introducing Citrix CloudPlatform, the first commercially supported cloud orchestration system based on Apache CloudStack. With the new commercial release, customers can quickly and easily evolve virtualized datacenter resources to automated, elastic, self-service IT delivery models using the same technologies on which the world’s most successful clouds are built.

Last month, Citrix announced the first building block of its aggressive cloud platform strategy by submitting its market-leading open source CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, home of the world’s most successful open source projects. With support from over 50 key ecosystem partners and universal approval from the Foundation’s committers, the Apache Software Foundation accepted CloudStack into its Incubator program.  Based on the technology from Apache CloudStack, Citrix CloudPlatform is now a key component of the Citrix cloud computing portfolio, providing customers with solutions 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. This new platform delivers a robust, proven, hypervisor-agnostic platform to help customers of all sizes build true Amazon-style clouds.

Since its introduction, Apache CloudStack has rapidly become the leading open source platform for building, managing and delivering highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds for a wide range of customers such as Datapipe, Edmunds.com, IDC Frontier, Nokia Research and LogicWorks. Building off of its success, Citrix CloudPlatform is designed to ensure organizations can build production cloud environments on an open source platform designed for economics, elasticity and scale – complete with commercial engagement and support from Citrix. New capabilities in Citrix CloudPlatform focus on performance, interoperability and advanced enterprise features that include:

• Built In Amazon API Compatibility – Cloud interoperability and portability is one of the top requirements for enterprises building clouds today. Citrix CloudPlatform will continue to integrate and extend compatibility for the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) into the core platform to achieve “proven Amazon compatibility.” With these integrations, customers will be able to build and deploy cloud applications across both Citrix CloudPlatform services and the Amazon Web Services public cloud using EC2-compatible tools.
• Software Defined Networking Enabled – Networks are a critical component of any large public or private cloud deployment.  Leveraging the innovation in new open networking standards, Citrix CloudPlatform delivers a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller that leverages the open virtual switch technology in XenServer® 6.0 to provide a scalable alternative to VLAN isolation, eliminating complexity and increasing networking performance and scale.
• Project Avalon Integrations – Project Avalon, also launched today at Synergy, will transform any Windows app or desktop into a cloud service delivered across any network to any device. Citrix CloudPlatform integrates support for large scale deployments of Project Avalon, providing the management and orchestration layer for the innovative Windows-as-a-Service and Desktop-as-a Service offering.

Citrix CloudPlatform already has more than 30,000 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. The CloudStack community also reached an important milestone, with the addition of its 60th partner to its quickly growing roster of well-known companies, with customers standing up over 100 new clouds a month on CloudStack.
 
Availability
Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack will be generally available in June.I