"The combination of RightScale and Eucalyptus is an excellent way to achieve federation between public and private cloud platforms,” said Rich Wolski, a professor in the Computer Science Department at UCSB and director of the Eucalyptus project. Wolski, an upcoming speaker at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo (November 19-21, San Jose, CA), made the comment as it was announced that RightScale has partnered with the Eucalyptus Project Team at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to foster cloud computing research, experimentation and adoption.

"Deploying scalable, reliable applications from scratch in a multi-cloud world is a time consuming and expensive task," Wolski continued. "Eucalyptus makes it possible to use RightScale’s top-quality management platform and expertise to make this easy and cost-effective for both a local IT infrastructure and many of the popular public clouds."

Eucalyptus, which stands for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems," is an open source software infrastructure for implementing cloud computing on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus can be downloaded for free and installed on any set of servers to create a private, EC2-compatible cloud computing system on those servers.

We are honored to collaborate with the talented UCSB Eucalyptus Project Team to accelerate the advancement of cloud computing technology," said Michael Crandell, CEO at RightScale. "Now anyone - from those just becoming familiar with cloud computing to organizations evaluating a massive application for deployment on Amazon's EC2 - will be able to easily test their applications on the Eucalyptus EC2-compatible, open source cloud infrastructure using RightScale's management platform."

Starting today, the RightScale cloud computing management platform is available for use with the Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC), a cluster of servers at UCSB for testing and evaluating the Eucalyptus cloud infrastructure. RightScale and the Eucalyptus Project Team are also collaborating to deliver a more robust private cloud for organizations whose testing requirements extend beyond those offered by the EPC.

The RightScale-Eucalyptus partnership, Crandell noted, is aimed at making cloud computing simple and accessible to everyone from universities, students and entrepreneurs to enterprises evaluating large cloud deployments.

Eucalyptus has leveraged RightScale's widely used and proven interface with Amazon's EC2 to validate that the Eucalyptus infrastructure is fully compatible with EC2, he added.

Last month the company already announced a strategic initiative to become the first cloud management platform to deliver the integrated management of multiple cloud environments - so RightScale’s support for Eucalyptus adds to an expanding list of supported clouds, which includes Amazon's EC2, FlexiScale and GoGrid.

Professor Rich Wolski is part of a star-studded lineup of speakers at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo. Between them, they'll be covering every aspect of the hottest IT topic for years, with not just Amazon but also IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP and a host of others all offering, using or developing high-end computing services typically described as “cloud computing” - through which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided as a service using Internet technologies.

Forrester Research analyst James Staten calls cloud computing "classic disruptive innovation - where the mainstream dismisses the product and small companies have time to create a real differentiated value." But there are so many offerings just now that what infrastructure architects are looking for above all is a set of organizing principles they can use to guide them in choosing between them all.

Such principles. and a host of associated topics, will be addressed in San Jose by a Top Speaker Faculty that includes:

• Dr Werner Vogels - VP & CTO, Amazon.com (Keynote)
• Mike Feinberg - Senior Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Group, EMC
• Rob Weltman - Director of Grid Services, Yahoo!
  
• Peter Nickolov - President CTO, 3tera
• Kevin Haar - President & CEO, Appistry
• Songnian Zhou - Co-Founder & CEO, Platform Computing
• Patrick Harr - CEO, Nirvanix
• Gerrit Huizenga - Cloud Solutions Architect, IBM
  
• John Keagy - CEO & Co-Founder, GoGrid/ServePath
• Sajai Krishnan - CEO, ParaScale
  
• Reuven Cohen - Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly
• Mike Eaton - CEO, Cloudworks
• Jonathan Bryce - Founder at Mosso (Rackspace)
• Nati Shalom - CTO, GigaSpaces
• Don MacAskill - CEO & Chief Geek, SmugMug
• Billy Marshall - Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, rPath
• Dr Thorsten von Eicken - CTO & Founder, RightScale
• Jonathan Pyke - Chief Strategy Office, Cordys
  
• Jason Stowe - Founder & CEO, Cycle Computing
• David Young - Co-Founder & CEO, Joyent
  
• Dave Durkee - Founder, CEO & Technical Director, ENKI
• John Janakiraman - CTO, Skytap
• Stuart Charlton - Chief Software Architect, Elastra
• Lars Leckie, Principal, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
• Dr Rich Wolski - Professor, U.C. Santa Barbara
• Javier Soltero - Co-Founder & CEO of Hyperic
• Omer Trajman - Director of Field Engineering, Vertica Systems
  
• Rachel Chalmers - Senior Analyst, Enterprise Software, The 451 Group
• Ken Gardner - Executive Chairman, SOASTA
  
  and with a special Cloud Bootcamp led by
  
  
• Alan Williamson, Founder at Blog-City.com, Creator of BlueDragon
  

All breakout sessions are all listed in further detail here.



Speaker Faculty - SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo 2008 West


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Sponsorship and Exhibit Opportunities
Sponsorship and Exhibit Opportunities Offered on a First-Come First-Served Basis. To inquire about sponsorship and exhibit opportunities please contact Carmen Gonzalez at 201-802-3021 or by email at events(at)sys-con.com. Currently, a limited number of sponsorship and exhibition packages with multiple sponsorship discounts are available for the upcoming events.

• Exclusive Q&A with Cloud Computing CEO Michael Crandell