Citrix Rolls Out 'Amazon-Style' Public Cloud for Enterprises

By Erin Harrison Executive Editor, Cloud Computing

As enterprises seek out potential sources for cloud adoption, Citrix today launched CloudStack 3, the company’s first release of its open source cloud platform under the Citrix brand since acquiring Cloud.com last year.

With the new CloudStack 3 release, Citrix brings “the power of true Amazon-style clouds,” allowing enterprise customers a way to “quickly and easily” transform virtualized data center resources into automated, elastic, self-service clouds, according to 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,” Dholakia said in a company statement.

CloudStack is a platform for public clouds, currently powering over $1 billion in revenue for more than 85 large-scale production clouds, including some of the biggest brands in the industry, company officials said.

“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,” Dholakia added.

In its announcement at Cloud Connect 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif., Citrix emphasized several new capabilities in CloudStack 3, which focus on “openness, flexibility and completeness.”

CloudStack 3 offers a cloud optimized virtualization platform, network-as-a-service integration as well as a built-in network services catalog. In addition to NetScaler integration, CloudStack continues also allows service providers to upsell network services through the creation of custom catalogs of network service options.

Citrix also touted its user interface as “brilliantly simple,” offering an out-of-the-box user experience that “allows even the most novice cloud user to quickly build, launch and manage their own workloads on the cloud.”

Since Citrix acquired Cloud.com in 2011, the CloudStack.org open source community has experienced a four-times growth in uses, with more than 25,000 cloud builders around the world now signed up as active members of the CloudStack.org community, Citrix said.

The beta version of CloudStack 3 can be downloaded by clicking here. Company officials said the full production version will be available this quarter.

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