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September 15, 2008
Xen in the Clouds
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Not content with XenServer just being the underappreciated hypervisor layer of some of the world's largest cloud infrastructures, Citrix is taking matters into its own hands. Today, the application delivery specialists launched its own cloud computing product line: Citrix Cloud Center (C3).
Described by Peter Levine, Citrix's vice president and general manager for the management and virtualization division, as "the product line to power the new cloud computing era," C3 is the product of "tremendous interest" from cloud vendors for a common infrastructure to maximize agility and backend resource utilization. Despite its alphanumeric acronym, however, C3 is not a cloud service like Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) or Simple Storage Service (S3). (In fact, Amazon itself uses open-source Xen as its hypervisor.) "We're not building a cloud to compete with the vendors who, presumably, would be using the same technologies," Levine says.
C3 is a four-phased set of software and services designed to give resource providers the tools they need to become players in the cloud-provider market. The first phase, says Levine, is XenServer Cloud Edition, an optimized version of the popular hypervisor that, in environments already running open-source Xen, will "wrap itself around that environment" to provide updated drivers, Windows support and other capabilities. In greenfield situations -- where a provider is building its cloud infrastructure anew -- XenServer Cloud Edition is a complete, cloud-ready virtual infrastructure.
The second phase, which comes to fruition concurrently, is application delivery with Citrix's NetScaler product. According to Levine, the reference architecture is to "seed the base" with XenServer, and add in NetScaler to load balance, speed access to backend VMs and dynamically provision workloads. Off the bat, Cloud Center will provide both of these products working in tandem.
"There's more to providing [cloud computing] than simply providing a flat virtual infrastructure," says James Staten, a principal analyst with Forrester Research. "You want to have workflows, you want SLAs, you want to be able to automate and move things around, and that's essentially what Citrix is bringing to the table -- a full suite of tools to do all of that."
Moving things around and workflows come in Phases 3 and 4, when users incorporate Citrix WANScaler and Citrix Workflow Studio, respectively. WANScaler lets users bridge enterprise and cloud computing environments, and Workflow Studio allows for the integration of business process and IT policy, thus creating a single automated, cohesive system. Says Levine: "I think the ... 'holy grail' of cloud computing is the interoperability and interchange of virtual machine images and data that live either on-premise or in the cloud, and the ability for one to manage that environment and deal with capacity and the movement of guests, of operating systems or virtual machines, from the enterprise out to the cloud and back to the enterprise."
Levine doesn't know when this hybrid computing model will become the norm, but he acknowledges "we're probably still a ways off." Right now, it's either/or, with start-ups renting cloud resources and enterprises continuing to build their own datacenters. The hybrid model Citrix envisions will start to take shape when IT administrators feel comfortable outsourcing some portion of their resources into the cloud, he says. The most likely candidates for outsourcing, he adds, are areas like disaster recovery and non-mission-critical, capacity-intensive applications like Exchange.
Citrix is rounding out Cloud Center with consumption-based pricing, which means that cloud providers will pay for their infrastructures the same way cloud customers pay for their services. "That sounds trite," Levine notes, "but it's a big change and something that cloud vendors are requiring of us in order to move into this market." Not offering a pay-per-use pricing model has been a stumbling block for vendors trying to get traction in this market, Levine adds.
Citrix Cloud Center partners include 3Tera, Softlayer and Skytap.
Huge Market, Small Investment
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