Citrix Commercializes OpenStack With ‘Project Olympus’

Citrix will soon be rolling out a new OpenStack product that would let customers build private or public clouds. The company has added Project Olympus, a new cloud product, to its open cloud computing portfolio to complement its Citrix NetScaler Cloud Gateway and NetScaler Cloud Bridge.

Citrix Systems announced Project Olympus, a new cloud infrastructure product based on the open-source cloud operating system OpenStack, at Citrix Synergy a few weeks ago. It will be the first commercialized version of OpenStack and will begin shipping later this year, Citrix said.

Based on OpenStack, Project Olympus will help customers build real infrastructure-as-a-service clouds that are scalable, efficient and open by design because they use the same architecture, approach and technology behind “some of today’s largest and most successful clouds in the world,” Citrix added.

Project Olympus will be composed of two components, a Citrix-certified version of OpenStack and a cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer. It will support a wide range of infrastructure, management and development technologies to make it easy for customers to expand and build on the platform, Citrix said.

Project Olympus will also support Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere in addition to Citrix XenDesktop.

OpenStack began as a joint effort between Rackspace and NASA back in July 2010. The effort has since expanded to include more than 70 industry partners, including Citrix. OpenStack supports multiple virtualization hypervisor platforms, including Hyper-V, KVM and Xen.