Ryan Lane, an operations engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote a blog post about how he is using OpenStack to build a cloud infrastructure for testing and development. OpenStack is the open source initiative that provides an infrastructure for building cloud environments.

Lane wants an infrastructure that does not require operations to manage user accounts, virtual machines, DNS entries or IP addresses. Lane also wants an environment in which developers can add additional infrastructure without operations support. Sound to good to be true? Lane seems to have it all worked out.

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Here's what Lane has in place:

OpenStack as the virtualization technology
PowerDNS with an LDAP backend for DNS entries
Puppet with an LDAP backend for puppet nodes
MediaWiki as the virtual machine manager

Using MediaWiki as a virtual machine manager is pretty interesting. Lane has written an extension, OpenStackManager, specifically for this. He's also written an LDAP Authentication extension which is being employed in this stack as well.

Is this a picture of a cloud stack we will see in 2011? What do you think?

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Virtualization is a star - at least in the big stage of the iPad. Since the device launched, Citrix Receiver has been one of the top ranked business apps in the store.

Chris Fleck, mobility leader on the Citrix team shares this demonstration showing a Citrix Receiver application enabled with four applications running side by side on iPad. He goes further to show the same apps running on a host of other devices.

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Born to Multitask

Citrix Receiver uses HDX, the name of the remoting technology Citrix has innovated based on the ICA Protocol (Independent Computing Architecture) the company has been developing on for over 15 years. Fleck tells us that HDX is conceptually similar to RDP/VNC but it includes significant optimizations for WAN performance, Multimedia, and user experience across multiple devices and OS's.

Here is a clip from the demonstration video showing four side-by-side apps running on iPad. Citrix Receiver is able to zoom on in each application to make it full screen, or display all four simultaneously.

Many Apps - Many Devices

The demonstration continues showing each device in this picture, from Mac to PC, iPhone to Android, all running the same applications.

At one point, Fleck goes on to demonstrate how to "flick" multiple applications on the iPhone. This demonstrates one app showing full screen and the four other applications are swipable, like photos in your photo library. This seems like a natural extension of the iPhone and really could be useful for building larger enterprise applications or portals.

This demonstration reminded us of one thing, the apps matter. When we see an iPhone application on Android, or Windows 7, it still looks pleasing to navigate. Perhaps there is room in the enterprise for a Apple's Mobile Human Interface Guidelines.

Enterprise designers, maybe it's your time to build insanely great apps for the enterprise that follow patterns of the iPhone and iPad. Whether new, or old, Citrix Receiver is breathing life into applications and iPad is getting down to business.

The company plans to release this capability with its partner SoftwareFX at the Citrix Synergy event next month.

Virtualization could become a default way to connect iPad in the enterprise - at least in year one.

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