Citrix heads for clouds, HA with XenServer 5

Supports more disk arrays and their software

Citrix is not budging on prices yet, despite Microsoft's moves. XenServer 5 costs the same as the previous version. XenServer Express is a freebie version that gives the basic hypervisor and XenCenter management tool; XenServer Standard adds resource pools, and costs $900 ($990 outside the U.S.) for every four server sockets in a machine; XenServer Enterprise adds XenMotion (which allows running VMs to be teleported around the network) and HA clustering and disaster recovery, and costs $3,000 ($3,300 outside the States); and XenServer Platinum adds dynamic workload provisioning and costs $5,000 ($5,500 if you are not American).

What's really new this week - for loosely defined uses of the word new - is a stack of software called Citrix Cloud Center, or C3 for short. Like every other server and system software vendor, Citrix has caught the Web 2.0, SaaS, Web 3.0, cloud computing, and related buzzword viruses. The Citrix Cloud Center stack brings together a bunch of existing Citrix products and the new XenServer 5 to create an integrated cloud computing management tool. (Well, so Roussain says. The market will decide, if cloud computing becomes a market that is somehow distinct from what we used to just call "distributed computing.") The C3 stack includes NetScaler, a Web traffic acceleration tool that Citrix has been selling for years, and which, Roussain says, 75 per cent of end users on the internet go through each day. The stack also has a related program called WANScaler, which shapes and manages network traffic, and Citrix Workflow Studio, which orchestrates how XenServer VMs are deployed on a cluster of computers and how NetScaler and WANScaler cache data and shape traffic.

The C3 software includes two new variants of the XenServer hypervisor. XenServer Cloud Edition is functionally the same as XenServer 5, but instead of being priced based on a four-socket server configuration, the cost will be based on the number of virtual machines it manages. It is basically the same as XenServer 5 Platinum Edition. There will also be an Open Edition, which includes the open source Xen hypervisor, optimized I/O subsystems and drivers, support for Windows guests (with their own optimizations), and a software development kit. (Interestingly, the open source Xen hypervisor is underneath the EC2 compute utility created by Amazon, which does not use the commercial XenServer products for this.)

For now, Citrix is looking pretty eagerly at clouding infrastructure workloads out there in the commercial data centers of the world. "There is a land grab right now in the infrastructure part of the market, and we need to get our products out there," says Roussain. The C3 stack is also suitable for SaaS and other kinds of Web applications, too, obviously.

Pricing on the C3 stack has not yet been announced, but presumably there is a discount for bundling. Roussain says that XenServer Cloud Edition will also have a revenue sharing component in its pricing - meaning if you make dough using it, you owe Citrix some of that dough - but the specifics are not yet available. IBM has been doing revenue sharing pricing on services engagements for years, so it stands to reason that software vendors want a piece of the recurring revenue stream they help to create. ®