Ubuntu Linux

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

April 29, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

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.

IBM Releases Virtual Desktop To Rival VMware View

December 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IBM is working with Virtual Bridges and its VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) product to ship a virtual Canonical Ubuntu Linux desktop, with Lotus email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, and social networking software included, to a variety of end-point devices. Virtual printing is also included. Wall Street Journal calls it a ‘Microsoft-free’ desktop.

This comes off the heels of VMware’s release of View 3.

None of the pieces of the IBM bundle, available immediately, are new, but the bundled solution makes it easier and cheaper for companies to deploy a complete VDI solution on Linux, IBM maintains. IBM’s OCCS includes Lotus Symphony, its implementation of the ODF-based OpenOffice, as well as Lotus Notes and other applications.

Virtual Bridges’ Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment runs about $49 per seat, while Canonical is about $50 per seat. IBM Lotus Symphony is free but the Notes and other applications are priced separately.

Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition Focuses On Virtualization

October 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

On Thursday, Ubuntu Linux distribution organization Canonical flipped the switch on free public downloads of Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition, both of which will be supported for 18 months.

Improvements to Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition focus on virtualization, Java development, system management, and email security. It includes a Virtual Machine builder with which developers can construct customized virtual images, which is based on the most recent version of the Just Enough Operating System (JeOS).

Java developers now have the option of using Apache Tomcat 6.0 and OpenJDK, and ClamAV and SpamAssassin have been added to the main repository to handle anti-spam and anti-virus tasks.

Earlier this week in a conference call with reporters, Mark Shuttleworth, leader of Ubuntu distribution organization Canonical, said the company has yet to turn a profit, but he plans to continue funding it for an additional three to five years.

Techtrob: Virtualization in Linux – Four Software Programs Reviewed

February 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Techtrob.com analyzed four software choices for linux driven virtualization platforms, now that Canonical completely supports the use of Parallels software in Ubuntu Linux. The article compares four virtualization products available for Ubuntu Linux: the free, open source x86 emulator Qemu; the closed-but-free versions of VirtualBox and VMware-Server, and the commercial Parallels Workstation.

Recommmended reading, includes screenshots for easy comparison!

Here’s their conclusion:

This article looked at four different products for virtualization in Linux, specifically Ubuntu Linux. The findings were interesting – the only product that requires the purchase of a licence for personal use, Parallels, actually performed the worst of the group. Qemu did well for a completely free-as-in-speech application, although VMware and VirtualBox blew the competition away in terms of performance.

Of these applications, VMware and VirtualBox definitely come out the clear winners. For individual use, where the ability to run a single Windows desktop inside of Linux is all that is needed, VirtualBox turns out to be my preference. It’s much smaller than VMware, which comes packed with extra features that aren’t necesary for the end-user. If your needs are different, however, you’ll probably want to give VMware a closer look. Overall, the maturaty and stability of all four applications was impressive enough to call virtualization on the Linux desktop “complete.”