Eucalyptus Systems, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based cloud computing startup, has launched a new commercial version of Eucalyptus, an open-source private cloud software. Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE) 2.0 is a major upgrade to the commercial edition launched in September 2009. The big news in the new Eucalyptus EE 2.0 is that is supports Windows virtual machines (VMs). Eucalyptus now supports all most major hypervisors — VMware, KVM, and Xen and Microsoft’s Hyper V.
“So far all the apps we supported ran on Linux and with this release we can now support Windows-based apps,” said CEO Marten Mickos, pointing that with this new version, the company has “improved scalability.” He explained that the company is currently focused on capturing the on-premise private cloud market, and support for Windows applications has been one of the most requested features for the paid version of the software.
The new version of the EE software also adds new accounting and user management features. It allows folks to switch from Amazon’s (s amzn) EC2 to VMware-based (s vmw) cloud offerings. Eucalyptus EE 2.0 also comes with a SAN adaptor that allows folks to connect a Eucalyptus cloud directly to a high-performance Storage Area Network (SAN), which comes with increased IO (input/output) performance and scalability, thereby allowing for much larger-scale clouds.
“Most customers want that (Windows compatibility) and flexibility,” added Mickos, who joined the company in March 2010. He has been focusing the open-source-based company on enterprise customers, perhaps in order to justify its rumored $100 million valuation. Eucalyptus is trying to carve out a niche in an increasingly crowded marketplace that includes other open-source offerings such as Open Nebula. Startups such as VMops nee Cloud.com are also vying for the same market, not to mention larger players such as VMware. To learn more about cloud computing, join us at Structure 2010 June 23 & 24 in San Francisco.
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Photo of Marten Mickos courtesy of James Duncan Davidson via Flickr
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