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Java Scalability Provider Terracotta Partners with Eucalyptus Cloud Platform

• By John K. Waters
• 02/17/10

Java clustering infrastructure provider Terracotta recently joined forces with Eucalyptus Systems, a provider of cloud computing management software, to allow large enterprises to provision clouds on the Amazon-compatible Eucalyptus cloud platform. The combined system will provide similar flexibility to the Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud with scaled Java, Terracotta CEO Amit Pandey said.

Together, the companies are offering tight integration of their technologies to provide an open source solution to "maximize data scalability and application performance in a private cloud environment." The two companies also plan to engage in joint sales and marketing activities.

San Francisco, Calif.-based Terracotta is the founding company of the open source Terracotta project. Terracotta clusters Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) to create a shared memory pool at the Java application tier, which can be used to share data among servers. This shared memory pool can also be employed to coordinate the work of many JVMs. The company's Java infrastructure solution is a commercial offering based on the open source project.

The company's products provide a means of scaling enterprise Java applications to as many computers as needed without custom coding. Customers offload work from databases and applications to the Terracotta infrastructure, essentially mimicking Amazon EC2 inside private datacenters.

Santa Barbara, CA-based Eucalyptus Systems is also a provider of commercial support for an open source project. Eucalyptus (an acronym for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems") is open source software that implements cloud computing within the datacenter. It's designed to provide a robust and scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution for service providers and enterprises.

The technology, which originated as a research project in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, provides a software stack that turns a visualized datacenter into a cloud that closely resembles Amazon EC2. Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure.

The partnership will allow the two companies to make private clouds "a viable option for managing critical applications and process at the highest workloads," Eucalyptus CEO and co-founder Wood Rollins said in a statement.

Terracotta's products were already available on Amazon's EC2 cloud.