Citrix will launch its own version of open source infrastructure cloud platform OpenStack, company’s chief marketing officer Wes Wasson announced on Tuesday.

Wasson said OpenStack, which was originally created by NASA and Rackspace, would play a crucial role in its future product that is being developed by the company under the codename "Project Olympus".

OpenStack is currently supported by more than 60 IT companies, including Cisco, Dell, Intel, AMD, Canonical and Citrix.

Project Olympus will be a blend of the XenServer server virtualization hypervisor’s cloud-optimized version and a Citrix-certified version of the OpenStack cloud controller fabric.

Just like as in the case of XenDesktop virtual desktop infrastructure tools, Citrix will use Project Olympus to support Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware ESXi hypervisors. The firm was responsible for weaving both Xen as well as VMware hypervisor code to the OpenStack project.

Wasson did not disclose the pricing, functions and other details of the Project Olympus; however, he said Olympus would be made available for selected customers through Dell and Rackspace, when it will be launched sometime in the second half of 2011.