Eucalyptus Systems and Red Hat are now partners.

Red Hat has a lot of cloud ambitions and delivers the infrastructure but it doesn’t have a cloud platform.

Eucalyptus has an open source-based private cloud platform that does the heavy lifting and provides the cloud’s signature elasticity.

Practically speaking there aren’t a whole lot of horizontally integrated companies Eucalyptus can pal around with. Between Canonical, which it’s already got, and Red Hat, it’s got its two prime picks, according to CEO Mårten Mickos, who discourages the inevitable speculation that maybe Red Hat will wind up buying Eucalyptus.


Mårten Mickos gave a session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley in November 2010

Mickos, the guy who sold MySQL to Sun for a breathtaking billion dollars, has been working on the deal since he got to Eucalyptus, picked up the phone and called Red Hat in March.

It’ll get Eucalyptus in front of a lot more people and presumably give it more feet on the street. It should help Red Hat peddle more virtualization in competition with its great bête noire, VMware. Try getting to the cloud without virtualization.

The pair quotes the 451 Group’s prediction that the market for cloud computing will grow from $8.7 billion in revenues this year to $16.7 billion by 2013. They are also warmed by the Yankee Group survey that found that two-thirds of the IT decision makers prefer the private/internal cloud model over public or hybrid clouds though Eucalyptus can rig up a hybrid cloud if you like.

What with testing and all, it’ll take until round about the middle of next year for Eucalyptus to support the framework-y Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and be compatible with the Red Hat-sponsored Apache Deltacloud API.

Once that’s accomplished, users should be able to transform virtualized Red Hat environments into secure Eucalyptus private clouds while advancing the Deltacloud interoperability goal of a single unified REST-based API used to manage services on any cloud.

Users will be able to run applications and workloads on Eucalyptus or the public clouds Deltacloud supports. By then that should include Terremark and VMWare vCloud as well as the currently supported EC2, GoGrid, OpenNebula, Rackspace, RHEV-M and RimuHosting.

Eucalyptus already supports Amazon’s API and claims it’s the only cloud software that can deliver all the benefits of industry-standard public clouds such as Amazon Web Services on private IT infrastructure.

Maybe it’ll try Xen next. Meanwhile, Eucalyptus has something to stick up the nose of Rackspace and its OpenStack effort.