Continuing yesterday’s theme of making it easier for ‘traditional’ IT to start using the Cloud, Canonical and Dell have announced that customers can now order servers to ship pre-installed with Canonical’s Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. Although quick to embrace Linux as an option with their laptops and desktops, Dell has taken a surprisingly long time to turn a March 2010 commitment into today’s reality. Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud incorporates Eucalyptus‘ open source cloud platform, which features the same API as Amazon Web Services in order to facilitate easy migration from on-premise (Eucalyptus) to public Cloud (AWS) instances of enterprise applications.

Initial excitement around Eucalyptus might have been somewhat overshadowed by the arrival of OpenStack, but the company and its tools remain significant for now. Today’s news makes it even easier for Eucalyptus to end up inside an enterprise data centre.