Four months ago, the makers of Eucalyptus established Eucalyptus Systems Inc. to provide enterprise-level consulting and support for the Eucalyptus platform. This week, the company released its first commerical product - Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE).

Developed at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2007, Eucalyptus allows enterprises to deploy large-scale on-premise clouds as well as hybrid clouds that take advantage of both private and public resources. The Linux-based open source software infrastructure is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure and the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs). It also ships with every copy of Ubuntu.

The new Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition takes Eucalyptus one step further by allowing enterprises to implement private clouds using virtualization technologies from VMware Inc. EEE supports vSphere, ESXi and ESX in addition to open source hypervisors Xen and KVM. EEE also includes an image converter for developing VMware-enabled Eucalyptus applications that are compatible with Amazon EC2.

Rich Wolski, the UCSB professor who lead the original Eucalyptus research group and CTO of Eucalyptus Systems, recently spoke with ComputerWorld Canada on the company's progress and its first commerical product launch.

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