Citrix CloudStack 3 Brings the Power of Amazon-Style Clouds to Customers of All Sizes

India, February 16, 2012 –  On Tuesday, at the Cloud Connect 2012, Citrix announced the general availability of Citrix CloudStack™ 3, the first release of the market leading open source cloud platform under the Citrix brand. CloudStack is already the world’s most successful platform for public clouds, powering over $1B in revenue for more than 85 large scale production clouds, including some of the biggest brands in the industry. With the new CloudStack 3 release, Citrix brings the power of true Amazon-style clouds to customers of all sizes. For the first time, enterprise customers who want to build clouds the way the world’s most successful clouds are built, can quickly and easily transform virtualized datacenter resources into automated, elastic, self-service clouds.

Citrix Announces Availability of CloudStack 3, Customer Momentum, and New “Citrix Ready” Cloud Verification Program

Citrix CloudStack is a key component of the Citrix cloud computing portfolio, providing customers with solutions that make it easy to Build new clouds, Connect to existing cloud services, and Deliver any cloud with the best security, performance and reliability. The Cloud Era is built on a completely different set of assumptions than past generations of IT – in fact, many of the exceptions from the PC Era now represent the norm in the Cloud Era. This is forcing enterprise IT organizations to reevaluate IT strategies, causing them to search for lower costs, greater capacity and improved agility. 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.

Since its introduction, CloudStack has rapidly become the leading commercial open source platform for building, managing and delivering highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds for a wide range of customers such as Datapipe, Edmunds.com, IDC Frontier, Nokia Research and Zynga. CloudStack is designed to ensure organizations can build production cloud environments on a platform designed for economics, elasticity and scale. It is not a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud-like management layers on top. Rather, it was designed from the ground up as an open, multi-hypervisor platform to help customers build public and private clouds the way the world’s most innovative clouds are built – simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient. New capabilities in CloudStack 3 focus on openness, flexibility and completeness and include:

• Cloud-Optimized Virtualization Platform: While maintaining a strong commitment to being hypervisor agnostic with support for leading platforms such as KVM, OVM, vSphere and Xen®, CloudStack 3 includes a cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer® 6 as a core integrated feature. With four of the top five world’s largest public clouds in production (Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, Softlayer) leveraging XenServer® or Xen® as the virtualization platform of choice, this unification brings unparalleled new levels of scale, manageability, security, multi-tenancy, and virtual switching integration that is currently unavailable in traditional enterprise virtualization solutions from other leading vendors.
• Network-as-a-Service Integration: As Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) becomes a key differentiator for providers looking to deliver advanced enterprise solutions in the cloud, CloudStack 3 now provides tight integration with Citrix NetScaler®, delivering a fast, secure, reliable cloud experience for an estimated 75% of all internet users each day. CloudStack supports NetScaler SDX™ and VPX™ appliances, and makes it easy to extend network level integration to products like Citrix CloudBridge™ and Citrix CloudGateway™. This brings virtual networking to a new level, ensuring increased security, performance and connectivity between public and private clouds that are delivered as integrated services within the platform.
• Built-In Network Services Catalog: In addition to NetScaler integration, CloudStack continues to build upon its rich and flexible network offerings by enabling service providers to upsell network services through the creation of custom catalogs of network service options. This capability, a first among cloud platform providers, enables cloud administrators to follow a cloud implementation model that best fits their environment and workloads.
• Brilliantly Simple User Interface: Citrix has long been known for its focus on delivering beautifully simple, consumer-like experiences for end users. The new CloudStack 3 release reflects this focus with a brilliantly simple out-of-the-box user experience that enables even the most novice cloud user to quickly build, launch and manage their own workloads on the cloud. The combination of self-service administration, coupled with advanced orchestration and automation, enables new IT services to be delivered in minutes, instead of weeks.
• OpenStack Swift Integration:  CloudStack 3 new supports Swift, the OpenStack object-storage technology for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of standardized servers to store petabytes of accessible data.

Citrix Ready for the Cloud – Building the World’s Largest Cloud Computing Ecosystem

Citrix is also unveiling a Citrix Cloud Community Program, which introduces over 2,200 products and services that are Citrix Ready® verified to work with Citrix cloud solutions. The program showcases hundreds of leading technology companies and service providers who are partnering with Citrix to build the largest cloud computing ecosystem in the industry. For more information, please visit the community page.

CloudStack.org – The Open Source Cloud Computing User Community

Since the acquisition of Cloud.com by Citrix in 2011, the CloudStack.org open source community has experienced a 4x growth in user engagement, with more than 25,000 cloud builders around the world now signed up as active members of the CloudStack.org community.  Within the past year, the open source CloudStack product has been downloaded over 60k times and is currently averaging a 5x increase in monthly downloads. For more information, please visit: http://www.cloudstack.org

Citrix at Cloud Connect 2012

Attendees at Cloud Connect 2012 will have the opportunity during the keynotes to hear from key Citrix cloud platform executives such as Sameer Dholakia, group vice president and general manager, and Peder Ulander, vice president of product marketing, as well as a CloudStack customers such as Datapipe, Edmunds.com, Nokia and Zynga. These customers will give a detailed account of how they were able to leverage Citrix cloud technologies to transform the way they are managing, delivering and consuming IT services via the cloud. Check out this blog from Citrix vice president of corporate marketing, Kim DeCarlis, for a full list of Citrix events at Cloud Connect.

Product Availability

CloudStack 3 beta is available today for download here. A full production version will be available this quarter.

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.”

Ed Laczynski, vice president, Cloud Strategy and Architecture, Datapipe

“CloudStack has provided our customers a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of tools - including rapid deployment, high performance, a robust API, and programmability - to create unique clouds without sacrificing compatibility. With the release of CloudStack 3 and the continued dedication to an open platform and hypervisor neutrality, as well as a track record of success in actual production cloud deployments, Citrix continues to help us achieve our vision of being the world’s leading mission critical IT services provider.”

Emil Ndreu, associate director, System Engineering, Edmunds, Inc. 

“Edmunds.com is a very innovative environment, and needed an elastic, stable infrastructure that would give us a simple and rapid way to update our products to serve the millions of car shoppers who use our site. Citrix CloudStack has been a great partner for us, infusing efficiency into our process so that we can quickly generate award-winning site tools and highly rated mobile apps nearly as soon as we come up with them.”

George Reese, CTO, enStratus

“We are excited around the investment Citrix is making around extending its position in the cloud with the launch of CloudStack 3. Their focus on advancing the platform while expanding its partner ecosystem and delivering programs that accelerate the adoption of this leading cloud platform by the enterprise. The combination of enStratus and CloudStack 3 gives IT organizations and service providers the tools they need to leverage the self-service and automation capabilities of cloud computing with the controls necessary for the enterprise.”

Chris Sharp, general manager, Content and Cloud, Equinix

“Today’s businesses have a strong interest in architecting their cloud infrastructure based on the models used by the most sophisticated cloud providers in the world. This approach enables them to achieve higher performance, limitless scale and faster deployment of new cloud services to their end-users. Citrix and Equinix have collaborated to launch some of the world's most successful cloud deployments for both enterprises and service providers. CloudStack 3 offers our customers the opportunity to achieve unparalleled scale, performance and connectivity between public and private clouds, by leveraging the integrated offering deployed globally across Platform Equinix.”

Eirikur Hrafnsson, founder and CEO, GreenQloud

“As a pioneer in the green cloud computing space it only made sense for us to select CloudStack, a leader in the free and open source software movement for cloud computing. We tried several IaaS solutions while we developed our strategy, but it was the simplicity and quick time-to-market that CloudStack could deliver that attracted us to Citrix. Our visions for the public cloud aligned nicely, and coupled with the performance, reliability and security capabilities of CloudStack made our decision extremely easy.”

Ichiro Nakayama, Director of Business Development, IDC Frontier

“The enhancements in CloudStack 3, as well as the extensive ecosystem Citrix provides, will not only enable further enforcements to our public cloud services, but provide a strong opportunity for our business customers to shift to the next level in leveraging hybrid cloud environments.”

Bailey Caldwell, vice president, Business Development, RightScale

“RightScale and CloudStack have been integrated since 2010 and jointly run many of the world’s largest production cloud deployments. The investment that Citrix is making in CloudStack will further expand this industry leading solution. The combination of RightScale with CloudStack 3 brings enterprises and service providers the RightScale cloud management platform which dramatically reduces the complexity of managing public and private cloud infrastructure so it’s faster and more productive for IT organizations and their end users.”