While in Las Vegas for VMworld 2008, I had a chat yesterday with Simon Crossby , Citrix Xenserver CTO. We talked a little about the meaning of Citrix cloud offering, C3 (for Citrix Cloud Center) for telcos, cloud and Services providers. According to Crossby, one of the aims of Citrix with this version, is to “bring all these open-source Xens back home”. Crossby noted that most cloud providers have cooked their own Xen linux distributions and customized them to fit their needs.
Understanding that fact, Citrix has developed an “open” Edition of C3 that the telcos, service providers and cloud providers of this world can freely customize. C3 Open is in fact citrix’s own Xen Linux Distribution told Crossby, a distro that comes with all the extensions, APIs and support capabilities of Citrix.
Commenting on VMware’s VDC-OS announcement, Crossby made another point : VMware’s cloud approach locks the service providers into a unified architecture that makes it difficult for them to differentiate their offerings. Because of its “open flavour”, C3 is a far better approach, he says…
