Private Clouds With New Eucalyptus 3.2 Platform
Private Clouds With New Eucalyptus 3.2 Platform by UCStrategies Staff
It was announced on Monday that the open-source software provider, Eucalyptus, will be launching a new 3.2 version of its cloud infrastructure platform which will offer partners the ability to make and monitor their own self-service private clouds; this will enable businesses to move more aggressively to the cloud.
The vice president of products for Eucalyptus, Andy Knosp, said: “It can be challenging moving to private clouds. This release is focused on greater ease of use in the deployment of private clouds, and also providing expanded features in the infrastructure with which they build those clouds.”
A console which can be used for provisioning of cloud compute, network and storage resources will be part of the updated platform, and will also allow for greater reporting of usage and increased scaling and testing capabilities. Furthermore, the platform will provide new on-premise stage capabilities that will enable linkage with cloud-based storage.
OpenStack, CloudStack and now Eucalyptus are all rivals competing to provide open-source platforms which allow for the creation of cloud infrastructure services. Eucalyptus also supports Amazon Web Services APIs and OpenStack works in conjunction with Rackspace and CloudStack with Citrix.
This March, the relationship between Eucalyptus and Amazon was strengthened when a partnership was announced; this aided Eucalyptus in developing its private cloud customer base and transferring it to Amazon's public cloud. Additionally, Eucalyptus is enhancing Amazon Web Services' APIs, enabling customers to operate Amazon-compatible apps like Amazon Elastic Compute and Amazon Simple Storage Service.
According to the CEO of Eucalyptus, Marten Mickos, the 3.2 version has many additions which simplify the process of building private clouds and switching between both private and transferring to public clouds. He said: “Eucalyptus 3.2 delivers a highly reliable and robust private and hybrid cloud solution that empowers both enterprises and the open-source community to confidently deploy applications and drive innovation in the cloud.”
The user console of 3.2 will also provide a graphical user interface, allowing self-service cloud services provisioning. Knosp said: “In previous releases, Eucalyptus had a Web-based interface targeted at administrators. This is targeted at cloud users themselves.” There is also a new feature for reporting usage which lets users create and store reports via the interface, and a node controller which makes Applications more accessible, which is useful for scaling and testing.
An on-premise capability will also be included for the benefit of customers who possess technology from EMC and just a bunch of disks (JBOD) manufacturers. Amazon Elastic Block Storage can be linked to on-premise raw block storage devices and JBODs. Storage area networking (SAN) support will also be provided for EMC's VNX Series SANs for Amazon's Elastic Block Store storage.
The founder and principle analyst with ZK Research, Zeus Kerravala, said: “Anything Eucalyptus can do to make it easier to access services will really help. They are trying to create broader adoption, so easier toolsets really play into this broader strategy.” The Eucalyptus platform, according to Kerravala, was considered by some to be rather complex and intricate, and therefore placing focus on ease of use with the latest version release is a good move. (CY) Link