Citrix will be rolling out a new OpenStack product that would let customers build private or public clouds.
Citrix
System 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 Summit on
May 25. Project Olympus 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 said
in reference to existing OpenStack implementations.
"Build
a real cloud in your data center based on OpenStack and XenServer. The early
access program starts today," said Citrix CEO Mark Templeton in a keynote
address at Synergy.
Public
cloud providers can leverage Project Olympus to create customized features
within the cloud infrastructure, while enterprises looking for efficiency and
flexibility can use the platform to build private clouds, Citrix said.
"There
was no better project to help bring Project Olympus to fruition than OpenStack,
with its dedicated industry support, rich ecosystem and rapid pace of
innovation," said Sameer Dholakia, vice president of product marketing, data
center and cloud division at Citrix.
Public
clouds like Amazon and Rackspace have set the bar for how real clouds should be
built, yet many first-generation cloud products "force-fit" the cloud into
existing server virtualization architecture, according to Dholakia. Citrix will
be working with the open-source community to bring open, elastic scale-out
infrastructures of leading infrastructure-as-a-service clouds to private clouds
instead of giving them an "imitation cloud," Dholakia said.
Project
Olympus will be composed of two components, a Citrix-certified version of OpenStack
and a cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer. Both parts incorporate Xen,
Citrix's own virtualization platform. 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. To "reinforce"
customer choice, Project Olympus will also support Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware
vSphere in addition to Citrix XenDesktop.
"We're
serious about open, about giving people choice, and leveraging the investments
they have already made and so they don't get locked into the legacy server
virtualization," said Dholakia.
Customers
interested in other hypervisors can continue using OpenStack instead of Project
Olympus.
Project
Olympus will go together with Citrix NetScaler Cloud Gateway, which gives IT
departments an easy and unified way to deliver a mix of software-as-a-service,
Web and PC-based applications to end users. It will also work alongside
NetScaler Cloud Bridge, which can be used to expand storage and computing
capacity by extending the data center to an external cloud service.
Citrix
also preintegrated Project Olympus with the Citrix Cloud Network fabric to
ensure cloud performance, security and reliability, the company said. The
built-in cloud networking capabilities will allow customers to utilize virtual
switching and intelligent application delivery in networking-as-a-service
models.
Customers
interested in pilots and proof-of-concept deployments can join the Citrix
Project Olympus Early Access Program and receive support from Dell and
Rackspace. Rackspace will provide deployment services, training and ongoing
customer support, and Rackspace Cloud Builders will be available to help deploy
and support private or public OpenStack clouds in any data center. Dell will
also be providing deployment software and optimized hardware platforms. Through
the program, customers can start building scalable clouds, Citrix said.
Early Access Program customers will receive Citrix Project Olympus beta
software free of charge.
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. Canonical
also recently announced that it will be basing its Ubuntu
cloud platform on OpenStack.
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