Gemini Cloudian, Citrix Partner to Deploy S3 Cloud Storage for Apache CloudStack

In any successful partnership, compatibility is critical.

Big Data solutions provider Gemini Technologies announced the integration of its Cloudian Cloud Storage Platform with Citrix CloudPlatform, an open source cloud platform based on the Apache CloudStack project.

Using the Cloudian and Citrix CloudPlatform combination, cloud service providers and enterprises can seamlessly deploy S3 compatible cloud storage quickly and cost-effectively along with a cloud computing platform, according to Gary Ogasawara, vice president of engineering at Gemini Technologies.

“Citrix and Gemini share the same goal: amazing cloud solutions that are scalable, powerful and affordable,” Ogasawara said. “With this unique integration we are providing unified cloud storage. The Cloudian object store is accessible through the S3 HTTP API, and also directly from the CloudStack compute hosts, all under a common user interface. Cloudian-CloudStack deployments now have turnkey access to efficient and scalable storage.”

Company officials said the integration of Cloudian and Apache CloudStack unifies the S3 compatible cloud object storage service along with the file system requirements of the CloudStack cloud compute environment, allowing users and their applications to be able to directly apply S3 cloud storage as they normally would with Cloudian.

Cloudian’s S3 compatibility offers interoperability with a number of tools and applications found in the S3 ecosystem. In addition, customers’ CloudStack templates and snapshots are centrally managed through the Cloudian service and available across datacenters or CloudStack Zones via Cloudian’s multi-datacenter storage capabilities. 

As cloud computing continues to grow in adoption, more organizations seek cloud storage options that align with a variety of application scenarios, according to Peder Ulander, vice president of marketing for cloud platforms at Citrix.

“Cloud computing is being widely adopted across all industries, geographies and sizes of organizations to align IT with business in a number of different application scenarios – and cloud storage is at the top of the priority list of capabilities,” Ulander added. “The Cloudian object store technology aligns well with our vision for building cloud services by architecting not only for scale and performance, but also compatibility and interoperability with Amazon Web Services (News - Alert).”

The interface between Cloudian and CloudStack can also allow for application data backup and recovery within the cloud environment. Cloudian’s Cloud Management Console is integrated with CloudStack to allow cloud service providers and their customers to access and administer cloud storage and cloud compute services via the product’s intuitive user interface.

Cloudian also offers an S3 API compliant, multi-tenant, multi-data center cloud storage platform that lets customers cost-effectively deploy an extremely scalable and reliable object storage service within public and private clouds.

Cloudian also provides a user interface for both end user applications as well as administrative functions, including billing, monitoring and provisioning. Company officials said the product scales from one node up to hundreds of nodes across multiple data centers, supporting petabytes of data, allowing system operators to leverage “heterogeneous, commodity servers for cost-effective horizontal scalability.”