Citrix, Amazon partner to expand Amazon Web Services

Citrix announced it has inked a new deal Amazon that will see the companies working more closely to make their virtualization and cloud platforms play nicer with one another. What makes this partnership a bit easier to manage is the fact that both companies offer solutions built on top of their own variant of the open source Xen hypervisor technology. In other words, from a hypervisor standpoint, there isn’t a huge chasm to leap here.

The partnership calls for Citrix to provide engineering support to Amazon to help provide better optimization efforts for Citrix products and Windows applications running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It will also enhance interoperability between on-premise Citrix XenServer deployments and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

“Today’s news expands our relationship with Amazon Web Services to enhance features in Xen, helping to further the rapid adoption of cloud computing by enterprise customers,” said Simon Crosby, Citrix chief technology for its data center and cloud division. “This effort will also focus on furthering compatibility with AWS to give customers an enhanced experience when connecting their XenServer virtualized data centers.”

The goal is to make it a much easier and more seamless process to migrate workloads between the locally owned and controlled, private virtualized data center and the Amazon EC2 public cloud, and ultimately work toward making the hybrid cloud a reality.

This latest agreement is more than just a hypervisor compatibility enhancement discussion, as it also talks of enabling the Citrix XenServer management tools to go beyond the walls of the physical data center and reach up into the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Citrix said it would also work with Amazon to help better tune Microsoft Windows and its applications running on Amazon’s EC2 cloud environment. This makes perfect sense. As a longtime partner with Microsoft, Citrix engineers have a history of fine-tuning the Microsoft Windows operating system and making it stand up and dance in ways that even Microsoft couldn’t have imagined.

Amazon and Citrix also plan to collaborate on other key areas to help advance cloud solutions for the enterprise. These areas include such areas as disaster recovery, applications-on-demand, advanced security, and compliance.

In a Citrix blog post, Crosby attempted to provide more detail around what this partnership is all about:

Citrix has been working with Amazon for some time to ensure that XenApp and our networking products, such as NetScaler, Branch Repeater and their virtual appliance implementations (VPX), work well in scenarios where customers want to take advantage of cloud-bursting to scale out their Windows or web application delivery infrastructures — effectively permitting them to outsource their DMZ and the app delivery services to the cloud.

While talking about taking their partnership even further, Crosby also mentions the following:

1. Citrix and Amazon are both committed to running any VM from any hypervisor, whether Windows or Linux based, with unbeatable performance, pay-as-you-go pricing, and elastic scalability.
2. They are both committed to the continued enrichment of the infrastructure service fabric to meet the security, compliance, performance, and SLAs demanded by enterprises for app delivery from the cloud.
3. They will ensure unparalleled portability, security, and manageability of application workloads between private and public clouds.
4. They will ensure that AWS runs Windows as well as or better than your private cloud, enabling you to move more workloads to the cloud. sooner, and to maximize price/performance. Citrix has extensive experience in optimizing Windows workloads on XenServer and it’s natural for Citrix to be the right partner to help optimize these same applications on AWS.
5. They will continue to collaborate to optimize performance and portability for all workloads, focusing on security by design and open innovation.

While I have no doubts about Citrix’s zest for realizing its vision of the cloud, I am a bit leery of about the company being committed to running any VM from any hypervisor. Sure, it sounds great, but is it realistic? While Citrix does a fantastic job of working with Microsoft Hyper-V, I’m not so sure how much energy and effort Citrix engineers are going to put behind working with VMware and KVM hypervisors at the end of the day.

Still, with organizations holding back on moving to a public cloud or a hybrid cloud approach, these types of value-added cloud solutions are going to play a key role in convincing people to go this route.

The announcement sure looks good on paper, but so do hybrid and public cloud computing. The real question is when will any of this stuff become a reality, and how soon afterwards will folks line up to actually take full advantage of it?

This article, “Citrix, Amazon partner to expand Amazon Web Services,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.