Eucalyptus, the open-source software provider for building cloud infrastructure, announced a new version of its platform Monday, making it easier for partners and businesses to create and manage their own private clouds.

In the fast-evolving world of cloud infrastructure development, Eucalyptus, with its version 3.2 release, is emphasizing self-service private cloud building so businesses can move more aggressively to the cloud.

"It can be challenging moving to private clouds," Andy Knosp, vice president of product for Eucalyptus, said in an interview. "This release is focused on greater ease of use in the deployment of private clouds, and also providing expanded features in the infrastructure with which they build those clouds."

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The updated platform includes a console for provisioning of cloud compute, network and storage resources; enhanced usage reporting; and increased scaling and testing capabilities. The platform also offers new, on-premise stage capabilities connecting with cloud-based storage.

Eucalyptus along with OpenStack and CloudStack are the three main rivals offering open-source platforms to create cloud infrastructure services. Eucalyptus supports Amazon Web Services APIs, while OpenStack is associated with Rackspace and CloudStack with Citrix.

Eucalyptus strengthened its relationship with Amazon Web Services in March, announcing a partnership to help Eucalyptus to bring its private cloud customers to Amazon’s public cloud.

As part of the partnership, Eucalyptus is developing Amazon Web Services' APIs so its customers can run apps compatible with Amazon, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Simple Storage Service.

Eucalyptus 3.2 contains several features that make it easier to build private clouds and switch between using private clouds and moving assets to public clouds.

"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," said Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus, in a statement.

Version 3.2's user console offers a new graphical user interface for self-service cloud services provisioning. "In previous releases, Eucalyptus had a Web-based interface targeted at administrators," Knosp said. "This is targeted at cloud users themselves."

New usage reporting features allow users to generate reports through the interface and to store usage data.

A node controller increases the availability of Applications, allowing massive scaling and testing.

Eucalyptus is also adding on-premise capability to cloud customers with technology from EMC and just a bunch of disks (JBOD) manufacturers. It will connect Amazon Elastic Block Store storage with on-premise raw block storage devices and JBODs. In addition, it will offer storage area networking (SAN) support for EMC's VNX Series SANs for Amazon's Elastic Block Store storage.

Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst with ZK Research, said the Eucalyptus platform was thought of by some as somewhat intricate, so emphasizing ease of use in the latest version is a thoughtful move.

"Anything Eucalyptus can do to make it easier to access services will really help," he said. "They are trying to create broader adoption, so easier toolsets really play into this broader strategy."

PUBLISHED NOV. 26, 2012