The Eucalyptus project, which aims to provide open source infrastructure for cloud computing, is growing beyond its university roots and is heading straight for enterprise data centers. The key developers behind the project have launched a company with the intent of commercializing the technology, and have received $5.5 million in venture capital funding to get them started.

Eucalyptus can be used to build elastic computing environments—like Amazon EC2—on top of conventional clusters. It provides infrastructure for automating virtual machine provisioning and management so that a cluster's computational resources can be made accessible to users in a more flexible way. It leverages the open source Xen hypervisor and it is designed to run on the Linux platform. Its management APIs are modeled after those provided by EC2, which means that it is largely compatible with tools that are built to work with Amazon's service.

Eucalyptus originated in UCSB's MAYHEM lab, which studies Middleware and Applications Yielding Heterogenous Environments for Metacomputing. The original purpose of the project was to facilitate the study of cloud technology and to provide researchers with a way to roll out an elastic computing sandbox in a controlled environment for testing and experimentation. The project proved to have practical value outside of the laboratory setting and it's beginning to see adoption as a tool for building self-hosted elastic clouds in enterprise data centers.

The developers have launched a company called Eucalyptus Systems that will provide commercial support, integration, and development services for Eucalyptus users while continuing to develop the core code base under an open source license. The company officially launched on Wednesday after receiving series A funding from Benchmark Capital.

"Eucalyptus Systems will ensure the viability and growth of Eucalyptus well beyond its life as a university research project, while also extending the technology to meet the needs of organizations that require high scalability, reliability, and enterprise-grade support," said cofounder and CTO Dr. Rich Wolski in a statement. "Eucalyptus Systems will enable businesses of any size to leverage their own IT resources to get the benefits of cloud computing without the concerns of lock-in, security ambiguity, and unexpected storage costs that can be associated with public clouds."

The software is already being integrated into popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is using Eucalyptus as the basis for its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud system, which is included as a preview in Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition. Stronger Eucalyptus integration is a high priority for Ubuntu 9.10, which is codenamed Karmic Koala.

The emergence of commercial backing for Eucalyptus will likely boost the visibility of the project and accelerate its development. As it matures, it could help improve the efficacy of virtualization on the Linux platform in enterprise data centers.

Listing image by Tina Keller