SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Xen.org, the home of the open source Xen hypervisor, today formally announced the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative - a powerful new community-led effort to build on the growing leadership of the Xen hypervisor in today's cloud, and deliver a secure and proven open source infrastructure platform for the federated cloud services of tomorrow. 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.
"The Xen Cloud Platform raises the bar - going beyond the hypervisor to deliver a complete run-time virtual infrastructure platform product that virtualizes storage, server and network resources," said Mark Bowker, analyst, ESG. "This announcement aligns the Xen community around a common compatible product, increasing the opportunity for value-added offerings from all ISVs, while promising to run VMs from any hypervisor."
The low cost and rapid development benefits of the open source model, coupled with its proven security, performance and customizability, made Xen the hypervisor of choice for many cloud computing pioneers. The widespread adoption of Xen in today's most successful commercial cloud offerings led the community to formalize the Xen Cloud Platform to further accelerate this growth in an open, non-proprietary way. This initiative enables open source contributors and consumers to come together around a more focused effort to deliver a complete Xen-based infrastructure product that supports a wide variety of current and future cloud scenarios.
"The Xen Project has played a seminal role in enabling the creation and rapid adoption of virtualization," said Ian Pratt, creator of Xen and founder of Xen.org. "Today Xen is already the most widely used hypervisor in the service provider market and the community will be able to build on this momentum to develop a complete, open source, cloud-optimized Xen virtual infrastructure platform. Our goal is to empower providers to offer a rich set of services that will catalyze cloud adoption by the enterprise in a way that's open, accessible and non-proprietary."
A key focus of the XCP initiative will be to provide technology that permits easy interoperability between internal enterprise "private clouds" and leading external cloud platforms like Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Servers and GoGrid. The Xen Cloud Platform will accelerate the development of a wide variety of key technologies and standards that address this need in an open, non-proprietary way, including:
