The future of Cloud Computing lies predominantly in solutions that are based on open, safe and flexible cloud architecture, free from any trappings of vendor lock-in. The acquisition of from Cloud.com and its CloudStack technology heralds a visionary leap towards a comprehensive ‘Enterprise ready’ flexible Cloud Builder software suite that is targeted for Cloud Providers who’d rather use commodity x86 compute gear and pair it up with storage, networking and hypervisors of their choice in order to create Enterprise Private, Hybrid and Service Provider Cloud solutions for their customers.
With this move, Citrix now boasts of a compelling cloud software story that has the potential to leverage economies of scale and flexibility of cloud computing, similar to those achieved by Amazon. Using its Cloud Infrastructure foundations in Xen and CloudStack’s nifty orchestration, the fortified Citrix portfolio can help cloud builders replicate Amazon’s cloud success story within the context of an enterprise. This is certainly different from traditional private cloud building approaches adopted by the on-premise hardware & software vendors that offer pre-configured packaged hardware-software ‘a-la-Lego’ bundles – for example, Vblock (Cisco, VMware, EMC), FlexPod (NetApp, Cisco, VMware), Matrix (HP) and CloudBurst (IBM). Citrix also happens to partner with several of these vendors and more in the traditional cloud building arena as well.
If you look at Citrix and CloudStack approach from the point of view of IT organizations, you can almost hear them heaving a sigh of relief. More often than not, IT folks’ response to cloud adoption is saddled anywhere in between anxiety at the risk of becoming redundant with cloud automation to the other extreme where they have been struggling to integrate, harness and reign in cloud-based applications with the existing on-premise systems. Enterprise IT could use this maturity in cloud through solutions such as CloudStack to elevate their value proposition within the organization. How? Well, through better alignment with business goals by harnessing the power of internal clouds that can co-exist with existing systems and grow on-demand using commodity hardware. Integration capabilities with the legacy and heterogeneous systems support is the key feature of this potent mix of Citrix and CloudStack technology that offers a much better way of dealing with enterprise IT than the traditional approaches which are locked-in with one vendor or the other.
Besides the hypervisor and hardware independence, CloudStack also provides ‘borderless scalability’ through its single command and control management console that can manage multiple availability zones that are geographically disjoint. CloudZones enable the federation of managed or hosted availability zones within a CloudStack deployment. Another feather is the Hybrid Cloud support through CloudBridge, which enables applications to interoperate with Amazon EC2, S3 APIs and OpenStack API.
Why did Citrix pick up Cloud.com? Well, besides being a feature rich cloud orchestration suite that is built from ground up and complements Citrix’s Cloud portfolio and goals, CloudStack has gained a lot of industry momentum with its cool partnerships and at least 50 large-scale production clouds in deployment that have been built on its open source cloud computing solution including Nokia Research Center, Tata Communications, GreenQloud, Logicworks, Korea’s KT ucloud, Japan’s leading enterprise cloud builder IDCF (a subsidiary of Yahoo, Japan ). An interesting case study of Cloud.com adoption is Logicwork’s Infinicloud that offers fully managed cloud services including shared root access, application monitoring, server patching, managed security, managed templates and snapshots, intrusion detection (IDS), and database clustering. It also enables hybrid cloud solutions for PCI, HIPAA, and SAS-70 Type II Compliance, making Infinicloud one of the most advanced public cloud offerings in the market. Another case in point is Pathway, a provider of integrated Internet solutions to businesses and residential customers. Pathway uses CloudStack for its offering CloudPath – a highly reliable and secure location for its clients to house important data. The primary reason why Pathway chose the Cloud.com cloud platform was because it integrates seamlessly into Pathway’s existing infrastructure that includes Citrix Xen, VMware, Cisco, KVM, Dell multi core servers, Linux and Windows 2003/2008.
Citrix already had partnerships with NetApp, HP for traditional private cloud builder solutions and now through Cloud.com acquisition, it has grabbed eyeballs for the x86 based commodity cloud deployment requirements of Service Providers and Enterprises laden with legacy IT that are bound by the integration requirement strings. Citrix is in a leading position to help its customers by enabling them to easily transform their data centres into cloud computing environments while leveraging their existing tools, infrastructure and architectures and tools. The systems integrators can use this approach for building, deploying, and managing multi-tier and multi-tenant cloud computing environments in an effort at easing the transition to the cloud. Besides hardware partnerships, CloudStack offers tight integration with cloud management partners like RightScale to help customers manage multi-cloud, hybrid platforms that span across private data center to the public cloud. To address one of enterprise’s biggest hurdles to cloud adoption, security, this solution provides requisite Identity and access management, security, compliance and regulatory needs of the enterprise customer through its partnership with Symplified. There is a burgeoning ecosystem around CloudStack with startups such as UberSmith providing billing and metering solutions that take into account CloudStack resources as well.
Citrix’s acquisition of Cloud.com’s CloudStack technology brings a breath of fresh air into the rapidly evolving world of cloud computing, bolstering cloud maturity and realism (sort of!). Well, yet again, the ‘old order changeth’, yielding place to the new and ‘data centers’ fulfill themselves in many ways.
