Eucalyptus Adds High Availability to Private Clouds

Eucalyptus Systems disclosed plans to roll out the third version of its open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private cloud software.

The new release, dubbed Eucalyptus 3, adds high availability (HA) to its cloud platform, meaning customers will be ensured uptime in the event of a hardware, software or network failure. The system will fail over if it goes down for any reason, including a failed disk drive, memory corruption or even a power outage. In any such event, the software will fail over to a "hot spare" service running on different hardware.

"Implementing HA was the obvious next major evolution for Eucalyptus," said Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos in a blog post. "After all, a key reason for organizations to run a private (i.e. on-premise) cloud is typically that they want more control than they have over a public cloud. Public clouds provide amazing uptime. But at the end of the day, this uptime is nothing you can influence. In a private cloud, however, it's your hardware and you can set the parameters. You can determine the level of assurance. With Eucalyptus 3 supporting HA in the cloud platform itself, your cloud rises to a new level of availability."

Mickos acknowledged that the company initially intended to offer HA just for customers who were requesting it. But the company since determined that it was a feature most customers would need.

Eucalyptus claims it has deployed 25,000 private clouds and counts 21 of the Fortune 100 that have deployed Eucalyptus-based clouds. Among its customers are Puma, the USDA, Plinga, Aerospace Corp., InterContinental Hotels Group, Wetpaint and USASpending.gov.

The appeal of Eucalyptus software is that it lets customers build internal clouds based on the Amazon Web Services API, allowing customers to move applications and data between AWS and their private clouds. Customers can also run Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on Eucalyptus and AWS-compatible clouds and can use management tools to administer Eucalyptus clouds.

That could be attractive to organizations that want to create hybrid clouds, where some of their systems run in the public cloud and others remain in the datacenter. It also allows for portability among public and private clouds.

Also new in Eucalyptus 3, users will be able to boot from Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS). Eucalyptus 3 will also support the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) API, as well as the ability to map identities from LDAP and Microsoft Active Directory servers to Eucalyptus accounts, groups and users.

Eucalyptus 3 will be available next quarter.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 25, 2011