This week at Synergy, Citrix and some of our key HCI strategic partners are announcing some exciting developments in our Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance Program.
The Program is comprised of four big objectives:
- No VMware vTax – reduced cost that directly impacts customers by basing the solution on the XenServer hypervisor.
- Simple to deploy – Citrix and HCI partner orchestration technologies work together to automatically deploy Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop on the appliances and connect them to Citrix Cloud.
- Simple to manage – HCI partner consoles enable management of the appliances themselves while XenDesktop controllers run in Citrix Cloud. This allows customers to focus their efforts on appliance-based user workloads while Citrix Cloud services take care of the maintenance of Citrix components.
- Did I mention, no vTax? 🙂
Our HCI Workspace solution partners jumped at the opportunity to participate and deliver outstanding value for customers of all sizes (particularly in mid-market) with this hybrid cloud approach. Here’s a roundup of the offerings coming to market. Each one brings differentiated value to customers. It’s great to have all these partners working with us, and giving customers all these options to choose from and still get the four — actually three — benefits listed above.
HPE and Atlantis
Following through on our announcement at Citrix Summit in January, Citrix, HPE and Atlantis have announced the availability of the first appliance to adhere to the program requirements – HPE’s Edgeline EL4000 Intelligent Edge Workspace appliance. HPE’s Edgeline HCI solution runs the XenServer hypervisor and includes Atlantis USX software in order to improve user density and performance. Pre-integrated and pre-tested, the HPE Edgeline EL4000 Intelligent Edge Workspace appliance provides zero-touch setup and management using Citrix Smart Tools. It includes a wizard-based environment that allows for setup that is 80% faster than DIY solutions. Since it’s connected to Citrix Cloud, lifecycle management of the Citrix components is easier than ever. The design allows customers to scale up to 500 users per 1U appliance and scale out linearly by adding more appliances to the deployment as needed. The Edgeline HCI solution will be featured in demonstrations at both the HPE (#206) and Citrix booths.
Cisco
Cisco has announced that they have officially joined the HCI Workspace Appliance Program and intend to deliver a “vTax-free” solution, based on the HyperFlex platform that is coming soon. The recently announced HyperFlex 2.5 release innovates in next gen stand-alone management via HyperFlex Connect which paves the foundation to a non-vTax hypervisor strategy. Cisco has one of the most differentiated HCI architectures in the market with the joint engineering of the UCS fabric computing platform with a data platform built from scratch specifically for HCI with virtualization options. The approach with deep hardware and software integration across compute, storage, and networking delivers industry-leading proven performance and predictability. Talk to the Cisco technical team at their booth (#202) at Synergy to learn more.
Nutanix
Nutanix also officially joined the Program with another XenServer-based, “vTax-free” appliance that simplifies deployment and management of the XenDesktop environment by taking advantage of Citrix Cloud services. Nutanix is demonstrating their implementation at their booth (#204) and plan to release their integration of the technologies within 90 days of Synergy. Customers will enjoy a single admin interface to the Citrix Cloud via Nutanix Prism, with built-in automation and orchestration for simplicity. Customers can expect the same benefits as other Nutanix platforms including storage management via Nutanix SR, Nutanix Fast-Clone for cloning in seconds, detailed capacity and performance stats through Prism, and much more.
Citrix HCI partners are seeing the benefits of the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance Program and are creating a “vTax-free” ecosystem that benefits customers by providing lower costs, higher performance and user density, simplified setup and management, and flexible deployment of digital workspace infrastructures. These partner solutions are being featured during our Day 1 Keynote and our breakout session dedicated to the Workspace Appliance – SYN126: Citrix Cloud-managed HCI Workspace Appliance. See you at there!
