Citrix Dramatically Improves Economics of Desktop Virtualization to Drive Mainstream Adoption

By VSM News Staff
published: Monday, February 08 2010

XenDesktop with FlexCast Delivery Technology Advances Scalability Across Multiple Desktop Virtualization Models to Significantly Improve ROI

SANTA CLARA, CA – Feb. 4, 2010 – Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS) today announced dramatic improvements in scalability across multiple virtual desktop delivery models to address the needs of every user in the enterprise at a significantly lower cost. Citrix XenDesktop™ 4 with FlexCast™ delivery technology has now been verified to deliver up to 125 VDI-based desktops, 500 hosted shared desktops and 5,000 local streamed desktops from a single physical server tuned to take advantage of the unique innovations of the latest Intel® Xeon® processor™ 5500 technology. These numbers represent orders of magnitude higher scalability than first generation VDI-only products, enabling IT organizations to deploy desktop virtualization solutions enterprise wide with less datacenter infrastructure and significantly lower operating costs. The new scalability data and testing methodology is available today in a new desktop virtualization reference architecture.

This advancement in virtual desktop scalability  is especially significant because it enables enterprises to deliver virtual desktops to more users at a far lower cost.  “The performance and consolidation levels achievable by XenDesktop, deployed on Intel® Xeon® 5500 processor based servers, are significant and compelling,” said Iddo Kadim, director of virtualization technology for Intel’s Data Center Group.  “When combined with FlexCast delivery technology to deploy user-attuned desktop virtualization solutions to the full range of PCs in an enterprise, including rich desktops and laptops based on the Intel® Core™ vPro™ processor family, it offers enterprise IT the opportunity to balance cost, control and flexibility.”

The latest Citrix scalability tests were carefully designed to use a mainstream server configuration. Desktop workload simulations incorporated a real-world mix of line-of-business apps, office productivity apps, web browsing and multimedia.  The results demonstrate that XenDesktop 4 with FlexCast can deliver up to 40 times more users (5,000 per physical server) than competing solutions which only support VDI-based desktops and max out at just over 100 users per physical server. This makes XenDesktop the only solution on the market that can truly deliver enterprise-wide virtual desktop deployments in a cost-effective way. With XenDesktop 4, desktop virtualization can now be implemented with 20 percent lower infrastructure costs.

“We are impressed with the hosted virtual desktop scalability improvements Citrix has achieved with next-generation technology from Intel,” said Phil Grove, global director, End User Services at CSC.  “With the new Intel technology in our engineering laboratories,” he added, “we have seen significant performance improvements in our CSC Dynamic Desktop offering, which is powered by XenDesktop. These kinds of Improvements in the economics of desktop virtualization from Citrix will help our joint customers move forward with large-scale deployments this year.”

New XenDesktop Reference Architecture Provides Guide for Large-Scale Deployments

Citrix also made available today a reference architecture for large-scale deployments that can help guide organizations who are looking at rolling out virtual desktops to a broad set of users. The new XenDesktop reference architecture is based on numerous real-world large-scale XenDesktop implementations, and provides a baseline model for a modular approach to designing and scaling to meet the needs of an entire enterprise. It provides a starting point and a solid understanding of the components and capabilities of each FlexCast delivery model, enabling customers to assemble a desktop virtualization architecture that’s tailored to each environment’s unique needs.

“Citrix continues to push the envelope in technology innovation in XenDesktop. We’ve doubled the user density for the fastest growing virtual desktop delivery type using Intel Xeon processors. And with the release of XenDesktop 4, we are able to drive far better ROI by providing organizations with a wide variety of virtual desktop delivery models that can address every use case in the enterprise. With the flexibility that FlexCast brings to XenDesktop, along with the improvements in scalability across delivery models, we are making desktop virtualization ready for mainstream enterprise-wide adoption,” said Raj Dhingra, group vice president and general manager of the XenDesktop product group at Citrix.

The XenDesktop reference architecture and set of guidelines will be maintained online so that customers can access the latest data. More information about XenDesktop 4 and the reference architecture can be found at www.citrix.com/xendesktop.

About Citrix

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is a leading provider of virtualization, networking and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies for more than 230,000 organizations worldwide. Its Citrix Delivery Center™, Citrix Cloud Center™ (C3) and Citrix Online Services product families radically simplify computing for millions of users, delivering applications as an on-demand service to any user, in any location on any device. Citrix customers include the world’s largest Internet companies, 99 percent of Fortune Global 500 enterprises, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers worldwide. Citrix partners with over 10,000 companies worldwide in more than 100 countries. Founded in 1989, annual revenue in 2008 was $1.6 billion.