Xen.org, the home of open source Xen hypervisor, has launched a new Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative, to provide a technology that permits interoperability between internal enterprise private clouds and external cloud platforms like Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Servers and GoGrid.
According to Xen.org, the new platform is expected to enhance the use of cloud infrastructure for enterprise customers by providing open source virtual infrastructure technology that allows service providers to deliver secure, customisable, multi-tenant cloud services that work with virtualised application workloads that customers already run in their internal datacentres and private clouds, without locking them into any particular vendor.
Ian Pratt, creator of Xen and founder of Xen.org, said: “Our goal is to empower providers to offer a rich set of services that will catalyse cloud adoption by the enterprise in a way that’s open, accessible and non-proprietary.”
The Xen Cloud Platform will accelerate the development of a variety of key technologies and standards including: interoperability across disparate virtualisation platforms, support for new and existing applications, federated computing capacity, support for DMTF standards for open management of virtual infrastructures, and virtual networking capabilities.
The company said that the new platform will address the needs of cloud providers by combining the isolation and multi-tenancy capabilities of the Xen hypervisor with enhanced security, storage and network virtualisation technologies to offer a set of virtual infrastructure cloud services.
According to Xen.org, the new platform will combine the mobility and openness attributes of the Xen virtualisation platform with storage, security and network virtualisation technologies already under development as part of Xen.org. This would not only address cloud provider requirements around security and isolation, but is also expected to meet user requirements for security, availability, performance, isolation and manage between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures.
Peter Levine, senior vice president and general manager of datacenter and cloud division at Citrix Systems, said: “As a Xen.org advisory board member and frequent contributor, Citrix fully supports this expansion in scope for the Xen community. Starting with the core Xen platform five years ago, the Xen Client Initiative (XCI) in 2008 and now the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative, the open source value proposition of reliability, security, scalability and unbeatable economics now extends from the desktop to the datacentre and cloud.”
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