Citrix, Carpathia Launch XenServer Cloud Service

Carpathia Hosting and Citrix Systems have combined resources to offer a XenServer-based set of cloud services, called Carpathia InstantOn. Such services are likely to appeal to heavy users of Citrix XenServer hypervisor or Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, since both use a shared VHD virtual machine file format which would lend itself to export to a XenServer based cloud. InstantOn is one of the first cloud offerings to be based on XenServer.

Amazon's EC2 is based on a variation of the open source Xen hypervisor known as Amazon Machine Images. The AT&T and Verizon clouds are based on working with VMware ESX Server virtual machines, as are Rackspace and other suppliers.

The nature of the virtual machine format a cloud service is prepared to work with determines who is most likely to find it easy to use. In some cases, customers will want to move workloads already running in their data centers out into the cloud. Doing so on short notice is much easier if they don't need to undergo a virtual machine format conversion first.

Carpathia CTO Jon Greaves said in the recent announcement that the Capathia cloud offering will be suitable for workloads designed to run in the public cloud, or for more secure private cloud-type operations. "Our focus has been delivering robust public and private cloud solutions for production-ready applications," he said.

The following will be made available through InstantOn, accessed through CarpathiaHost.net's E3 Portal:

• On-demand computing services for virtual machines, including connections to dedicated or single-tenant infrastructures. Most public clouds invoke multi-tenant infrastructures, putting many customers side-by-side on the same physical servers.
• Virtual networking that can take advantage of Citrix Systems Netscaler VPX, which allows Web applications to rapidly scale up to growing traffic demand.
• Virtual storage in the form of object or block storage that can be shared by a single customer's multiple virtual machines.