Feb 3, 2011 15:20 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has been able to push Ubuntu as a server solution, despite the entrenched competition, through a number of interesting tactics. For one, it offers Ubuntu Server Edition ISOs for free, unlike most of its rivals. But probably the most successful, was its focus on the cloud.

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud has proven incredibly popular for deploying private clouds so it's no big surprise that it now comes pre-installed on a couple of Dell rack servers.

Dell has announced that it will be shipping the Dell PowerEdge C2100 and PowerEdge C6100 with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud to enable businesses to build the infrastructure needed for a local cloud with ease.

The advantage of having UEC pre-installed on the machines is that everything works out of the box with minimal configuration. Installing UEC is not particularly hard, but it can be a time-consuming task especially with a lot of servers.

Testing and troubleshooting to ensure that everything works after that takes even longer. With UEC pre-installed, IT specialists can also add new machines to the infrastructure at any given time without much of a hassle.

"Open source is the driving force of cloud computing however we choose to define the concept," Neil Levine, vice president of Corporate Services at Canonical, said.

"This initiative is a great way for U.S. businesses to realize the power of this approach -- the efficiency, savings and flexibility it brings and the power it can deliver to any data center -- and to start developing their internal cloud infrastructures with hardware and support from a familiar and trusted source," he added.

UEC is built on top of Ubuntu Server Edition and makes use of the Eucalyptus open-source cloud solution. It's fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services APIs meaning that applications built for UEC will work on AWS and the other way around, ensuring great flexibility in moving from a public cloud to a private one and vice versa.

"The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud -- based on Eucalyptus -- is the leading cloud distribution in the world, popular among software developers and web companies," Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, said.

"The integration and availability of UEC on Dell servers will be ideal for the growing number of organizations that are building new consumer-facing cloud services and need cloud-ready servers," he concluded.