At first glance, Red Hat Inc. and Eucalyptus Systems are partnering up to jointly promote open source cloud solutions. But take a closer look and TalkinCloud wonders if Red Hat and Eucalyptus are partnering up to compete more effectively against the RackSpace OpenStack cloud effort.
GigaOm does a great job describing a potentially intense showdown between OpenStack and Eucalyptus. Here’s why VARs, MSPs and cloud services providers should care: Traditional cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure are proprietary platforms, meaning that it’s difficult to move customer applications from one public cloud to the next.
Eucalyptus, a startup led by former MySQL Marten Mickos, is a private cloud platform that supports Amazon Web Services standards. In theory, that means channel partners can build Amazon-compatible private clouds.
Sounds promising. But here’s where things get interesting: RackSpace and NASA are promoting OpenStack, an open source cloud standard. If service providers adopt OpenStack, channel partners and customers could have an easier time writing their SaaS applications once to run in any cloud. Jim Curry, chief stacker for Rackspace OpenStack, explains the strategy in the TalkinCloud FastChat Video.
Remaining Relevant
OpenStack is a work in progress, but it has forced Eucalyptus to work harder on the partner front. The latest Eucalyptus move involves a closer working relationship with Red Hat.
Under terms of a new partnership, it will become easier to transform a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) environment into a Eucalyptus cloud. Also, Red Hat will integrate Eucalyptus into the Apache Deltacloud API, enabling administrators to share workloads between Eucalyptus and any other Deltacloud-supported cloud platform.
Said Red Hat VP of Business Development Mike Evans in a prepared statement:
“Collaboration around technologies like Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Deltacloud are examples of how Red Hat and its partners are focused on a truly open approach to cloud computing and choice for customers.”
Can Red Hat help Eucalyptus to compete with OpenStack? We’re watching the situation closely.
Additional reporting by Matt Weinberger. Follow Talkin’ Cloud via RSS, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for Talkin’ Cloud’s Weekly Newsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Read our editorial disclosures here.
The 
I think “competition” is an overly simplistic model for the relationship between Eucalyptus and OpenStack. We are both open source projects (OpenStack is Apache-licensed, while Eucalyptus is GPLed), and we are inspired by each other’s approaches, and we are likely to end up being better at different niches.
And Eucalyptus is available and running with real workloads right now.
Mark: Thanks for sharing some views from the Eucalyptus perspective. My personal opinion is that Eucalyptus and OpenStack will compete and cooperate — classic “coopetition.” Please keep us posted as Eucalyptus achieves new milestones, partner wins, etc. We’re particularly interested in VARs, integrators and managed services providers that promote Eucalyptus to their customers.
-jp
Joe Panettieri
Editorial Director
TalkinCloud