Citrix has announced that NetScaler, the leading networking solution from Citrix, is now certified to run on the Mirantis OpenStack distribution. This marks the first integration that Citrix has made with an OpenStack distribution for Citrix technologies. The cross-certification of NetScaler comes as part of the Mirantis Unlocked partner program, which enables both companies to work together to provide interoperability, enterprise readiness and best of breed technologies for enterprise customers. The joint solution gives customers access to a broader portfolio of products to dramatically increase performance and scale for Mirantis OpenStack deployments. In addition, Mirantis will work with Citrix to integrate the deployment of XenServer, the company’s commercial virtualization platform based on the open-source Xen Project Hypervisor, through the OpenStack Fuel installer, which dramatically simplifies and accelerates the deployment of Mirantis OpenStack and core technologies to deploy cloud infrastructure. Citrix will also cross-certify XenServer with Mirantis OpenStack later this year.

Customers are increasingly faced with the challenge of scaling their OpenStack deployments and looking for production-grade infrastructure that supports the demands of their business. NetScaler and XenServer solutions from Citrix are used as core infrastructure for some of the largest cloud infrastructure providers worldwide, and this announcement brings the power of these products to customers choosing to build their clouds on OpenStack. With the integration with Mirantis OpenStack, customers will have access to leading industry-proven software defined datacenter products to deploy and scale their deployments.

Citrix NetScaler Control Center has been specifically designed to natively integrate with OpenStack and is certified to work with Mirantis OpenStack today. NetScaler today offers the broadest choice of form factors – from hardware to virtual appliances – and complex deployment methods including clustering deployments for a single management plane. NetScaler Control Center allows the full range of deployment methods natively integrated with OpenStack. Customers can now deploy complex workloads on their clouds, through the use native OpenStack APIs to drive Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS), using the rich ADC capabilities of NetScaler for workload availability, security, scalability, and performance. Through the combination of OpenStack and NetScaler with Tri-Scale technology for scaling up, in and out, clouds are able to provide elasticity across all aspects of their infrastructure.

XenServer is a crucial piece of this cloud infrastructure, running mission-critical workloads for some of the world’s largest communication service providers, cloud service providers and enterprises. XenServer offers a full 64-bit kernel architecture that allows customers to take advantage of the latest hardware and OS platforms, and supports enterprise-grade networking, storage and workload management. With its next-generation architecture supporting both enterprise-grade and carrier-grade features, XenServer is the most comprehensive, cost-effective and open virtualization platform choice for enterprises and service providers. Citrix recently announced XenServer 6.5 SP1 which features increased scalability, improved 3D graphics acceleration and management of Docker containers.

 

CloudOps has been building and operating clouds for service providers and enterprises with Citrix technology including Netscaler and XenServer since 2008, including the regional Canadian cloud IaaS “cloud.ca” With market demand for OpenStack growing fast, CloudOps has partnered with Mirantis, endorsing their “pure play OpenStack” focus.