Citrix optimises XenServer for the OpenStack cloud

Project Olympus, an infrastructure platform engineered by Citrix, blends the OpenStack cloud framework with a cloud-tweaked version of Citrix XenServer.

Announced on Wednesday at Citrix Synergy, Project Olympus will be useful for public cloud providers and enterprises keen to build their own private clouds, according to Citrix.

"Public clouds like Amazon and Rackspace have set the bar for how real clouds should be built, yet many vendors want to force-fit the cloud into existing server virtualisation architecture, giving customers more of an imitation cloud," Sameer Dholakia, vice president of product marketing for Citrix's datacentre and cloud division, said in a statement.

"Citrix believes it is time to leverage the open-source community to bring cloud to a new level of innovation with a solution that brings the open, elastic, scale-out infrastructures of leading [infrastructure-as-a-service] clouds to private clouds," he added.

OpenStack is an open-source framework for building the compute and storage elements of infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. It has received broad backing from the industry, with over 60 development partners including Rackspace, Nasa, Canonical and Citrix.

Rackspace and Dell are also supporting the Project Olympus scheme. Dell plans to provide software and a reference architecture for its PowerEdge C-servers for members of the Project Olympus early access program. Rackspace hopes to offer deployment services.

Anyone can sign up for the Project Olympus early access program. Once accepted, they will be able to test out the beta software free of charge. Project Olympus will launch "later this year," Citrix said, without giving a specific date.