Maureen O'Gara

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer

Eucalyptus Systems Thursday released the first major update of its open source private cloud software since it was launched.

The new widgetry features multi-cluster support and enhanced concurrency management to improve scaling so users can seamlessly overlay their Eucalyptus cloud on top of virtually any existing IT infrastructure, regardless of size or configuration.

Eucalyptus is meant for implementing an on-premise cloud using an organization’s own IT infrastructure. It supports the same APIs as public clouds, and with the release of version 1.6.1, claims to be the only on-premise cloud platform that’s fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure.

There are also new monitoring capabilities in the rev for ongoing visibility into the status of an organization’s on-premise cloud using open source tools like Nagios and Ganglia.

Besides enhancing scale Eucalyptus CTO Rich Wolski said the point of the new release was to take greater advantage of the hardware, software, security and organizational policies already in place in the customer’s data center.

It’s not uncommon for infrastructures to be organized as separate clusters of machines to segregate resources based on different user groups, to partition the resources across geographically distributed data centers, or to isolate machines in a datacenter by organizational, business, or security policies.

Support for multiple clusters gives administrators a new level of organizational flexibility, allowing them to view their entire IT infrastructure as a single Eucalyptus cloud.

And an administrator can now install different components of Eucalyptus on different physical machines; Eucalyptus can leverage both the security and performance topologies present in the data center.

Its install has also been automated.

Eucalyptus of course is the engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), the solution packaged with the latest version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, the Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition.