Citrix aims for VMware, Amazon with new cloud strategy

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Citrix Tuesday updated its cloud computing strategy, saying that its platform – which is based off the Apache CloudStack project – can span both private on-premises deployments and public clouds and is the only one in the market that takes an application-centric approach to architecting clouds.

Citrix officials say that the company’s chief competitors, VMware and Amazon Web Services, “pigeon-hole” users into architecting clouds a certain way. VMware is ideal for virtualized legacy applications, but not new, cloud-native apps, Citrix says. AWS, on the other hand, is perfect for these new apps that were born to run in the cloud, but not legacy applications. Citrix’s cloud platform, by being “application-centric” caters to both legacy and new-age apps, says Krishna Subramanian, vice president of marketing for Citrix’s cloud platform…

Citrix’s cloud platform is built on Apache CloudStack – an open source project the company spun out of work in the OpenStack community. Unlike the OpenStack backers though, the project is more closely aligned to AWS APIs. The newest version of Citrix’s cloud platform lets customers set up regions and zones, similarly to how AWS is architected. Customers have the ability to control policies for each of these zones. So, for example if legacy bare-metal apps are running in one zone, it will use a certain architecture. If cloud-native apps are running on virtualized servers in another zone, they can have different characteristics. Elastic block storage spans all regions…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/092413-citrix-cloud-274138.html