Eucalyptus Systems has struck a partnership with Red Hat that should ultimately ease the deployment of Eucalyptus private cloud platform on Red Hat software.
With this new arrangement, Eucalyptus Systems engineers, with the help of Red Hat engineers, will make Eucalyptus easily accessible through Red Hat's Deltacloud, which is a set of overlay APIs (application programming interfaces) designed to facilitate cloud platform interoperability.
The two companies will also incorporate into Eucalyptus some of the management features of Red Hat's virtualization package, RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization), which is based on the open source KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor.
The work will be "an assurance to our users who run on Red Hat that there will be good integration between the two products, that they won't have to worry about inconsistencies between Eucalyptus, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and KVM," said Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus CEO.
The Eucalyptus platform is an open source implementation of the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute), S3 (Simple Storage Service), and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) APIs. Users can deploy Eucalyptus to set up a private cloud, one that can run virtual machines designed for the Amazon specifications.
With the work from this partnership, all the Eucalyptus functionality will be accessible through Deltacloud. All the resulting code will be made open source. Mickos expects the integration to be largely completed by the middle of 2011, with beta versions to be released earlier.
Also with the partnership, some RHEV management controls will be embedded within Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus already can run virtual machines based on Red Hat's KVM hypervisor, but the new work will allow users to "manage some aspects of the cloud through RHEV, so it would be a more seamless experience for them than it would be otherwise," Mickos said.
The partnership also signals a potential alliance in the emerging cloud software space, as both companies share a common competitor in VMware, and its VCloud cloud manager software.
"Red Hat doesn't partner very much with software companies, so we feel very privileged about the fact they have chosen to work with us," Mickos said. "And what it brings to us is better access to Red Hat's customers and ecosystem."
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com
