Cloudian®, Inc. has introduced Cloudian Connector for Citrix CloudPortal™ Business Manager 2.0, designed to simplify the management and delivery of Storage-as-a-Service (StaaS). By integrating the Cloudian Storage Platform with CloudPortal Business Manager, Enterprise IT and Service Providers can easily roll out S3-compatible cloud storage services. For the first time, everything from service provisioning, multi-tenant user management, pricing and billing are available out of the box, finally removing roadblocks to StaaS adoption and moving the marketplace one step closer to making Storage-as-a-Utility a reality.

“Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager enables enterprises and service providers to unify the commerce, user management, provisioning and operational aspects of a cloud into a single cloud interface capable of delivering Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS),” said Sameer Dholakia, Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix. “The Cloudian Connector for CloudPortal Business Manager extends these services to storage, letting Enterprise and Service Provider customers enhance their end-user and IT productivity by simplifying and streamlining cloud operations and significantly reducing the cost of acquiring and managing cloud storage. Cloudian delivers a needed and vital service, with a vision toward Storage-as-a-Utility.”

The combination of Cloudian and Citrix technologies drastically reduces operational costs by providing a single comprehensive platform and user interface to provision, manage and deliver cloud storage.  The Cloudian Storage platform is Citrix Ready® Cloud Verified, a designation signifying that the Cloudian storage solution has been tested and verified to work with Citrix CloudPlatform™, powered by Apache CloudStack. The Citrix Ready program is designed to simplify the decision making process and reduce risk for customers as they select third party products to augment their Citrix product investments. Key new features of the Cloudian Connector for CloudPortal Business Manager include:

  • Storage Service Catalog: Users can create a customized catalog of storage offerings that can be delivered to selected user types, organizations, and channels.  Authorized users can then provision and consume storage on-demand.
  • Flexible Pricing Schemes: Users can associate subscription pricing with storage services based on regions, channels, currencies, organization, storage capacity, etc.
  • Self-Service Provisioning: Users can browse and provision storage services on-demand from the services catalog using a simple, intuitive self-service portal. Services are provisioned automatically without any intervention from IT or the cloud operator.
  • Usage & Bill Tracking: Users can access usage, billing and payment information on-demand using a self-service dashboard

“Cloudian’s vision is to disrupt the storage market by enabling the delivery of Storage-as-a-Utility,” said Michael Tso, CEO, Cloudian. "This aligns well with the vision behind CloudPortal Business Manager, which is all about simplifying the management and delivery of cloud services beyond IaaS, providing customers a path to IT-as-a-Service. The integration with CloudPortal Business Manager 2.0 brings the power and flexibility of our S3-compatible platform to a large and growing base of Citrix-powered public and private clouds.”

Cloudian delivers a fully S3 API compliant, multi-tenant, multi-data center cloud storage platform that enables enterprises and service providers to cost-effectively deploy an extremely scalable and reliable object storage service within public and private clouds. The platform leverages a fully distributed, peer-to-peer architecture, with no single point of failure. Cloudian also provides a comprehensive user interface for both end user applications as well as administrative functions, including billing, monitoring and provisioning. The solution easily scales from one node up to hundreds of nodes across multiple data centers, supporting petabytes of data, enabling customers to leverage heterogeneous, commodity servers for cost-effective horizontal scalability.