Citrix takes OpenStack commercial with Project Olympus

Citrix has teamed up with Dell and Rackspace to offer a cloud building service based around the OpenStack reference design.

Project Olympus consists of a Citrix-certified version of the OpenStack code, coupled with a cloud-optimised version of its XenServer software.

Rackspace has already signed up to provide support for systems developed under Project Olympus, and Dell will create a range of PowerEdge C servers based around Intel processors for hardware provisioning.

"The key behind all this is OpenStack," said Lew Mooreman, chief strategy officer at Rackspace. "There are now over 70 partners involved and we've started a movement. It's one of the fastest growing open source groups."

Citrix chief executive Mark Templeton outlined the plan during his keynote at the Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco. Project Olympus will be fully interoperable with existing Citrix software, as well as with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

"The relationship between cloud providers has given us insights on how to move forward," he said. "We also know we can partner with the world's biggest and best suppliers."

The commercial rollout of Project Olympus will come in the second half of the year, but Citrix has begun an early access programme for companies interested in getting a head start. Members will get access to Project Olympus beta code free of charge.

The OpenStack project began last year after 20 members, including Nasa, Rackspace and Dell, got together to build an open source reference architecture for cloud deployment.

Citrix's move is the first to take the code commercial, but the company has the support of other key partners.

"Dell has been a part of the OpenStack initiative since the beginning," said John Igoe, executive director of development engineering at Dell.

"By providing cloud-enabled versions of Xen and XenServer, Citrix is augmenting and strengthening OpenStack, helping drive new solutions that make it easier to accelerate virtualisation and cloud deployments alike.

"This is just the first step. Dell, Rackspace and Citrix will continue collaborating closely to drive innovative cloud offerings and solutions."