Citrix CloudStack 3 to offer Amazon-style clouds to customers

CloudStack is known for its platform for public clouds, and it now brings the CloudStack 3 in the true Amazon style clouds (of varying sizes) to customers. Citrix introduced the Citrix CloudStack 3 at the Cloud Connect 2012. Enterprise customers looking to build clouds can quickly and easily transform virtualized datacenter resources into automated, elastic, self-service clouds. Citrix CloudStack is said to be a key component of the Citrix cloud computing portfolio, offering its customers easy solution to build new clouds, connect to existing cloud services, and deliver any cloud improved security, performance and reliability. It has also unveiled the Citrix Cloud Community Program, introducing over 2,200 Citrix Ready products and services, which can work with Citrix cloud solutions.

Building cloud

CloudStack is a leading commercial open source platform for building, managing and delivering highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds to customers, such as Datapipe, Edmunds.com, IDC Frontier, Nokia Research and Zynga. Unlike a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud-like management layers on top, it has been designed from the ground up as an open, multi-hypervisor platform helping customers build public and private clouds.

CloudStack 3 features the cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer 6. Utilizing XenServer or Xen as its virtualization platform, it touts to offer new levels of scale, manageability, security, multi-tenancy, and virtual switching integration. Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) is become a key differentiator to deliver advanced enterprise solutions in the cloud. CloudStack 3 brings in tight integration with Citrix NetScaler. CloudStack supports NetScaler SDX and VPX appliances, simplifying to extend network level integration to products such as Citrix CloudBridge and Citrix CloudGateway. 

Furthermore, it promises a simple user interface and built-in network services catalog. CloudStack 3 supports the new OpenStack for forming redundant, scalable object storage using clusters - Swift.

Sameer Dholakia, Group Vice President and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix, “Built correctly, cloud computing delivers higher efficiency, limitless scale and faster deployment of new services to the end-user, thereby changing the economics of the data center by shifting the delivery of IT resources to an on-demand model. With tight integration with the Citrix cloud portfolio, our customers gain access to an unparalleled set of cloud virtualization, orchestration and networking solutions that are not only best in class individually and optimized to run collectively, but also designed to work with the hardware, software and management products customers already have deployed.”

While the full production version of CloudStack 3 will be made available this quarter, the beta version is available for download here.