private cloud resources together to get the unique benefits of each. To assist customers with setup, deployment, training, and support, Eucalyptus Systems has created the QuickStart program, the ideal first step for organizations looking to partner with Eucalyptus experts on critical cloud infrastructure initiatives.

The Eucalyptus management team includes Co-founder and CEO Woody Rollins, Co-founder and CTO Dr. Rich Wolski, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Matt Reid, and the team of Ph.D. computer science engineers from the Eucalyptus project at UCSB. In addition, Andreas Von Blottnitz, former CEO of AOL Europe and Citrix Online, is chairman of the board, and Dr. Klaus Schauser, founder of AppFolio and founder and CTO of Citrix Online, is serving as an advisor.

To date, Eucalyptus has been downloaded over 14,000 times in 72 countries. In addition, Eucalyptus software is the cloud computing engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (powered by Eucalyptus), which was recently announced as part of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Eucalyptus will ship with every copy of Ubuntu, starting with the Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition, made available on April 23.

Karma Koala

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With all the fuzz around Cannes.. oh wait .. nothing happened there.. that was the most boring event ever wasn’t it … we forgot to focus on where the real action is happening …

When the 9.10 Ubuntu Release, Karmic Koala, hits the wire it will be Cloud Ready or Virtualization ready or whatever you want to call it. Ubuntu wants to keep Open Source and Free software where it belongs, the key components of Cloud Computing. We have to agree that it are the Open Source Hypervisors that are the being used in the fundaments of Cloud Computing.

Ubuntu will be embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2 and will make it easier for every body to build their own Private Clouds using Open Source tools. Ubuntu-vmbuilder allows you to create a custom AMI , however they also provide a set of standard images to be used. Apart from deploying Ubuntu instances on the existing clouds, Karma Koala will live very happy in his favourite Eucalyptus trees

In Plain English, Ubuntu has recently welcomed the Eucalyptus framework in it’s software repositories, and it will be part of the upcoming release 9.4 already. (Eucalyptus being the open-source infrastructure for implementing Elastic Cloud computing using computing clusters which has an interface-compatible that is with Amazon.com’s EC2 which we covered earlier)

Now if you remember Ubuntu was one of the first Linux distributions to go for KVM rather than Xen, given its desktop-oriented nature. Amazon build it’s infrastructure on Xen. So Originally Eucalyptus was a mostly Xen supporting Framework, but lots of things have changed and today Eucalyptus supports both Xen, KVM and VMWare mostly using LibVirt, making it hypervisor-agnostic.

openQRM 4.2 Released, Includes Cloud Sauce

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Matt just let us know that he released openQRM 4.2 into the wild. This new opensource openQRM release includes VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer support, a Puppet plugin and the Cloud Add-on.

This new version comes with additional support for VMware ESX, an integration with Puppet for automated configuration management, improvements for the high-availability mechanism and, last but not least, a Cloud-plugin.

This new Cloud-plugin provides a fully automated private cloud with a separated Cloud portal for external data-center users to submit their requests to. The Cloud-plugin features a complete automated provisioning cycle including automatic deprovisioning, Deployment of phyiscal and virtual machines from different virtualization types, P2V, V2P, V2V, P2P, “Clone-on-deploy” and a billing system.

So with openQRM you can deploy and manage any machine inside and outside your firewall. Need that extra CPU load for a weekend on Amazon, fine openQRM will manage it for you.

openQRM is probably the first management tool that integrates both traditional Physical and Viritual Datacenter deployment and provisioning technologies and Cloud deployments all from 1 console , It allows you to migrate back and forth between different deployment types. So you might be running your test servers in the cloud and when you go live migrate them to a physical location within you firewall. openQRM even integrates a billing infrastructure, an administrator can hand out CCU Cloud Compute units to his openQRM users and they then can use resources in the Cloud for that budget.

John Willis said earlier this week in one of his podcasts that that the combination of openQRM , Puppet and Eucalyptus could be the dream combination that makes Datacenter management easier than ever.
Two third is done.. the final step might not be far away..

Did we mention it was Open Source ?

Go get openQRM here or watch the screencast for more information on the Cloud features.

Update: Matt just let us know the new openQRM.com is now live !

RightScale Supports The Smell Of Saunas

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Today RightScale Inc. announced they will team up with the Eucalyptus team have their platform available with Eucalyptus so they can deliver an Easy to Mange Open Source Cloud Computing platform.

They have announced that starting today, November 4, 2008 they will have the RightScale Cloud computing management platform ready for use with the Eucalyptus Puclic Cloud (EPC).


“We are honored to collaborate with the talented UCSB Eucalyptus Project Team to accelerate the advancement of cloud computing technology,” said Michael Crandell, CEO at RightScale. “Now anyone — from those just becoming familiar with cloud computing to organizations evaluating a massive application for deployment on Amazon’s EC2 — will be able to easily test their applications on the Eucalyptus EC2-compatible, open source cloud infrastructure using RightScale’s management platform.”

RightScale was already supporting Amazon’s EC2, FlexiScale and now GoGrid and sends a big message to the Cloud Community that Eucalyptus is a valuable platform to support.

Earlier this year Elastra also announced support for Eucalyptus. May we wonder why the Eucalyptus folks went with RightScale and not with Scalr ? Afterall integrating Scalr with Eucalyptus seems like a good way to achieve a fully featured opensource platform.

And on a final note .. if RightScale titles their Press Release “RightScale and the Eucalyptus Team Join Forces to Deliver Easy-to-Manage Open Source Cloud Computing” , when will they show us the code ?

ELASTRA Adds Support for Eucalyptus Platform

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ELASTRA, which recently raised $12 million from Amazon and other investors, today announced Elastra Cloud Server support for the Eucalyptus platform.

ELASTRA’s products are designed for portability across compute clouds and currently provide support for the Amazon EC2 and S3 compute and storage environments. Because Eucalyptus exposes its virtual machines through an EC2-compatible API, ELASTRA’s portability to Eucalyptus was a straightforward addition to its platform offering.

Eucaplyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems) is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies.

Elastra

Workspace Service Morphs Into Nimbus 2.0

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Grid is dead, and reinventing itself as Cloud. All kidding aside, the idea of providing a virtual machine instance as a service in the Grid rather than just CPU time with the appropriate environment and libraries to be used by different users isn’t new; it actually makes a lot of sense to provide e.g. a working virtual machine instance for a complex scientific application, which is a lot easier than having to document the correct setup for fellow researchers to implement.

The Workspace Service project part of Globus.org has just announced it’s rebranding and releasing the 2.0 version of what will now be known as Nimbus.

One of the core services of the Virtual Workspace project was orchestrating the deployment of VMs on remote resources as well as the release versioning. Today, Nimbus is a set of tools that together provide a “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS) cloud computing solution targeted specifically towards scientific applications. Many non-scientific use cases are supported as well.

Nimbus allows a client to lease remote resources by deploying virtual machines (VMs) on those resources and configuring them to represent an environment desired by the user.

It was formerly known as the “Virtual Workspace Service” (VWS) but the “workspace service” is technically just one the components in the software collection.

Just as Eucalyptus, it is capable of managing clients that are compatible with the Amazon EC2 service.

Open Source Virtualization management platforms like Nimbus , Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and openQRM are catching on. This probably isn’t the last one we’ll learn about. The question is which one will survive eventually.