Xen Project Launches New Open Cloud Initiative

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:    * Broad interoperability across disparate virtualization platforms - Through standards such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Open Virtualization Format (OVF), virtual appliances will be packaged in a hypervisor-independent format for easy transport between internal and external clouds with no proprietary vendor lock-in.
    * Support for new and existing applications - Existing applications currently running in enterprise datacenters will be enabled to run in Xen-based cloud platforms without modification. This flexibility will allow users to choose where each application should run based on business needs rather than limitations of the technology or proprietary requirements of their current virtualization or cloud vendor.
    * Federated computing capacity - With federated private and public clouds, the process of moving application workloads between virtual datacenters and disparate cloud service providers will be simplified.
    * Standardized virtualization management - Support for DMTF standards will allow complete open management of virtual infrastructures.
    * Rich virtual networking capabilities - A powerful open virtual switch will make it easy for cloud providers to add sophisticated network service offerings, including per-tenant network management, intrusion detection, firewalling, routing, and load balancing.
    * Cloud-scale virtual storage infrastructures - Advanced storage features required by enterprise workloads will enable virtual machines and their physical storage to be widely separated without disrupting application performance.

"Rackspace is very excited about the direction and scope of the Xen Cloud Platform," said Lew Moorman, president and chief strategy officer, Rackspace. "We have built our Cloud Servers offering on the Xen platform and are experiencing strong customer interest in this new model of hosting. The cloud will not only reduce the cost of computing but also provide instantaneous access enabling customers to improve the speed of business. It is very exciting and encouraging to see Xen.org put the full weight of the community behind the development of a cloud platform."

The Xen Cloud 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 virtualization technologies to offer a rich set of virtual infrastructure cloud services. The platform will also address user requirements for security, availability, performance and isolation across both private and public clouds. The project will not attempt to develop new, independent management and orchestration offerings since this is an area with existing rich offerings and active ongoing development in the community, including open source options from the Eucalyptus Project and OpenNebula.org, as well as solutions from cloud provider and commercial virtualization vendors.

The Xen Cloud Platform will combine the mobility and openness attributes of the Xen virtualization platform with innovative storage, security and network virtualization technologies already under development as part of Xen.org. As a result, the new platform will not only address cloud provider requirements around security and isolation, but will also meet next-generation user requirements for security, availability, performance, isolation and manage between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures.