Citrix Cloud Center(C3)
Amazon announces VPC with support for Citrix C3 PDF 
Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen   
Thursday, 27 August 2009 14:04
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What is Amazon Web Services?

Since early 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has provided companies of all sizes with an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud. With AWS customers can requisition compute power, storage, and other services-gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as your business demands them. In AWS, customers pay only for what they use with no up-front commitments. The Amazon Web Services cloud is distributed, secure and resilient, providing reliability and massive scale. AWS includes a number of services such as EC2, S3, SimpleDB and others. Today AWS is making available their limited public beta for their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

What is EC2?

Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows customers to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides companies with complete control of the computing resources and lets customers run on Amazon's computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing companies to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing payment only for capacity used. EC2 is a key building block for VPC.

What is VPC?

Amazon is announcing a limited public beta of their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). For the last three years, AWS has provided companies of all sizes with on-demand, highly elastic and highly reliable technology resources in the cloud. As more and more enterprises leverage the cloud, they want a simple, seamless way to migrate their large and complex IT infrastructures to AWS, and to use the security and management controls that their IT teams already know. Amazon VPC aims to address this need —to allow any company to seamlessly connect their existing resources to the AWS cloud as if it were a part of their own datacenter. To read the press release[ follow this link|http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-web-services-announces-amazon-virtual-private-cloud-now-enterprises-can-seamlessly-connect-existing-it-infrastructures-to-aws-and-continue-to-use-their-own-security-and-management-tools-2009-08-26].

Using Amazon VPC, AWS customers can create an isolated set of AWS resources that they then access via an industry-standard encrypted IPsec Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection. Using API calls, users create their isolated network and then launch customer-addressed Amazon EC2 instances into that network. Users then create a secure VPN to bridge those AWS resources to their existing IT infrastructure. Cloud traffic bound for the Internet routes over the VPN where it is examined by the customer's existing security and networking technologies before heading to the public Internet. With Amazon VPC, customers can access their resources running in the AWS cloud as if these assets were running within their existing IT infrastructure.

What is Citrix's involvement?

Amazon is a top tier strategic partner for Citrix in the Cloud market. Over time, Amazon VPC will enable all our enterprise customers to seamlessly expand their Citrix infrastructures, starting today with XenApp, by adding highly secure and reliable on-demand resources from AWS as a natural extension of their current on-premises Citrix based applications. Citrix will be included in AMZN's VPC press release on August 26 with a quote from Frank Artale. Other companies quotes are Intuit, Computer Associates and Eli Lilly.Datacenter).

Do Citrix have an exclusive cloud relationship with Amazon?

No. While Amazon is the leader in the cloud space and thus provides us with a most important relationship, our partnership with them is not exclusive. Citrix is actively partnering with many other leading cloud vendors, hosting providers and IaaS vendors.

Is Amazon selling Citrix solutions?

No. While Amazon and Citrix endorse and promote each other's offerings, there is not a reselling relationship. Citrix customers need to bring their existing licenses to AWS, leaving our channel empowered to add value as their usually do.

Prior to today's announcement, did Citrix already have a relationship with Amazon?

Yes. EC2 is built on opensource Xen. In addition, Amazon is a large NetScaler customer. Our partnership was officially launched on 5/6/9, when Citrix and Amazon announced the Citrix C3 Lab (press release: http://citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=1690164 ). The Citrix C3 Lab was launched to run in EC2 (vs. VPC) and enables companies of all sizes to get started using Citrix technologies quickly in the Amazon EC2 environment. Since then, Citrix has been one of only nice "Amazon Featured Partners". Here is a link to our partnership: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/featured-partners/citrix/ . Today's announcement expands our alliance from EC2 into VPC.

Where can I learn more about the new Citrix scenarios for VPC?

The Citrix Community Website, has a dedicated section to our solutions in Amazon Web Services: http://community.citrix.com/display/cdn/Citrix+C3+Lab

What does this announcement mean to a Citrix customer?

Customers can more easily expand their Citrix environment into the Amazon cloud. Starting today, a Citrix customer can use the newly launched AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) within VPC (in addition to the already available Citrix C3 Lab AMIs within EC2), in conjunction with the blueprints, which provide technical guidance. Customers will need to bring their own licenses to use these AMIs for production, even though they should realize that VPC is currently in beta form by Amazon. To learn more about Amazon's limited public beta for VPC, customers will need to visit http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/.

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All the faces of cloud and the Citrix Cloud Computing story PDF 
Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen   
Friday, 14 August 2009 13:40
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Cloud is still not well understood. Indeed the very name suggests fogginess. This is why we see such a profusion of "what is cloud" presentations, all, or most, providing a very vendor-centric view. In the presentation below, I've attempted instead to provide a general overview of how cloud is perceived by different players, and (surprise, surprise) to position Citrix technologies with respect to the most general views of 'cloud'.

Cloud computing (for the IT professional at least) includes notions of Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Platform as a Service. These categories are well understood and largely accepted, but are imperfect. Very clearly, all can be applied to offerings from external providers as well as to operating models, or "patterns" within the enterprise. Furthermore, we're seeing a great deal of category leak at present, with SaaS offerings on IaaS, PaaS offerings that can be hosted as IaaS and offered as SaaS, etc, etc.

Citrix has various technologies that enable Infrastructure as a Service and this has been the focus of our C3 (Citrix Cloud Center) marketing to date. However Citrix has long been a leader in bringing the notions of Software as a Service to the enterprise. This is something we've been doing for over a decade with our WinFrame, MetaFrame and XenApp technology. It's the core notion of today's Citrix Delivery Center, now extended to desktop virtualization.

Here's an updated cloud computing deck, originally used at some of the Citrix iForum events (and posted here), that I recently presented as a keynote at the IT Architect Regional Conference in Malaysia (http://www.iasahome.org/web/malaysia/). Please let me know what you think.

Some other links on Citrix C3:

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Citrix C3 Lab in Amazon EC2 Enables the Cloud to Save You Time and Money Now PDF 
Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen   
Friday, 15 May 2009 09:40
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In the early days of virtualization most developers and IT Pro's would not trust deploying production workloads in Virtual Machines. However, as soon as it was apparent how easy it was to test apps and configurations plus prototype new environments prior to production, virtualization became a defacto standard for test and dev environments. Over time virtualization improved in performance, robustness and management to the point where IT is now comfortable deploying a significant portion of production workloads on Virtualized platforms.

Move the clock forward to today and Cloud based Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS ). Most companies are not ready to deploy their production environments to the Cloud, however every company spends a significant amount of time and resources for testing , evaluation and PoC's prior to deployment in production on premise or at a Colo. It turns out that IaaS is a great platform for test, dev and evaluations even if it may be early for enterprise production environments. Zero capital, rapid deployment, temporary workloads and elastic capacity are all attributes of IaaS that map directly to test and dev environments.

Citrix has now established the Citrix C3 Lab with Amazon Web Services to enable; PoC's, evaluations, demonstrations, testing, training and more. Pre-built Virtual Appliances available as AMI ( Amazon Machine Image ) templates are now available for XenApp, Citrix Secure Gateway and Access Gateway. In addition we are providing C3 ( Citrix Cloud Center ) Blueprints and a community site dedicated to provide " How to " descriptions, configuration guides, videos and forums to support the Lab. The time to build XenApp environments  can literally change from days to hours or even minutes utilizing C3 Labs. The expense of buying test servers for every new test or evaluation is changed from $ thousands up front to as low as 12.5 cents per hour. The time for racking, cabling and powering is  gone. The time to install Windows OS, then patches, then XenApp, then configure, then redo ( because you didn't read the manual ) is eliminated. You can literally be up and running in a little as 15 minutes. More complex environments can also be built with multiple AMI's networked together in almost unlimited configurations.

Going forward expect to see more C3 Blueprints, more Citrix products in AMI templates, and more suggested solutions to evaluate. We may also utilize the lab for tech previews or hosting research projects to gain customer insight and feedback. Stay tuned for more and give us some suggestions.

Saving significant time and money for test and dev just may be a leading indicator for how Clouds are adopted into IT production environments later.

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SaaS and the Cloud - How to deliver applications, Phase I PDF 
Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen   
Tuesday, 12 May 2009 18:35
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There was a webinar with Goldman Sachs last week and their most technically astute analysts were talking about the future of virtualization in relation to Public and Private Clouds as well as the ability to deliver next generation applications using Web 2.0 technology.  I posed the question to them, "What about the tens of thousands of applications that have been written in Windows that either can't or won't make the transition to 'webification'" (a cool term I dreamed up at the spur of the moment!).  The answer was predictable but unfortunately had been left out of the entire discussion until I brought it up.  The analyst responded, "Whoever figures out how to get those [Windows] apps into a SaaS model has a huge opportunity in the market today."

Well lucky for all of those ISVs who have written their code in Windows that Citrix has developed a way to bridge the gap between Cloud nirvana and Cloud reality. With this in mind any application that is currently available over Terminal Services can be deployed directly from the MSP or Enterprise in a SaaS model.  But what is promised by Cloud hype today for a seamless, simple and secure environment will take time to evolve. There will be three phases to the delivery of applications through the Cloud.  This journey will take anywhere from 5-10 years but there are elements that can be done today.  This evolution will be consistent with existing business practices in both the service provider (hosted applications space) and the Enterprise IT space.  In a phase I, the foundation by which ISVs, Service Providers and Enterprises look to deliver solutions is depicted in the illustration below.

 

First we need to understand that there will be two basic customers of the Cloud to deliver SaaS; the Managed Service Provider (MSP) and the Enterprise.  Small and Medium Business (SMB) customers look to MSPs to handle the complexities of application delivery, business continuity and IT management.  These MSPs are also often times ISVs in their own right, delivering their application over the Internet as a cost effective distribution mechanism.  What the Cloud means for the MSP in Phase I is a growth strategy for low cost CapEx.  MSPs will use the Cloud by extending their data center server farms and in some case the entire infrastructure depending on the complexity of the application.  The simpler the app, the easier it is to replicate in the Cloud.  Also,  it makes a great deal of sense for these service providers to use the Cloud for business continuity as the usage will be variable and cyclical in nature.. a great way to save costs.

Enterprises are skeptical of the Public Cloud as depicted in this illustration and will be looking for data center extensions but much more related to non mission critical applications that have little affect on the day-to-day running of the business.  Certain web sites, databases, and non business productivity apps are included in this set.  The core focus of this phase will be expansion and extension of the data center, not replacement.  Private Clouds will have to evolve first in the Enterprise in order for there to be any synergy in full extension of service into the Public Cloud.

The key element to either MSP or Enterprise use of the Public Cloud for Software delivery will be the ability to provide a seamless interface depicted in this illustration as the "Cloud Bridge".  In other words to fully accomplish data center extension, the administration of workloads and storage will indeed have to be extensions of the exsiting systems.  To do this, Cloud providers will have to enable administration consoles to integrate with the management of workloads in the Enterprise and MSP.  Without this capability, the cost of managing disparate systems will overshadow the cost savings of hard capital.  Use of the Public Cloud for computing will be limited without this functionality.

Further, in order for Cloud providers to be successful at extending data center functions, they will need to provide reference architectures for the MSP as well as the Enterprise for best practices and deliniate use cases based on these architectures.

Citrix technology allows workloads to be distributed over several data centers and in fact have been used this way for years.  This approach has mainly been used for remote delivery of applications and/or business continuity.  By extending the use of XenApp and XenDesktop into the Cloud, both MSPs and Enterprises can cut the cost of their data centers today and achieve higher reliability at a lower cost.

Third parties have developed solutions to provisioning of services such as this for the MSP.  Enterprises will need to work hand-in-hand with the Cloud provider to insure the seamless extension of their unique architectures and produce roadmaps for further use of the Public Cloud.  Citrix Provisioning Server and Workflow Studio will be essential in this seamless transformation as the Cloud evolves to be the "virtual" extension of these physical data centers to deliver Software as a Service.

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Citrix Expands Citrix C3 Cloud Computing Platform and Program PDF 
Written by Administrator   
Wednesday, 06 May 2009 21:57
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C3 Platform Now Enables Windows Applications and Desktops to Be Delivered as a Cloud Service; New Service Provider Program Adds Pay-as-You-Go Pricing

Citrix Synergy '09

LAS VEGAS--Today at Citrix Synergy™, the event where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet, Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) announced a variety of new offerings for its Citrix Cloud Center™ (Citrix C3) product family to further equip service providers with the infrastructure and product licensing needed to deliver successful clouds services to their customers. Following up to the initial debut of Citrix C3 last Fall, Citrix is now enhancing the C3 platform with the addition of Citrix® XenApp™ and Citrix® XenDesktop™, enabling service providers to deliver Windows applications and desktops as a service. Central to this added functionality is the new Citrix Service Provider (CSP) program which is designed specifically for service providers who provide hosted software services to end users. In addition, Citrix C3 has been updated to include new scalable, secure, multi-tenant virtual switch and application delivery controller capabilities. To further help customers gain experience with new cloud-based scenarios, Citrix is also unveiling a series of Citrix C3 Cloud Blueprints, which offer guidelines and best practices for testing virtualization, security and application services in a cloud environment. With these enhancements to the Citrix C3 platform and program – including the new Citrix C3 Lab based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) separately announced today – Citrix is providing an essential set of resources that help make cloud computing a reality for customers of all sizes.

“We have been extremely pleased to partner with Citrix to offer fast, reliable and secure cloud services for our customers,” said Alvin Kok, Chief, Alatum, Singapore Telecommunications Limited. “By leveraging Citrix C3, we have been able to bring tremendous cost savings and business values for enterprises, SMBs and government agencies alike, which are all great differentiators for us in this economic climate.”

Product Enhancements

The updates to the Citrix C3 product family enable service providers to create secure, highly performing, multi-tenant cloud infrastructure environments in a cost effective manner. New capabilities include:

  • Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop – The incorporation of these two products into Citrix C3 enable service providers to take their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings to a new level. With Citrix C3, service providers can now effectively deliver any Microsoft Windows applications in the Software as a Service (SaaS) model and even deliver Windows Desktops as a Service (DaaS).
  • The CSP program – The newest Citrix channel partner offering, the CSP program is designed specifically for service providers who provide hosted software services to end-user customers. The CSP program addresses the service provider market for offsite and multi-tenant hosting, where the end-user customer is not the licensee. The CSP program extends to service providers the “right to use” Citrix products as the underpinning of their delivery infrastructure and gives them the flexibility of a monthly “active subscriber” pricing and licensing model. Service providers always have access to the most current versions of Citrix products available in the program and only pay for actual end-user usage recorded during the previous calendar month.
  • Citrix NetScaler VPX – A virtual appliance version of Citrix® NetScaler® (see today’s separate announcement), the new Citrix NetScaler VPX will be added to Citrix C3, enabling service providers to run multiple NetScaler instances simultaneously and provide true, cost-effective multi-tenancy web application delivery. In addition, service providers will be able to ensure the best application performance and most reliable service delivery by “cloud balancing,” which allows load balancing across multiple cloud infrastructures.
  • Citrix XenServer – One of the key components of Citrix C3, XenServer™ will soon be enhanced with a new distributed virtual switch add-on to enable secure, multi-tenant, highly scalable public clouds. The switch will partition network traffic on a per-application basis, with resource and security guarantees, and offer full visibility into and control over inter-VM traffic both within a server and virtual network overlay.

Cloud-Proven Resources for SMBs and the Enterprise

As cloud computing continues to ride the hype/awareness cycle, corporations of all sizes are contemplating how to incorporate the cloud into their long range plans from both technology and business process perspectives. To answer these needs, Citrix is now providing Citrix C3 Lab Blueprints, giving IT professionals a set of common scenarios to test and prototype application compatibility, stage applications, as well as gain experience in datacenter-cloud interactions. The Citrix C3 Lab Blueprints provide architectural overviews, deployment guides, tips and tricks and discussion forums.

Availability

Citrix C3, with XenApp and XenDesktop, is available today. The Citrix Service Provider Program will be effective starting June 1, 2009. A technological preview of NetScaler VPX will be available for free download from Citrix.com on May 18, 2009. A technological preview of XenServer virtual switch for XenServer 5.5 will be available for free download from Citrix.com on June 1, 2009. Access to the Citrix C3 Lab and Citrix C3 Lab Blueprints is available today – to get started please visit http://community.citrix.com/display/cdn/Citrix+C3+Lab.

About Citrix C3

The Citrix Cloud Center (C3) is an integrated portfolio of Citrix delivery infrastructure products packaged and marketed to the cloud service provider market. C3 integrates cloud proven virtualization and networking products that power many of today’s largest Internet and Web service providers. Citrix C3 is designed to give cloud providers a complete set of service delivery infrastructure building blocks for hosting, managing and delivering cloud-based computing services. C3 includes a reference architecture that combines the individual capabilities of several Citrix product lines to offer a powerful, dynamic, secure and highly available service-based infrastructure ideally suited to large-scale, on-demand delivery of both IT infrastructure and application services.

About Citrix Synergy 2009

Born as a user conference more than 10 years ago, Citrix Synergy has been completely reconceived as the industry’s premier thought leadership event where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet. Citrix Synergy combines several events into one registration, including Virtualization Congress, Network World Live, Geek Speak Live and the Citrix iForum User Conference. Attendees can benefit by attending a single track, or by combining sessions from various tracks to custom-build a conference to suit their individual needs. With insights from a wide range of industry luminaries, solutions from leading vendors, and shared experiences from customers, attendees will see a quick return on their investment. More information is available on the Citrix Synergy website.

About Citrix Systems, Inc.

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is the leading provider of virtualization, networking and software-as-a-service technologies for more than 230,000 organizations worldwide. Its Citrix Delivery Center™, Citrix Cloud Center (C3) and Citrix Online Services product families radically simplify computing for millions of users, delivering applications as an on-demand service to any user, in any location on any device. Citrix customers include the world’s largest Internet companies, 99 percent of Fortune Global 500 enterprises, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers worldwide. Citrix partners with over 10,000 companies worldwide in more than 100 countries. Founded in 1989, annual revenue in 2008 was $1.6 billion.

For Citrix Investors

This release contains forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The forward-looking statements in this release do not constitute guarantees of future performance. Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks associated with revenue growth and recognition of revenue, products, their development and distribution, product demand and pipeline, economic and competitive factors, the Company’s key strategic relationships, acquisition and related integration risks as well as other risks detailed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Citrix assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release or with respect to the announcements described herein.

Citrix®, Citrix Cloud Center™, Citrix Delivery Center™, NetScaler®, XenApp™, XenDesktop™ and XenServer™ are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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