Cyber Threats
Enterprise-Grade Open Source Clouds: Citrix, OpenStack
At Synergy, Citrix announced “Project Olympus,” making open source clouds more viable for enterprises. Before, cloud providers focused on open source cloud infrastructure while enterprises made more conservative choices about support contracts.
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Today at Synergy, Citrix announced “Project Olympus,” effectively making open source clouds a more viable option for enterprises. In the past, it was cloud providers like Rackspace who tended to focus on open source cloud infrastructure, while enterprises tended to make more conservative choices where support contracts were available.
The new support from Citrix, along with about 60 other supporting commercial hardware and software vendors, should go a long way towards helping enterprises see OpenStack as an enterprise-grade choice of cloud infrastructure. Enterprises can now get a Citrix-certified version of OpenStack and a cloud-optimized version of XenServer, and Dell is providing a reference server architecture.
There are a couple reasons enterprises – or service providers – can benefit from using OpenStack and Project Olympus. The first is that Infrastructure as a Service clouds built on the same architecture and technology as public clouds are likely to scale very well and have reasonable operational costs. The second reason is that a forward-looking enterprise might choose OpenStack and Project Olympus is that common cloud infrastructure makes for very simple migration – or bursting on demand – from private clouds to public clouds. It’s also very cool that Rackspace Cloud Builders can design and build a private cloud for an enterprise using the OpenStack project with Project Olympus.
It’s particularly interesting that Citrix’s Project Olympus will also support Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, just as Citrix does with its XenDesktop offering. (Years ago, I was on the Citrix team that helped to launch XenDesktop’s predecessor that also had cross-platform support. Awesome to see that strategy evolving and working seamlessly with new versions of two other Citrix products I used to product manage, the NetScaler Cloud Gateway and NetScaler Cloud Bridge! )
I’m also excited that Trend Micro’s market-leading server security product, Deep Security, works to protect cloud servers deployed on OpenStack with Project Olympus, providing firewall, HIPS, virtual patching, antivirus, file integrity monitoring, and log inspection. Like Citrix’s Project Olympus, Deep Security also supports Hyper-V and vSphere, allowing for a single interface to manage security across multiple private cloud infrastructure providers. And our Secure Cloud product (or SaaS offering) remains the most secure way to manage encryption keys in public and private clouds today, including those based on OpenStack.
The new Project Olympus announcement from Citrix represents a level of cooperation between hardware, software, and service providers that is good for the entire cloud industry, and I am glad that we are able to protect all kinds of clouds – including Citrix & OpenStack ones – from malicious threats.
Ed. note: Trend Micro would like to know what you think about this. We enthusiastically invite your comments and we will read every one of them. For very detailed information:
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