Eucalyptus, the butt of some impudent sass since OpenStack got started last year, says it's got something other cloud peddlers, open source and otherwise, don't have, and that's high availability. So there.

The breakthrough makes it the first on-premise IaaS cloud software to deliver enterprise-grade high availability, which should bring in more users since it promises that their applications and data won't be affected by any underlying hardware or network failure.

And Eucalyptus is already supposed to be the most widely deployed private and hybrid cloud platform, used by outfits like Puma, USDA, Plinga, Aerospace Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group, Wetpaint and USASpending.gov.

It says at least 21 of the Fortune 100 have started a Eucalyptus cloud to get the service levels, security and compliance they can't get with public clouds.

Anyway, the company's been working on the new widgetry for the last 18 months and it doubles its lines of code.

High availability will appear in the company's third-generation Eucalyptus 3, which should be out for trials, proofs-of-concept and production deployments in Q4.

Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos says, "High availability is one of the most sought-after and difficult features to implement in a private cloud platform." It will be offered as a built-in standard feature in both the company's supported and open source versions.

Eucalyptus 3 is architected to allow no single point of failure. If a system crashes for any reason - a failure in the disk drives, memory corruption or a network or power outage - Eucalyptus 3 will immediately trigger a failover to a "hot spare" service that's running concurrently on a different physical machine.

The failover will be transparent to the outside world. Nobody's slip will show even if hardware or network components fail. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will be preserved.

Eucalyptus 3 also includes enhanced resource access controls (RAC) so cloud administrators can finely tune user group management, run in-depth cost tracking, and see details of cloud use throughout an enterprise. The admin can control which operations can run what and put limits on who's eating up specific resources.

The upgrade supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Identity and Access Management (IAM) API. Eucalyptus 3 can also automatically map definitions from enterprise LDAP and Active Directory (AD) servers to Eucalyptus accounts, groups and users and includes expanded account and resource reporting interfaces for integration with existing data center chargeback and billing systems.

It'll support an AWS boot from its own EBS SAN devices along with NetAPP and JBOD EBS SAN drivers, integrates with Active Directory (AD) and standard LDAP servers, and runs Windows, VMware 4.1, RHEL 6.0 and KVM images.

By the way, Gartner figures OpenStack is 18 months away from being production-ready.