Citrix Launches Open Source CloudStack 3

Citrix has launched Cloudstack 3, the first release of the open-source Cloud platform under the Citrix banner.

The product was announced at Cloud Connect 2012, where the company also launched the Citrix Cloud Community Programme, which allows for the verification of Citrix-comaptible products.

The Cloud era

Citrix says that CloudStack 3 will usher in the “Cloud Era” and claims that the first time, “enterprise customers will be able to quickly and easily transform virtualised data centre resourced into automated, elastic self-service clouds.”

“The Citrix Cloud portfolio is designed to help customers accelerate this Cloud Era innovation by making inexpensive compute power accessible to anyone, allowing people to work from anywhere any device, and enhancing business agility,” the company said.

Cloudstack 3 is said to focus on openness, flexibility and completeness. The new release includes a Cloud-optimised version of Citrix XenSever 6 as a core integrated feature and Citrix says that this will bring unparalleled levels of scale, manageability and security that is currently not possible with solutions from its rivals.

Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) is included in the form of tighter integration with Citrix NetScaler, while a network services catalogue will allow administrators to follow an implementation model that suits their environment.

CloudStack 3 also supports Swift, while Citrix claims that its simple user interface will mean that even novices will be able to quickly build, launch and manage their workloads, straight out of the box.

Growing platform

The Citrix Cloud Community Programme will introduce more than 2,200 products and services which have been verified to work with Citrix Cloud offerings and aims to be “the largest Cloud computing ecosystem in the industry”.

“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 centre by shifting the delivery of IT resources to an on-demand model,” commented Sameer Dholakia, group vice president and GM, Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix.

“With tight integration with the Citrix cloud portfolio, our customers gain access to an unparalleled set of Cloud virtualisation, orchestration and networking solutions that are not only best in class individually and optimised to run collectively, but also designed to work with the hardware, software and management products customers already have deployed.”

Citrix acquired CloudStack in July last year as part of its takeover of Cloud.com, and it says that it is already the world’s most successful platform for public Clouds, powering over $1 billion (£64m) for over 85 large-scale production Clouds.