By Theresa Miller

Citrix held their annual partner conference last week called Citrix Summit (Jan 13-15, 2015), and while I did not attend the conference there were many announcements during the event that Citrix customers can look forward to learning more about. After taking a closer look at these, here are some that I am excited about watching unfold!

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Citrix Acquires Sanbolic – There was an announcement about Citrix acquiring a company called Sanbolic last week http://www.citrix.com/news/announcements/jan-2015/citrix-acquires-sanbolic.html. Regardless of your organization or the technologies being used it has become evident that we are in an IT era that caters to our users and what they want. It’s no longer the IT way or the highway like it was years ago. If fact many organizations are working diligently to better integrate IT with everyday business function and vice versa. That being said, VDI has been used as a way to allow users access to a desktop anywhere any time while ensuring that corporate data remains secured in the datacenter.

We are always looking at ways to better accommodate our customers’ demands by providing them data anywhere, anytime while ensuring performance. So how do we accommodate this within the realm of virtual desktops with VDI solutions? While, there isn’t a single answer to this question within VDI solutions, vendors are working diligently to support this market. For example, as VDI has evolved we have seen many 3rd party technology options become available. Technologies such as GPU grid cards and flash based storage array implementations are available and have proved that they can provide value to end-user experience. So how can the Citrix acquisition of Sanbolic become part of this puzzle? The real answer is that this is yet to be determined, but here is what we do know. Sanbolic technology is known for its ability to allow multiple Windows servers read/write access to multiple storage partitions. Prior to the acquisition many different products including SQL server saw benefit from Sanbolic technology, but a common use case was Citrix VDI with Provisioning Services. This acquisition has the probability to improve VDI performance within the Citrix product suite.

sanbolic

For more detail on the past, present and possible VDI advantages to this product within the Citrix family here is another great writeup on this topic. http://blog.itvce.com/2015/01/12/hot-off-the-presses-citrix-acquires-sanbolic-creators-of-melio-fs-whats-next/

Citrix X1 Mouse – At Summit Citrix announced that they were getting into the mouse market. When I heard this, I crinkled my nose and thought why Citrix would do this? Honestly, the only place I use a mouse these days it at the office, otherwise there isn’t much value to me anymore. As I read more about this new product though I became a bit more excited. The X1 mouse resolves a common issue within the tablet community and more specifically with VDI and the iPad. Personally I will not use anything RDP or desktop-like on an iPad, because the experience is awkward. So whenever possible I will always pull out a laptop first. This mouse is currently only a prototype, but I think there is something great here. It was designed to work with the virtual desktop’s that are launched on an iPad.

X1

If you are interested in learning more or obtaining a prototype, visit the Citrix website to learn more. http://www.citrix.com/go/citrix-mouse.html

XenServer 6.5 – I was excited to hear that there was a new release of XenServer this past week. There was a time in the past couple of years where there were rumors that there would not be any great commitment to this product line, so I am glad to see that there is continual improvement and advancements to this hypervisor product.

XenServer

Some of the advertised advantages to upgrading or implementing a new deployment of XenServer are as follows: It is now an entirely 64-bit platform, there are drastic improvements to GPU density, there are significant reductions in Bootstorm startup duration, network throughput improvements and improved read/write throughput. Our users are demanding faster access to their virtual machines and it appears that this product upgrade with help. http://blogs.citrix.com/2015/01/13/xenserver-6-5/

More Announcements

That summarizes only a small part of what appeared to be a great Citrix Summit. Other announcements can be found here. http://www.citrix.com/news/announcements.html Enjoy!