The makers of Eucalyptus, the Linux-based open source cloud computing platform that now ships with Ubuntu, are targeting enterprise cloud computing with the launch of Eucalyptus Systems Inc.
With $5.5 million in financing led by Benchmark Capital, the private company will develop enterprise-grade products and services built on the freeware platform, starting with consulting and support.
The Eucalyptus infrastructure, which began as a University of California Santa Barbara project in 2007, allows enterprises to deploy large-scale on-premise private clouds as well as hybrid clouds that use both private and public resources.
Eucalyptus also powers the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, which was announced last week by Ubuntu sponsor Canonical Ltd., and will ship with every copy from Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition forward.
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In addition to Ubuntu, Eucalyptus Systems has formed relationships with Amazon Web Services LLP, RightScale Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. The Eucalyptus platform supports application programming interfaces (APIs) including Amazon EC2 and is compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure.
“Eucalyptus is really developing it’s own ecosystem,” said Rich Wolski, CTO of Eucalyptus Systems.
Eucalyptus Systems is currently in discussion with low-level management systems including Xen hypervisor.
“For us, the question going forward is how do we interface Eucalyptus with the plethora of management systems that have already been developed as open source and proprietary offerings,” said Wolski.
Transparency is one of the key advantages to maintaining an on-premise cloud using an open source platform, according to Wolski. “When you run a cloud on your infrastructure with your hardware, the institutional knowledge inside your organization necessary to actually see what’s going on is much richer,” he said.
University of Chicago’s Globus Nimbus is a prevalent open source competitor, but Wolski said commercial competition is likely to come from the data centre virtualization community.
Evan Leibovitch, open source architect at York University and executive director of CLUE - The Canadian Association of Open Source, said Eucalyptus Systems isn’t the only organization using this business model to make a dollar out of open source.
“The model has been used successfully by a number of other organizations, the most successful of which is probably MySQL, which is now owned by Sun, which is now owned by Oracle,” he said.
SugarCRM is one organization that has open source components and a layer of professional services for those that want a commercially supported package, he pointed out.
“Frankly, I applaud companies that are trying to do that as long as they don’t have some kind of hidden dead-end that hampers the adoption of the open source component,” said Leibovitch.
The challenge for open source companies is that any competitor is capable of re-copying the open source and competing with them, he explained. But Eucalyptus Systems created the package and they know it best, which gives them a running start, he said.
One benefit of open source, by its very nature, is the openness, according to Leibovitch. “People are upfront and honest about the pace of where they’re going. In most cases, you are free to download the works in progress, so there’s no surprises when the releases are done,” he said.
Ubuntu is one example of this, he pointed out. “They had multiple alpha releases as well as a beta release that people were free to download well in advance of the actual release this week. As a result, anybody who needed to support, test it out, get an idea of what the strengths and weaknesses were didn’t have to wait for the release,” he said.
According to Leibovitch, the current Ubuntu release isn’t the “rock solid” answer enterprises are looking for. “For enterprises that want something a little more stable and less bleeding edge, I would recommend they stay with the Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release, which was released last year,” he said.
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“Given the predominance of other operating systems, vendors and the length of time they’ve been in business, the fact that most enterprises are using an open source platform as the basis of their core infrastructure really speaks to the power of open source,” said Wolski.
Wolski attributes the strength of open source in the enterprise to low friction for adoption and the global community of contributors. Eucalyptus is following these footsteps, he said.
IT managers will appreciate the fact that Eucalyptus supports public cloud APIs and is very easy to install, said Wolski. “If you’re already running Linux in your data centre, installing Eucalyptus feels like any other Linux package and the recipe for installing it from Ubuntu from start to finish is six steps,” he said.
Wolski sees enterprise IT as having two primary responsibilities: maintaining the infrastructure and customer service for people using the infrastructure.
“What Eucalyptus does is allow them to run a cloud so those individual constituencies can do their own provisioning and customization and enterprise IT can focus on the maintenance and infrastructure building activities,” he said.
“Open source has been a significant player as a backbone for networking-based systems for more than a decade,” said Leibovitch. “When you have some of the most popular Internet databases like MySQL, the most popular Web server like Apache and so on, then it’s only reasonable that other moves such as this one have open source equivalents and packages.”