Citrix Project Olympus

The Citrix company, one of the world's largest enterprise solution providers for virtualization, announced the solution Project Olympus allowing to unroll public and private "clouds" of the class IaaS based on the infrastructure developed within the OpenStack OpenSource-project. Thus, Citrix not only got own IaaS-offer, but also became the first large company which proposed the commercial solution based on OpenStack.

At the Synergy conference which opened in San Francisco on May 25 the Citrix company presented the first commercial solution based on the project on creation of cloud infrastructure with the open code OpenStack which was announced at the initiative of NASA and Rackspace hosting provider slightly less than a year ago. The new product which received the name Project Olympus represents the commercial option of infrastructure OpenStack which underwent certification of Citrix and using as a basis the optimized version of the platform for server virtualization of Citrix XenServer based on the Open source software of Xen developed by Citrix., As reported in the press release, Xen it is used today in more than 80% of offers of the market of public "clouds" (the truth, in infrastructure of Amazon Web Services is used not the normal, and modified version of Xen), however in corporate data centers solutions of VMware enjoy the greatest popularity.

"Many vendors with a great effort try to squeeze a cloud in legacy architecture of server virtualization, and it is rather possible to call results in such cases simulation of "cloud", – Sameer Dholakia, the marketing vice president of the products Citrix says. – Citrix considers that now it is a high time to address community Open Source to bring cloud computing to the new level of innovation and to create the solution which will allow to give to private "clouds" openness, the elasticity and scalability inherent to infrastructure solutions of the leading suppliers of IaaS".

Thus, Citrix which provided only separate components of IaaS-infrastructure until recently got own sound offer for creation of "clouds" of the class IaaS today. However, unlike VMware, the solution Citrix is founded on the platform with the open code that should draw attention of the customers concerned by a problem of dependence on the supplier. It should be noted that Citrix will support in Project Olympus, in addition to regular Xen, also similar platforms of Hyper-V from Microsoft and vSphere from VMware that should attract careful customers still more.

Project Olympus can be used both for creation of corporate private "cloud", and for creation of a commercial public cloud solution.

In the text of the press release Citrix emphasizes that the solution Project Olympus will be integrated with other components of an open cloud computing architecture Citrix where the infrastructure solutions NetScaler Cloud Gateway and NetScaler Cloud Bridge announced along with Project Olympus enter, in particular. At the same time the solution Cloud Gateway which Citrix calls "an entrance door" of corporate data center is intended for uniform providing applications to end users from different sources, whether it be SaaS, the Internet or traditional Windows applications. Cloud Bridge which is respectively "a back door" allows to integrate corporate infrastructure with third-party public cloud services.

Project Olympus will be provided to commercial operation in 2011, however already now interested in the platform can subscribe for participation in the test program which Citrix will organize together with two other project participants of OpenStack: Dell and Rackspace. At the same time Dell provides reference architecture based on the PowerEdge C server and software for solution deployment, and Rackspace is services in deployment, training and technical support.

At the same Citrix conference submitted the curious concept of "a personal cloud" which marks end of an era of personal computers in the version from Citrix. According to this concept, users in the work cannot be limited any more to desktop PCs alone therefore they need to give an opportunity fully to work from any device – and Citrix provides such opportunity, allowing to start corporate applications on different PCs, 149 models of smartphones, 37 tablets and 10 different thin clients using Citrix Receiver software. The solution NetScaler Cloud Gateway can also be perceived as one of concept components of "a personal cloud".