Update:: Eucalyptus Goes Commercial with $5.5M Funding Round. This removes my objection that it's an academic project only. Go team go!
Rich Wolski, professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, gave a spirited talk on Eucalyptus to a large group of very interested cloudsters at the Eucalyptus Cloud Meetup. If Rich could teach computer science at every school the state of the computer science industry would be stratospheric. Rich is dynamic, smart, passionate, and visionary. It's that vision that prompted him to create Eucalyptus in the first place. Rich and his group are experts in grid and distributed computing, having a long and glorious history in that space. When he saw cloud computing on the rise he decided the best way to explore it was to implement what everyone accepted as a real cloud, Amazon's API. In a remarkably short time they implement Eucalyptus and have been improving it and tracking Amazon's changes ever since.
The question I had going into the meetup was: should Eucalyptus be used to make an organization's private cloud? The short answer is no. Wait wait, it's now yes, see the update at the beginning of the article.