Citrix Brings the Cloud into the Fold with CloudStack 3.0

Citrix is positioning the Cloud Connect launch of the CloudStack 3.0 cloud platform as the first time that customers of all sizes can leverage “the power of Amazon-Style clouds,” thanks to a deeper integration with Citrix technology and advances along the product’s roadmap.

But just as notable is the fact that Citrix has dropped the “Cloud.com” branding, indicating it’s ready for CloudStack to fly under the company’s own flag — now that we’re many months out from the acquisition.

As part of the upgrade, the third iteration of CloudStack includes a “cloud-optimized” version of Citrix XenServer 6 as a core feature, according to the press release. Citrix is maintaining CloudStack’s goal of hypervisor agnosticism, and still supports KVM, OVM, vSphere and Xen. But Citrix likes to boast that Amazon, SoftLayer, GoGrid and Rackspace all use XenServer or Xen as their virtualization platform of choice, and maybe CloudStack customers can reap some of the benefit, too.

Also new in this release is a deep integration with Citrix NetScaler, bringing so-called networking-as-a-service (NaaS) to CloudStack. That integration extends to the NetScaler SDX and VPX appliances, and enables extension into Citrix CloudBridge and CloudGateway. Thanks to these virtual networking capabilities, service providers can deliver security and performance between public and private clouds, according to Citrix.

On that note, Citrix CloudStack 3 enables service providers to upsell nework services by way of a custom catalog of options, enabling administrators to match workload to environment. Also new: a revamped, “brilliantly simple” user interface and support for OpenStack Swift, the open source platform’s object storage component.

Finally, Citrix also took the opportunity to launch the Citrix Cloud Community Program, which it said folds more than 2,200 completely verified solutions from service provider and technology partners into its ecosystem. And on the subject of community, the open source CloudStack community continues strong.

We’ll continue to monitor Citrix’s cloud strategy going forward. But the real takeaway here is that CloudStack is now, in both name and feature set, all Citrix’s.