Great news for open source cloud computing users. RightScale and the Eucalyptus have announced a plan to join forces.
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SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – November 4, 2008 – RightScale, Inc., the leader in cloud computing management, announced that it has partnered with the Eucalyptus Project Team at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to foster cloud computing research, experimentation and adoption. Starting today, the RightScale cloud computing management platform is available for use with the Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC), a cluster of servers at UCSB for testing and evaluating the Eucalyptus cloud infrastructure. RightScale and the Eucalyptus Project Team are also collaborating to deliver a more robust private cloud for organizations whose testing requirements extend beyond those offered by the EPC. The RightScale-Eucalyptus partnership is aimed at making cloud computing simple and accessible to everyone from universities, students and entrepreneurs to enterprises evaluating large cloud deployments.
“We are honored to collaborate with the talented UCSB Eucalyptus Project Team to accelerate the advancement of cloud computing technology,” said Michael Crandell, CEO at RightScale. “Now anyone — from those just becoming familiar with cloud computing to organizations evaluating a massive application for deployment on Amazon’s EC2 — will be able to easily test their applications on the Eucalyptus EC2-compatible, open source cloud infrastructure using RightScale’s management platform.”
RightScale announced last month a new strategic initiative to become the first cloud management platform to deliver the integrated management of multiple cloud environments. RightScale’s support for Eucalyptus adds to its expanding list of supported clouds, which includes Amazon’s EC2, FlexiScale and GoGrid. RightScale is also working with Rackspace to assure compatibility with their cloud offerings. Eucalyptus has leveraged RightScale’s widely used and proven interface with Amazon’s EC2 to validate that the Eucalyptus infrastructure is fully compatible with EC2.
“With hundreds of thousands of instances deployed already, RightScale has emerged as the de facto cloud management platform,” said Rich Wolski, a professor in the Computer Science Department at UCSB and director of the Eucalyptus project. “Deploying scalable, reliable applications from scratch in a multi-cloud world is a time consuming and expensive task. Eucalyptus makes it possible to use RightScale’s top-quality management platform and expertise to make this easy and cost-effective for both a local IT infrastructure and many of the popular public clouds. The combination of RightScale and Eucalyptus is clearly an excellent way to achieve federation between public and private cloud platforms.”
Cloud computing infrastructures have the potential to radically change the way organizations deploy and manage their IT systems. A “cloud,” however, is essentially just a collection of bare bones virtual servers. Most organizations do not have the expertise or resources to deploy and manage cloud computing applications cost effectively and according to best practices. RightScale’s management platform provides rapid cloud deployment and a dynamically scalable infrastructure to meet varying traffic and loads, using minimal resources. The company’s core offerings include automated system management, pre-packaged and re-usable components and service expertise. With RightScale’s platform and services, any organization can easily tap the enormous power of cloud computing for a virtually infinite, cost-effective, pay-as-you-go IT infrastructure.
Eucalyptus, which stands for “Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems,” is an open source software infrastructure for implementing cloud computing on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus can be downloaded for free and installed on any set of servers to create a private, EC2-compatible cloud computing system on those servers.
RightScale Availability on Eucalyptus
The RightScale cloud management platform is available today for use with Eucalyptus on the Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC). The EPC is open to anyone for evaluation purposes, with specific server number and time limitations. To access the EPC with RightScale, go to https://eucalyptus.rightscale.com/users/new.
RightScale and Eucalyptus will also be delivering a more robust, full-featured private cloud aimed at addressing the needs of organizations whose cloud testing requirements go beyond those offered by the EPC. This private cloud will offer the full array of Eucalyptus and RightScale functionality and be accessible by invitation only. For more information or to request access to the Eucalyptus-RightScale private cloud, please contact [email protected].
For more information about the Eucalyptus project at UCSB, please go to http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu
