Eucalyptus Systems, creators of open source private cloud platform, have announced a major update of the open source Eucalyptus software. Eucalyptus 2.0 features increased scalability to support massive private and hybrid clouds as well as enhanced performance tuning and flexibility in deploying Eucalyptus without modification on existing IT infrastructure. Eucalyptus 2.0 is available immediately under the open source GPL license.

"Eucalyptus software is evolving rapidly to support private and hybrid clouds in a range of sizes and configurations," said Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus Systems CEO. "Along with many new usability enhancements, Eucalyptus 2.0 today meets the scaling requirements of enterprise data centers and cloud service providers. We continue to benefit from our early lead in the market as we work closely with the open source community, customers and partners in perfecting our offering."

Eucalyptus is infrastructure software that enables organizations to deploy scalable private and hybrid cloud computing environments within a secure IT infrastructure. With Eucalyptus, customers can make more efficient use of their computing resources, increase productivity, and deploy new applications faster, while protecting sensitive data and reducing capital expenditures. Eucalyptus supports the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure.

Eucalyptus 2.0 represents a major update to the open source Eucalyptus private cloud infrastructure software, with significant enhancements in scalability, flexibility and performance tuning.

Key features in Eucalyptus 2.0 include High Scalability with Eucalyptus employing a software design in which scalability is achieved at two levels: front-end, transactional scalability and back-end, resource scalability. The new version of Eucalyptus provides increased back-end cluster scale improvements to support massive private and hybrid clouds.

Additionally there is support for iSCSI protocol for EBS volumes: Eucalyptus now supports Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) protocol for EBS volumes, which can make overlaying a Eucalyptus cloud on top of existing IT infrastructure even easier. This feature gives Eucalyptus users the flexibility to situate the EBS controller machine anywhere on the cloud, including outside the broadcast domain of the cloud nodes.

Eucalyptus 2.0 supports KVM virtio, an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Users now have the flexibility to choose between emulated device drivers or direct kernel supported I/O devices via virtio for performance tuning. Eucalyptus 2.0 also extends its innate compatibility with AWS with support for S3 versioning. Now users can perform version control on the objects stored in Eucalyptus Walrus. Through a well-defined API, Eucalyptus users can retrieve specific versions of objects.