Citrix optimises XenServer for AWS cloud

Citrix and Amazon Web Services are working together to optimise XenServer virtualisation and some Windows software for the Amazon cloud.

The partners will enhance interoperability between on-premise XenServer deployments and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. They will also optimise Windows workloads running on the XenServer platform for the AWS cloud, Citrix announced on Thursday.

Citrix and Amazon Web Services have announced an extension of their partnership Photo credit: Coolcaesar/Wikimedia Commons

"Today's news expands our relationship with Amazon Web Services to enhance features in Xen," said Simon Crosby, Citrix's chief technology officer for its datacentre and cloud division, in a statement. "This effort will also focus on furthering compatibility with AWS to give customers an enhanced experience when connecting their XenServer-virtualised datacentres."

The move is designed to make it easier to migrate workloads between datacentres and the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), according to Citrix, which specialises in virtualisation, software-as-a-service and networking products.

"We are excited to extend our relationship with Citrix to bring its extensive engineering talent to streamline Citrix and Windows applications running on Amazon Web Services," said Terry Wise, director of partner relations at AWS, in the Citrix statement.

XenServer is based on Xen, a Type 1 hypervisor that competes with VMware's ESX and Microsoft's Hyper-V. Citrix acquired Xen creator XenSource in 2007.

In a blog post published alongside the announcement, Crosby compared Citrix's system with VMware's vCloud, which he characterised as a "single-vendor, closed solution that... is not interoperable or compatible with other vendors".

Crosby believes the announcement illustrates AWS's commitment to the enterprise and said that the collaboration means Citrix "will ensure unparalleled portability, security and manageability of application workloads between private and public clouds".

Year-end results

Separately on Wednesday, Citrix announced its year-end results. For the fourth quarter, it reported revenue of $530m (£332m), up 17 percent on the same period in 2009. For the whole of 2010, the Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based company reported revenue of $1.87bn, compared with $1.61bn in the previous year, up 16 percent.

For the whole year, the company's technical services revenue, which comes from consulting, education and technical support, was up 31 percent on 2009. Looking forward to 2011, the company anticipates it will take in revenue of $2.10bn to $2.14bn.