Terracotta, Eucalyptus deliver the do it yourself cloud

Clouds took another step toward being just-another-computer this week as Eucalyptus and Terracotta began joint marketing of a system that mimics the Amazon EC2 cloud with scaled Java.

Both companies are open source. (Picture from ZDNet Asia.)

Eucalyptus is bringing its version of the Amazon AWS technology to the party while Terracotta totes the Java. A Webinar is planned for February 25 to introduce the system and you can sign up here.

IBM has been building private clouds for a few years, both selling and leasing systems around the world. With the new, as-yet unnamed system (Eucacotta? Terralyptus?) the two say fundamental problems with scaling access to SQL databases can now be addressed efficiently.

Terracotta has already done work in transaction processing, while Eucalapytus lists NASA among its customers.

Terracotta CEO Amit Pandey predicted the new system would be "ideal for enterprises that are adopting the cloud as their IT infrastructure."

The announcement will be a big help for Amazon, which leads the cloud race so far but is being hammered in the media by Google and Microsoft.

The system being delivered will allow companies to build clouds that can easily off-load to Amazon, or pick up Amazon instances, creating "hybrid" clouds with more capacity than a company may be able to afford for itself.

Eucalyptus is expecting to sign other, similar ideas throughout the year as it seeks to replace the server farms of the past with private clouds which feature virtualization and integrate with Amazon's infrastructure.