Competitor Citrix releases cloud products at VMware’s VMworld 2008

Citrix Systems Inc. is hardly shy about its presence at VMworld 2008, an event hosted by its major competitor, VMware Inc. “Citrix is providing virtualization software customers with a choice where before the options were limited,” said Matt Fairbanks, Citrix VP of product marketing. Citrix will make two releases at the event this week. 

The first is XenServer 5, which acts as a platform for the second release, Citrix Cloud Center (C3). XenServer 5, or XenServer Cloud Edition, is an upgrade from previous versions of XenServer and will feature improved storage, disaster recovery, availability, performance and guest operating system support. It includes a feature called metadata tagging which identifies and categorizes individual virtual machines for easy virtual organization and management. It also offers expanded its application support to allow “hardware agnosticism,” said Fairbanks. 

Citrix Cloud Center is a family of products that works together with XenServer5 to help software service providers deliver applications to end users in a cloudlike infrastructure.  “Cloud computing is a new way of thinking about software,” said Fairbanks. “These products provide high-quality management and energy savings in the move to Web 2.0, 3.0, and Software as a Service.” Both products are part the Citrix Delivery Center line and are designed to help administrators run more servers on the same amount of hardware. Citrix Delivery Center includes as its core products XenServer, XenDesktop, XenApp and NetScaler.