Citrix releases open source cloud platform
Today Citrix announced the availability of Citrix CloudStack 3, the first release of the open source cloud platform under the Citrix brand.
CloudStack is already the world’s most successful platform for public clouds, powering over $1B in revenue for more than 85 large scale production clouds, including some of the biggest brands in the industry. With the new CloudStack 3 release, Citrix brings the power of true Amazon-style clouds to customers of all sizes.
Since its introduction, CloudStack has rapidly become the leading commercial open source platform for building, managing and delivering highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds for a wide range of customers such as Datapipe, Edmunds.com, IDC Frontier, Nokia Research and Zynga.
CloudStack is designed to ensure organizations can build production cloud environments on a platform designed for economics, elasticity and scale. It is not a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud-like management layers on top. Rather, it was designed from the ground up as an open, multi-hypervisor platform to help customers build public and private clouds the way the world’s most innovative clouds are built – simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient.
New capabilities in CloudStack 3 focus on openness, flexibility and completeness and include:
Cloud-pptimized virtualization platform: While maintaining a strong commitment to being hypervisor agnostic with support for leading platforms such as KVM, OVM, vSphere and Xen®, CloudStack 3 includes a cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer® 6 as a core integrated feature. With four of the top five world’s largest public clouds in production (Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, Softlayer) leveraging XenServer® or Xen® as the virtualization platform of choice, this unification brings unparalleled new levels of scale, manageability, security, multi-tenancy, and virtual switching integration that is currently unavailable in traditional enterprise virtualization solutions from other leading vendors.
Network-as-a-Service integration: As Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) becomes a key differentiator for providers looking to deliver advanced enterprise solutions in the cloud, CloudStack 3 now provides tight integration with Citrix NetScaler, delivering a fast, secure, reliable cloud experience for an estimated 75% of all internet users each day. CloudStack supports NetScaler SDX and VPX appliances, and makes it easy to extend network level integration to products like Citrix CloudBridge and Citrix CloudGateway. This brings virtual networking to a new level, ensuring increased security, performance and connectivity between public and private clouds that are delivered as integrated services within the platform.
Built-in network services catalog: In addition to NetScaler integration, CloudStack continues to build upon its rich and flexible network offerings by enabling service providers to upsell network services through the creation of custom catalogs of network service options. This capability, a first among cloud platform providers, enables cloud administrators to follow a cloud implementation model that best fits their environment and workloads.
Brilliantly simple user interface: Citrix has long been known for its focus on delivering beautifully simple, consumer-like experiences for end users. The new CloudStack 3 release reflects this focus with a brilliantly simple out-of-the-box user experience that enables even the most novice cloud user to quickly build, launch and manage their own workloads on the cloud. The combination of self-service administration, coupled with advanced orchestration and automation, enables new IT services to be delivered in minutes, instead of weeks.
OpenStack swift integration: CloudStack 3 new supports Swift, the OpenStack object-storage technology for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of standardized servers to store petabytes of accessible data.