Convirture and Eucalyptus Systems to partner on open-source, cloud management
ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise is meant to provide Eucalyptus private cloud users with management capabilities that were previously only available on closed-source products. ConVirt software manages virtual and private-cloud environments based on open platforms such as Linux, Xen and KVM. ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise provides advanced automation and scalability features for use in large and/or mission-critical environments, including high availability, backup and recovery, storage and network automation, and enterprise-grade security. It also includes tools and features for managing hosted and private clouds.
In an as yet unreleased statement, Matt Reid, vice president of sales and marketing at Eucalyptus Systems, says. "Convirture's software provides sophisticated management capabilities that will help further drive adoption of open source-based private clouds in the enterprise. With the open source Convirture software and Eucalyptus, a wide range of users will be able to deploy and manage powerful on-premise clouds, and we are pleased to include Convirture in the growing Eucalyptus partner ecosystem."
Convirture seems to work well for its customers. In a ZDNet interview with Dan Kusnetzky, a principal architect at a major e-commerce, told Kusnetzky that, after considering, "many different products including: VMware's vCenter, Citrix XenServer, Eucalyptus, OpenCloud, Amazon EC2 (external), Convirture and Oracle's VM Manager," his company went with Convirture because it has "a number of features we likedincluding: simplicity, integration of our current Hypervisors, and its open-source nature allowing us to customize it as required."
He continued, "Since this product, unlike most of the other products, is hypervisor independent it allows us to do things on the hypervisor that we couldn't normally do with other virtualization products because of the closed nature of their respective hypervisors. One example is usage of different storage techniques and technologies."
Eucalyptus needs little introduction to cloud-savvy, open-source, or Linux users. After all, Eucalytpus' CEO is Marten Mickos, one of MySQL co-founders. Eucalyptus has partnered both with Ubuntu and Red Hat to deliver cloud-based Linux systems. And, last but not least, Eucalyptus with its free, open-source version serving as its greeting card, has become quite popular in cloud-computing circles.
That's all well and good, but the real question for Eucalyptus will be whether these partnerships will this be enough to counter not only its proprietary rivals from Microsoft and VMware but the new open-source OpenStack project. Like Eucalyptus, OpenStack has also garnered a lot of support. Regardless of how the cloud wars turn out for the vendors, the real winners will be the users. They'll see new, improved cloud services rolling out at a rapid clip at affordable prices.