Xen Cloud Platform Initiative

By Dawn M. Foster (55 posts) on September 9, 2009 at 8:00 am

Xen.org recently announced the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative, a community effort that provides an open source platform for federated cloud services. According to their press release, "The Xen Cloud Platform will accelerate the use of cloud infrastructure for enterprise customers by providing open source virtual infrastructure technology that makes it easy for service providers to deliver secure, customizable, multi-tenant cloud services that work seamlessly with the virtualized application workloads customers are already running in their internal datacenters and private clouds, without locking them into any particular vendor."

James Staten from Forrester Research sees this as a positive step:

"Now Xen.org is delivering a complete product that IaaS clouds can more easily deploy, Linux distributions can deliver and that end customers can install knowing that storage, deployment, monitoring, reporting, policy-based automation and most other management tasks are consistently executed. This also makes Xen plus Eucalyptus a more complete cloud-in-a-box, open source solution.

Clearly this move benefits Citrix’ aims as well. The company carrying the Xen.org flag will be contributing all its cloud-relevant technologies to this open source project including its StorageLink, virtual switch, virtual appliance, and VMware-to-Xen VM conversion (Project Kensho) technologies. Many early IaaS cloud leaders have their own solutions in these areas but are likely to welcome this IP so they don’t have to maintain their unique solutions long term.

Hopefully with this move the days of cloud incompatibility, at least between Xen-based clouds, will come to an end just a bit sooner."

With this announcement, the buzz surrounding open source software in the cloud continues. My last post on open source in the cloud talked about the VMware acquisition of SpringSource, and many people are saying that the Xen announcement is designed to take on VMware. The way I see it, competition is good for the users, so I hope to see more of these announcements of innovative new open source solutions for the cloud.

Categories: Open Source, Virtualization

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