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Eucalyptus Systems, a provider of private and hybrid cloud computing software, has announced several new capabilities within its open-source cloud software including new management and storage features.
Eucalyptus 3.2 introduces several new features that increase control and management of cloud resources including a new graphical user interface that enables self-service capabilities, simplified cloud administration and enhanced cloud usage reporting. Eucalyptus Systems officials maintain that Eucalyptus 3.2 furthers the company’s position in open-source cloud computing software for private and hybrid clouds.
“Customers worldwide, including NSN, Puma, Inter-Continental Hotels Group and NASA, have turned to Eucalyptus based on the agility, elasticity and scale that our software provides for highly demanding development and test and Web applications,” Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus, said in a statement. “Eucalyptus 3.2 delivers a highly reliable and robust private and hybrid cloud solution that empowers both enterprises and the open-source community to confidently deploy applications and drive innovation in the cloud.”
“Visibility and control are foundational elements in driving the broader adoption of cloud computing in the enterprise,” said Aneel Lakhani, research director at Gartner, in a statement. “These capabilities are critical across the entire cloud spectrum, but especially for customers pursuing a hybrid approach where applications may run on multiple clouds, private or public, for maximum flexibility in supporting business needs.”
Lakhani noted that managing distributed cloud environments is a daunting challenge for cloud administrators. As the complexity and scale of cloud deployments grow, solutions that automate key processes, troubleshoot and resolve performance issues, and report on cloud use and key trends are critical for success.
Innovations in Eucalyptus 3.2 provide customers with self-service provisioning of compute, network and storage resources. The console enables users to perform self-service operations including the provisioning of instances, key pair and password creation, Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume and snapshot operations, image catalog listing and registration, user group operations and elastic IP operations.
Meanwhile, enhanced cloud usage reporting capabilities enable cloud administrators to easily understand usage of cloud resources, provide chargeback for resources consumed and facilitate capacity planning. Cloud administrators can report on cloud compute, storage and memory usage at the user, group and cloud level; generate and export reports via the graphical user interface, API or command line; and store usage data in an external database.
Cloud administrators also benefit from simplified cloud administration through improved logging capabilities for faster troubleshooting and issue resolution. And Eucalyptus 3.2 increases the resiliency and availability of applications with a hardened node controller that further increases cloud reliability, the company said.
“At any given time, our load-test harness may handle up to 6,000 concurrent connections to 20 test applications across multiple groups and phases of development. Eucalyptus enables us to quickly provision cloud resources to meet these demands using the same ecosystem of tools we’re already familiar with through our work with AWS [Amazon Web Services],” Thomas Morse, director of IT and software as a service (SaaS) operations at App Dynamics, said in a statement. “The reliability, flexibility and control provided by Eucalyptus 3.2 sets the stage for us to more rapidly deploy and manage mission-critical development and test environments in a highly scalable and self-service manner.”
The new storage support in Eucalyptus includes two new adaptors. The JBOD Storage Adaptor overlays Elastic Block Store (EBS) functionality on top of raw block devices and JBODs (just a bunch of disks), and provides full support of AWS EBS API operations, the company said. The EMC VNX SAN (storage area network) Storage Adaptor provides expanded SAN support for EMC VNX Series SANs for EBS storage, including high availability for the Eucalyptus Storage Controller, advanced VNX snapshot support and multipathing support for greater redundancy.
The new capabilities build upon Eucalyptus 3.1, which aligned the open-source community and enterprises on the same platform to contribute, build, run and manage cloud development and deployments. Eucalyptus 3.2 will be available to customers in December.