Cloud News: 1&1 Internet Builds Cloud Atop Citrix

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing sector:

Citrix powers 1&1 Cloud. Citrix Systems (CTXS) announced that leading Web hosting provider 1&1 Internet has designed its public cloud offering, Dynamic Cloud Server, on Citrix XenServer technology. The strategic adoption of Citrix technology for its public cloud computing solution puts 1&1 as yet another one of the world's largest hosting providers that uses Citrix. XenServer will make it possible for 1&1 to deliver granular control of server resources using a proven cloud-ready virtualization platform to meet customer price, performance and scalability requirements. “We wanted a partner who would support an open source mindset for ongoing product enhancements and XenServer delivered the right combination of features, performance and price to support 1&1 Internet in its strategy to build and scale our cloud computing service," said Michael Frenzel, Vice President, 1&1 Internet. "Developing open sourced software is an important element to achieving our objective, which we see as an attainable and sustainable path for growing along with the cloud market. Xen and XenServer are technically sound platforms that continue to lead the way in functionality and performance. Combined with our significant internal resources, it was an easy decision to partner with them for our cloud virtualization platform.”

New regions available for AWS Elastic Beanstalk.  Amazon Web Services announced that AWS Elastic Beanstalk is now available in the US West (Oregon) and the US West (Northern California) regions. Beanstalk supports Java applications running on Apache Tomcat, .Net applications and PHP applications running on the Apache HTTP Server stack and allows users to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. Amazon also announced MFA-protected API access, a new feature of AWS Multi-Factor Authentication(MFA) to enforce MFA for AWS service APIs via AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies.

Fujitsu builds private cloud for NAMCO.  Fujitsu announced their collaboration on the construction of a cloud-based shared platform that aims to integrate accounting and other mission-critical systems, primarily SAP, as well as operating systems at BANDAI NAMCO Group's major group companies. Also in collaboration with Fujitsu, NAMCO has employed the private cloud environment at Fujitsu's datacenters to standardize its software and design protocols for these mission-critical systems and other business systems, in addition to integrating operations and developing a shared platform upon which the systems will run. By constructing the new shared platform, BANDAI NAMCO Group will be able to achieve a group-wide system optimization, thereby significantly improving operational efficiency and reducing the company's total cost of ownership by an anticipated 30 percent.