Citrix Cloud Center (C3) Released

I got a press release from Citrix a few days ago and it provides the details of a conversation I had with Peter Levine last week. I was surprised to learn that 75% of all Internet user’s traffic passes across NetScaler products. Couple that with Xen being the hypervisor of choice for many of the cloud service providers like Amazon.com and it seems a natural idea for Citrix to package their products together in a suite. Now there is. Citrix announces Citrix Cloud Center (C3).

“Citrix is an established leader in Software as a Service (SaaS), eCommerce and Web 2.0 clouds,” said Wes Wasson, CMO, Citrix Systems. “NetScaler is the web application delivery controller of choice for most of the world’s largest consumer websites, delivering web applications to an estimated 75 percent of all Internet users each day, and Citrix Online – under our GoTo brand – delivers more than 100 million online collaboration sessions each year.  In addition, Xen powers the world’s largest virtualized IT infrastructure clouds.”

Citrix has all the pieces defined and where they fit into the cloud solution:

“Platform – XenServer Cloud Edition: Cloud Edition is available in the XenServer virtual infrastructure package and as a highly optimized, secure and compact Linux distribution with an open, extensible system architecture that offers open source Xen clouds the full benefits of XenServer’s industry leading support for Windows, and virtual machine compatibility with Microsoft Hyper-V.

Delivery – Citrix NetScaler: Through a rich policy and workflow based interface, Citrix NetScaler has the ability to continually optimize application performance, including dynamically scaling the number of VMs or servers in response to changing workload demands and infrastructure availability, automatically redirecting traffic to alternate capacity in the event of faults, and global load balancing.

Bridge – Citrix WANScaler:  Bridging enterprise to cloud – addresses need to connect premise apps/infrastructure with the big cloud.

Orchestration – Citrix Workflow Studio: Tying it all together, Citrix Workflow Studio provides a rich orchestration and execution capability that allows the different products in the portfolio to be dynamically controlled and automated, and integrated with customer business and IT policy.  Workflow Studio allows customers to control their infrastructure dynamically – integrating previously disconnected processes and products into a single powerful, orchestrated and cohesive system. Workflow Studio also makes it easy for customers to integrate Citrix solutions with third-party products to automate end-to-end application delivery processes. “

Citrix is going to have a consumption- based pricing model to fit in with the Cloud delivery model.