GigaSpaces Leverages Citrix OpenCloud to Deliver Flexible and Open PaaS Solution

NEW YORK and BETHESDA, Maryland, April 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- GigaSpaces today announced they are collaborating with Citrix (http://www.gigaspaces.com/citrix) to provide an open, scalable platform for the development of enterprise cloud applications. GigaSpaces will leverage Citrix OpenCloud (http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=1681633&ntref=prod_top) to offer a truly open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that will enable developers to use any hypervisor, development language, and runtime of their choosing - including Java, .Net, PHP, and Spring - to develop and scale applications for even the largest clouds. As a result, businesses can fully leverage their existing investments while benefitting from the economics and elasticity the cloud provides.

Today's news builds on the October 2010 announcement ( http://www.gigaspaces.com/content/gigaspaces-integrates-citrix-opencloud-platform-ease-creation-elastic-data-center-environmen) from the two companies highlighting the integration between Citrix(R) NetScaler(R), (http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=21679&ntref=prod_top) Citrix(R) XenServer(R) (http://www.citrix.com/xenserver) - both part of the Citrix OpenCloud solution - and GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) (http://www.gigaspaces.com/xap). The integration addressed the need for seamless infrastructure with application scalability and elasticity. Building on this effort, GigaSpaces has joined the OpenStack(TM) Community (http://www.openstack.org/community/) - of which Citrix is a founding member - whose goal is to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. Members of the OpenStack project have already made the open cloud a reality on the infrastructure layer with support for multiple hypervisors and open Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms. GigaSpaces wants to extend the openness and flexibility of OpenStack to the application platform layer, enabling enterprise customers to choose a cost-effective cloud solution that will not only allow them to automatically scale to meet the demands of employees and customers, but also evolve with their business needs and ensure that they are not locked in to a long-term solution.

Facts and Highlights

The GigaSpaces solution built on OpenStack will provide the following benefits:

- Openness: An enterprise-grade hybrid cloud stack solution that includes OpenStack-based IaaS and PaaS and is open to a wide variety of applications, including those based on Spring, Java, .Net, and other non-Java platforms.

- Flexibility: Develop applications with a choice of application stacks (Tomcat, MySQL, NoSQL, Hadoop, Ruby, etc.) and handle provisioning, elasticity, multi-tenancy, continuous high availability, and monitoring of those services in a consistent way across the stack.

- Integration: By leveraging the Citrix OpenCloud solution GigaSpaces will provide tighter integration between the platform and the infrastructure layers to up-level services offered through OpenStack clouds.

- Scalability: Enterprises can use GigaSpaces as the enterprise PaaS layer specifically geared for big-data analytics, e-commerce, and financial applications.

- SaaS-Enablement: Ability for SaaS ISVs to SaaS-enable applications while delivering the same solution off- and on-premises.

Quotes

"It's great to see GigaSpaces and Citrix innovating on top of the OpenStack platform to provide key capabilities like Platform-as-a-Service," said Mark Collier, VP of Marketing and Business Development for Rackspace. "These community members are advancing the project by allowing developers to build and scale applications for large-scale OpenStack clouds."

"GigaSpaces is bringing the open cloud to new heights with their contribution to OpenStack," said Gordon Mangione, VP of Business Development, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix. "By raising the open cloud to the app development level, enterprises can leverage their existing knowledge and development tools while ensuring their cloud strategy will automatically scale with their business. And because GigaSpaces is using Citrix technology - which runs the largest clouds in the world and touches 75 percent of all Internet users daily - customers can be assured their clouds will scale on a world-class level."

"The lack of open standards for cloud platforms and infrastructure poses a huge risk to the industry. The situation today is that vendors offer closed, proprietary integration solutions that lock companies into long-term, expensive associations," says Adi Paz, EVP Marketing and Business Development at GigaSpaces. "OpenStack provides a perfect framework for bringing openness to the cloud, and increasing freedom of choice, through member collaboration at different layers of the stack. That is why we are so pleased to be working in concert with companies such as Citrix and Rackspace to provide openness at the application platform layer, and we look forward to welcoming additional players to this alliance."

Availability

GigaSpaces intends to announce its first code contribution at the OpenStack Design Summit ( http://www.openstack.org/blog/2011/03/openstack-conference-design-summit-2011-sponsored-by-citrix/) on April 26, 2011, in Santa Clara, California. It will make its integration with OpenStack available to the entire Java community through the open source JClouds project. GigaSpaces XAP is currently available through the GigaSpaces channel network and at http://www.gigaspaces.com. Early Access Registration ( http://www.gigaspaces.com/registration_earlyaccess) is also available for the new GigaSpaces Cloud-Enablement Platform. Citrix OpenCloud is available through Citrix partners worldwide. More information on the integration can be found in the GigaSpaces blog (http://blog.gigaspaces.com/).

About GigaSpaces

GigaSpaces Technologies is the pioneer of a new generation of virtualized application platforms and a leading provider of end-to-end scaling solutions for distributed, mission-critical application environments, and cloud enabling technologies. GigaSpaces is the only platform in the market that offers a truly silo-free architecture, along with operational agility and openness, delivering enhanced efficiency, extreme performance, and always-on availability. Our offering includes solutions for enterprise application scaling and enterprise PaaS and SaaS enablement that are designed from the ground up to run on any cloud environment - private, public, or hybrid - and offers a pain-free, evolutionary path to meet tomorrow's IT challenges.

Hundreds of organizations worldwide have been leveraging GigaSpaces technology, among which are global Fortune 500 companies, including top financial service enterprises, e-commerce companies, online gaming providers, and telecom carriers.

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For more information, please visit http://www.gigaspaces.com, our blog at http://blog.gigaspaces.com or contact

    
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