Citrix Charts “Path to the Cloud” at Synergy San Francisco
15.05.2012Company: Amcham
Within Citrix Synergy™, the conference where mobile workstyles and cloud services meet, Citrix unveiled its strategy to help customers of all sizes deliver business-ready cloud services. With the advent of the Cloud Era, companies everywhere are looking for effective strategies to harness the benefits of cloud computing, without disrupting their current business models. Today’s announcements give customers a simple, pragmatic “Path to the Cloud,” making it easier for them to “build” new clouds, “bridge” to third-party clouds, “deliver” cloud services with the best performance, reliability and security, and “transform” existing Windows desktops and apps into true, cloud-like services.
Build New Clouds
The first component of the Citrix “Path to the Cloud” strategy is focused on making it easy for customers of any size to create true, Amazon-style clouds. To accelerate the broad adoption of open, interoperable cloud computing, Citrix has focused its cloud platform strategy on the CloudStack™ platform, now part of the Apache Software Foundation, home of the world’s most successful open source projects. Apache CloudStack is a powerful, proven, hypervisor-agnostic platform that helps customers of all sizes build true Amazon-style clouds. It boasts more than 30,000 active community members, thousands of certified apps, and hundreds of production clouds, collectively generating more than $1 billion in cloud revenue from some of the biggest brands in the industry. Since CloudStack was accepted into the Apache Software Foundation Incubator Program, 60 industry partners have announced support for the platform, with customers standing up over 100 new clouds a month on CloudStack.
To bring the power of Apache CloudStack to its extensive enterprise and service provider customer base, Citrix today unveiled Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack. Citrix CloudPlatform is now a key component of the Citrix cloud computing portfolio, providing customers with a hyper-agnostic solution that make it easy to build new clouds, connect to existing cloud services, and deliver unparalleled cloud services with the best security, performance and reliability.
Bridge to Third-Party Clouds
The second element of the Citrix “Path to the Cloud” strategy is focused on making it easy for enterprises to connect their datacenters and private clouds to external, third-party cloud services. The centerpiece of the Citrix strategy in this area is Citrix CloudBridge™, an innovative solution that sits at the “back door” of corporate datacenters, giving them a secure, transparent, high-performance connection to any third-party cloud. This approach allows customers to tap into the elastic, low-cost capacity of public clouds as part of their overall cloud services strategy.
Citrix announced CloudBridge 2, a new upgrade that makes connecting to third-party clouds even easier. The new release adds a self-service catalog of popular clouds that are pre-configured to connect to CloudBridge on the enterprise side, along with a new “one-click” provisioning capability that makes it far easier to connect to external clouds for the first time. Customers can also add new clouds to the CloudBridge service catalog as needed.
Deliver Cloud Services to Any Device
Regardless of whether cloud services run in the corporate datacenter, or are delivered from a third party provider, delivering those services to end users with the best performance, reliability, and security is essential. This critical step, which requires a robust cloud networking platform, is the third pillar of the Citrix “Path to the Cloud” strategy.
The centerpiece of the Citrix strategy in this area is Citrix NetScaler®. The recently released NetScaler 10 broke new ground in cloud networking with its innovative TriScale™ technology that brought the elasticity, simplicity and expandability of the cloud to enterprise and carrier networks alike. Using the new TriScale technology, NetScaler helps businesses of any size scale their networks “up, in and out” with ease, just like the world’s largest public clouds. This revolutionary new technology elevates NetScaler beyond traditional service and application delivery controllers, creating the industry’s most advanced cloud networking platform.
Citrix today also announced a tech preview of NetScaler 10 for Amazon Web Services. Delivering all the power of NetScaler available as an Amazon cloud service makes it easy for enterprise customers to spin up new instances of NetScaler in seconds, with no on-premise deployment, configuration or management required.
Transform Existing Windows Apps and Desktops into Cloud Services
As enterprise customers make the transition to more cloud-centric delivery models, one of the most significant payoffs will come from transforming existing Windows apps and desktops into cloud-like services that can be managed, measured and delivered alongside newer mobile, web and SaaS apps. Citrix XenDesktop®, with its integrated XenApp® capability, is focused on helping customers make this transition in the most effective way possible, transforming physical Windows desktops and apps into high-definition services that can be delivered over the network to any device, in any location.
To expand on this strategy, Citrix today announced Project Avalon, a powerful new solution that will bring together a wide range of Citrix technologies to help customers deliver any Windows app or desktop as a true cloud service. With Project Avalon, customers will be able to rapidly deploy personalized Windows apps and desktops in a flexible, private cloud environment across single or multiple sites, and utilize public clouds in a “capacity on demand” fashion for business continuity, integrating mergers and acquisitions, or supporting offshoring projects. By leveraging the new Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack, Avalon will also make it easy for existing Citrix customers to adopt new features at whatever pace they like, allowing them to “mix-and-match” different versions of Windows Server, XenDesktop and XenApp – and span across any mix of public and private clouds.
Customers will hear more about Project Avalon, and the entire Citrix “Path to the Cloud” strategy, throughout the week at Citrix Synergy, including live demos, breakouts, and “Meet the Architects” sessions.
