Virtual Office Resource

Citrix Systems (News - Alert) has announced a new edition of the CloudStack enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud management layered on top. This is the company's first release of the product since it was acquired through Cloud.com in July.

The new release features enhanced support for the VMware vSphere and Oracle VM hypervisors, which enable VMware and Oracle customers to manage virtualized servers through a high availability, scalable cloud computing environment. The platform is production-ready, free and open source and can aid all types of service providers in deploying and managing scalable, secure, open design cloud services.

The Citrix CloudStack gives customers a fast path to the cloud, recognizing that organizations are dealing with a huge task in trying to build out their own IaaS cloud environments. The platform offers advanced software technologies and has been used in more than 60 large-scale production clouds including GoDaddy, Tata Communications, Nokia, GreenQloud and Zynga (News - Alert).

The platform also enables users to preserve existing virtualization investments since it works with all major enterprise technologies. These include Oracle, VM, vSphere, KVM, XenServer or a mix of those technologies, which also enables customers to grow their own virtual infrastructures. When VMware customers deploy the CloudStack over vCloud Director, they can eliminate the proprietary costs of VMware while gaining the flexibility and control of an open source cloud platform.

The CloudStack also relieves some of the financial strain of the “vTax,” a term that some use to refer to the latest update of the VMware vSphere 5 licensing model that adds costs to customers' existing cloud and virtualization implementations. VMware customers may mix and match their virtualization technologies within the same cloud environment using CloudStack, since it can support multiple hypervisors within the same cloud.

The new release is available as a free download from CloudStack.org or as a commercially supported solution through Citrix. Support for Oracle VM will be available in October, to be followed by Microsoft (News - Alert) Hyper-V later in the fourth Quarter. The platform may be deployed on premise or as a hosted cloud service.

“By enhancing availability and support for VMware vSphere and Oracle VM, the latest release of Citrix CloudStack enables customers to build clouds on their existing virtualization and datacenter technologies while taking advantage of the most widely deployed open source cloud platform today,” said Peter Ulander, vice president of product marketing for the Citrix Cloud Platforms Group. “A powerful, hypervisor-agnostic solution, CloudStack helps customers build clouds the way the world's largest and most successful public clouds are built - simple, automated, elastic, scalable and massively efficient. And by providing advanced enterprise features that support vSphere and OVM in a free, production-ready offering, users are given a choice, not a surcharge, when building out their cloud platform.”

“IDC (News - Alert) Frontier, a subsidiary of Yahoo! Japan, is the market leading provider of cloud services in Japan with its innovative NOAH Cloud Services product, a fully-automated cloud management service with an open API that is optimized specifically for the Japanese market,” said Ichiro Nakayama, division director of Business Development, IDC Frontier (IDCF), a subsidiary of Yahoo! Japan. “We chose Citrix CloudStack based on the comprehensiveness of the solution and its ability to help us to quickly come to market with a highly differentiated and customized cloud platform running on top of our VMware installation.”

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.

Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO… follow us on Twitter