Eucalyptus Grows for Use in the Cloud

Eucalyptus Systems (News - Alert) provides a widely-used, open-source software platform. It traces its beginnings to a National Science Foundation-funded research project at the University of California. Today, there are over 25,000 Eucalyptus clouds, including involving two out of every five of the firms on the Fortune 100 list.

Eucalyptus software has been used in government, academia and businesses. It is offered in two editions: open source Eucalyptus and the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition – which is commercial software for large-scale deployments.

Eucalyptus CTO and co-founder Rich Wolski was recently interviewed by TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert), during the Cloud Expo 2011.

“Cloud computing came about in 2007,” Wolski recalled. “It was primarily thought of as a public utility computing model.”

While working as a computer science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he and his research team worked on an open source model. Their primary goal was not commercial application but to be able to study the model.

Upon hearing of their research, Fortune 10 companies sent teams to talk with the researchers and understand what they were developing. They also wanted to see how it could be used commercially.

In addition to the big companies, Eucalyptus has Web 2.0 customers, who provide services over the Internet. Also, representatives from the software industry – as well as media companies – are interested in Eucalyptus.

The response has been very strong.

“People were very, very interested in being able to have the cloud paradigm,” Wolski said.

“While public clouds continue to be an important technological breakthrough, private clouds have emerged,” he added.

There are several benefits to the software. For example, open software provides transparency, and because it’s open the time spent on remediation – if there is a security breach – is short, Wolski said.

“Open software provides transparency that can be used for good or evil,” he added. “Think about how Linux works. Linux is very open, but it’s also the operating system of choice for data centers. People are constantly finding new ways to hack Linux, but the people who are using it for professional reasons are constantly finding ways to defend Linux. That can only happen if the software base is open.”

There are patent issues when working with the cloud, as well. With the cloud, there is more use of shared resources than when working with licensing models, Wolski said.

Looking at the future, the company is working on data management. Advances will make the cloud more useful and will focus on the “how” and “where” data needs to be.

“It’s an exciting time when so many more people can have access to technology we’ve been working on…,” Wolski said. “The heart of Eucalyptus is a deep understanding of how this technology can be brought to bear in almost any data center to achieve the cloud paradigm.”

Eucalyptus is the only cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) software platform that can provide benefits of a public cloud, such as Amazon's EC2, on a private IT infrastructure, the company added.

Check out the video in full below.