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Citrix “Opens Up The Cloud” For VMware Customers

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Citrix Systems today announced a new edition of CloudStack, which will feature enhanced support for both the VMware vSphere and Oracle VM hypervisors, enabling VMware and Oracle customers to manage their virtualized servers as a highly available, scalable cloud computing environment.

Citrix CloudStack is not just a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud management layered on top, it is a production-ready, free and open source cloud infrastructure platform that helps providers of all types deploy and manage simple, cost-effective cloud services that are scalable, secure, and open by design.

The new release is based on the same CloudStack solution that has been used by some of the world’s largest and most successful public clouds to roll out new cloud services up to 50 times faster and at one-fifth the cost of alternative solutions.

This is the first release of the product since Citrix acquired Cloud.com in July.

Citrix CloudStack with support for VMware vSphere and bare metal provisioning is available today as a free download from CloudStack.org or as a commercially supported solution from Citrix. Oracle VM support will be available in October, followed by Microsoft Hyper-V later in Q4.

CloudStack can be deployed on-premise or as a hosted cloud service.

Citrix Reaches For The Cloud.com, Acquires Cloud Computing Startup For A Reported $200 Million+

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Citrix this morning announced that it has acquired Cloud.com, a provider of software infrastructure platforms for cloud providers. The company’s CloudStack product line helps providers of all types deploy and manage simple, cost-effective cloud services that are scalable, secure, and open by design.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but TechCrunch reports that Citrix paid more than $200 million for the cloud computing startup.

Also read: Citrix Acquires Cloud.com: An Analysis from CloudAve

Industry analysts expect a massive build out in cloud infrastructure, creating a new market projected to exceed $11 billion by the end of 2013.

The Cloud.com product line is not a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud management layered on top. It is a hypervisor-agnostic solution designed from the ground up to help providers build clouds the way the world’s largest and most successful public clouds are built – simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient.

With the addition of Cloud.com, Citrix now offers a complete portfolio of virtualization, orchestration and networking solutions purpose built for what it dubs the ‘Cloud Era’. The Cloud.com product line will continue to support commercial hypervisors such as Citrix XenServer and VMware vSphere, as well as open source hypervisors like Xen. Citrix intends to add support for Microsoft products like Hyper-V and System Center to the Cloud.com product line, as well as support a full range of “platform-as-a-service” development environments, storage systems, servers and management software.

As a founding member of Openstack.org, Citrix is the second largest contributor to the project and is a member of the OpenStack policy board. Citrix product support for OpenStack was initially announced at the recent Citrix Synergy conference under the code name “Project Olympus.”

With this acquisition, Citrix will also be extending OpenStack support to the Cloud.com product line in an upcoming release later this year.

Cloud.com CEO Sheng Liang will continue to lead the design, architecture and technology of the CloudStack product line, reporting to Sameer Dholakia, group VP and GM of the newly-formed Cloud Platforms product group at Citrix.

The Cloud.com CloudStack solution is available to cloud providers today, with Citrix branded versions coming in a future release.

Cloud.com Joins the NetApp Alliance Partner Program

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Cloud.com, a vendor of open source cloud computing software, has joined the NetApp Alliance Partner Program.

As part of this collaboration, Cloud.com CloudStack, an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform, seamlessly integrates with NetApp storage systems and simplifies how customers can build, deploy and manage public and private cloud environments, for improved IT flexibility and efficiency.

This integration with NetApp gives Cloud.com the ability to directly integrate with the NetApp OnCommand management software to help automate provisioning volumes on the storage system, create Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) of administrator-specified sizes, and perform LUN masking.

Cloud.com has also integrated, tested, and validated CloudStack with NetApp unified storage systems, allowing customers to continue to use the NetApp Data ONTAP platform, which effectively creates and manages storage pools and devices requiring ever-increasing capacity and bandwidth.

Cloud.com currently enables over 50 large-scale production clouds in deployment that have been built on its market-leading open source cloud computing solution including KT, Tata Communications, Nokia Research Center, GreenQloud and Profitability.net.

Cloud.com technologies can be deployed on-premise or as hosted cloud services.

Appcore Picks Cloud.com To Power Private Cloud Platform

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Open source cloud computing software company Cloud.com recently announced that Appcore, a global business information systems provider, is using the company’s flagship product, CloudStack, for its private cloud computing platform.

Appcore technology includes such a platform, the global Appcore Cloud Network, Appcore Second Site for disaster recovery, and Appcore Cloud Onsite, which allows enterprises to run the platform behind its firewall or in any of Appcore’s global clouds.

One of the key reasons Appcore is using Cloud.com CloudStack is due to its open source model and therefore Appcore’s ability to see the code prior to making its selection. In addition to the benefits of open source that CloudStack delivers, Appcore has gained an easy-to-use user interface for customer self-service administration that can decrease operating costs by freeing up

Vyatta, Cloud.com Team Up To Deliver ‘Advanced Networking In The Cloud’

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Vyatta, which provides software-based networking for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, and open source cloud computing software company Cloud.com recently announced a joint solution for advanced connectivity and security for cloud infrastructures.

With Vyatta’s cloud-ready network operating system and the Cloud.com CloudStack cloud infrastructure software, enterprises and cloud providers can set up cloud instances and configure complex network security policies to isolate customers and applications.

The combined solution enables unique infrastructure build-out in the cloud by including Layer 2 cloud bridging, Intrusion Prevention, and N-tier network management in addition to stateful firewalling, IPSec and SSL-based VPN and secure web filtering.