Eucalyptus Systems, the leading provider of open source software for building AWS-compatible private and hybrid clouds, today announced Eucalyptus 4.0, a release that provides companies with greater control and choice over cloud configuration and deployment to support large scale clouds.

Enterprise scale private clouds face numerous obstacles as deployments grow. Predicting future cloud usage and traffic is difficult, and any deployment must be able to seamlessly expand to handle dynamic growth to meet the needs of the business. This growth can cause overload in the network that dramatically slows cloud application performance. Storage also presents a major pain point for enterprises, as it must scale with the cloud deployment. This often requires continual expensive storage add-ons, which can quickly break the bank. Additionally, enterprise cloud deployments struggle to meet security and compliance requirements, creating the need for solutions that reduce risk and vulnerability to an attack.

"Organizations of all sizes are adopting cloud alternatives to traditional data center operations to achieve their corporate objectives," said Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies and the founder of the Cloud Computing Showplace. "These organizations are seeking a mechanism to more easily and economically mix and match a growing assortment of cloud services to meet their escalating business needs."

Many enterprises rely on Eucalyptus' private and hybrid cloud platform to build large-scale clouds, including Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), which is scaling its cloud footprint up to 100,000 cores. Eucalyptus 4.0 makes deploying clouds at scale easier through greater control, flexibility, network efficiency, and security.

Advancements in Eucalyptus 4.0 include:

• Scalable Object Storage - Enables cloud infrastructure administrators to support massive data volumes by deploying scale-out object storage. The new object storage gateway supports the use of commercial or open source object storage solutions that present an Amazon S3 compliant interface, such as RiakCS and Ceph.
  

• Operational Simplicity - Reduces the complexity of deploying and managing private clouds by giving users greater flexibility and control. Infrastructure managers may now easily deploy Eucalyptus into existing network topologies using the new edge networking; respond to infrastructure changes and cloud growth by dynamically changing cloud service configurations; and rapidly create and manage cloud accounts using the web-based cloud account management console.
  

• Cloud Service Availability - To achieve more consistent cloud experience, user-facing services such as EC2 and S3 are separated from cloud core services. This architectural change enables cloud infrastructure administrators to deploy multiple instances of these services to avoid bottlenecks and load balancing across the services to improve availability.
  

• Hybrid Cloud User Console - The Eucalyptus hybrid cloud user console has been redesigned to improve user efficiency and support an increasing number of large-scale Eucalyptus deployments. The interface leverages responsive design to allow users the freedom to control their cloud from computer, tablet or other mobile devices. A new dashboard allows users to quickly view status and access controls for cloud resources. To reduce potential errors and time lost to repetitive tasks, the console can launch automated workflows to perform common operations.
  

• Unparalleled AWS compatibility - Eucalyptus is the only private cloud solution to support multiple security groups and S3 bucket lifecycle, enabling users to consistently apply resource policies across clouds. The Elastic Load Balancer service now supports SSL termination and session stickiness, helping users deploy secure, scalable cloud applications. Eucalyptus 4.0 includes additional improvements to API fidelity to expand the breadth and diversity of cloud workloads that can seamlessly shift between public and private clouds.
  

"Eucalyptus 4.0 gives customers the power and control to deploy large scale clouds while keeping costs low," said Greg DeKoenigsberg, vice president of community and product at Eucalyptus Systems. "Over the past year, we have seen numerous enterprises come to us ready to deploy a private and hybrid cloud. Eucalyptus 4.0 empowers our customers to achieve their business goals through an AWS-compatible cloud by eliminating common cloud roadblocks that prevent enterprise scale."

What customers and partners are saying about Eucalyptus 4.0:

"Our Eucalyptus cloud is a central foundation for our research project, which enables health organisations to quickly and accurately identify pathogens, leading to rapid, targeted treatment of patients with infectious diseases.  Linking genetic sequences of pathogens helps us understand transmission and detect potential outbreaks early," said Helen Barker, Programme Manager at University of Oxford.  "We looked to Eucalyptus as an internal alternative to public cloud services.   We needed a cost-effective, flexible and stable system, which increased our performance and scalability.  We've tripled our Eucalyptus deployment over the last few months and have plans to expand our footprint even further.  This will enable us to progress from our research system into trial for real-time clinical and public service."

"Many companies around the world rely on our distributed cloud storage solution, Riak CS Enterprise," said Adam Wray, CEO at Basho Technologies. "With Eucalyptus 4.0, Riak CS can be plugged in as a scalable back-end object store. This allows customers to experience the seamless growth of cloud storage within large scale, Eucalyptus clouds and provides the added benefits of Riak CS Enterprise, such as multi-datacenter replication for disaster recovery or geo-data locality."

"The state of Haryana is an industrial hub and one of India's most economically developed regions," said Saji Thoppil, General Manager, DC Transformation & Enterprise Cloud at Wipro Limited. "In collaboration with the Haryana government, we selected Eucalyptus as the foundation for the state's Commercial Taxes e-Governance platform.  The ability to upgrade Eucalyptus without any instance downtime was a key factor in our decision as sustained economic growth has led to greater demand for our mission-critical applications."