“Truly inspired thinking and ingenuity went into this software, which delivers a personalized user experience on par with physical desktops,” said Jason Mattox, CTO of Liquidware Labs. “ProfileUnity with FlexApp allows virtual desktops to support a greater number and diversity of workers, which permits more companies to move their hundreds or even thousands of physical PCs to virtual platforms running Windows 7.“

At the same time, the company also announced a “FlexApp This!” Contest to provide users with a fun, rewarding and original way to learn about the large number of applications that FlexApp currently supports as well as to break new UIA ground. Users can enter weekly raffles for an Apple® iPad by providing new application names to test on FlexApp.

“Over our beta process, we’ve had hundreds of customer recommendations that were successfully installed with FlexApp,” said Mattox. “However, we want to encourage the community to challenge us with new suggestions, so that we can build out our collection of proven applications.”

Early next week, Liquidware Labs will also launch the “Dare2Compare” program to allow companies who are currently using user virtualization solutions to compare them with ProfileUnity with FlexApp for FREE. The “Dare2Compare” program provides customers with a set number of free, fully functional ProfileUnity with FlexApp licenses and Support services for a year in order to fully evaluate competing solutions and pick the best for their requirements.

“We’ve had growing interest from companies wanting to test out the latest version of ProfileUnity with FlexApp in their environments and see how it compares to their current option,” said Mattox. “This product launch is the perfect time to extend a risk-free, high value program allowing users to properly evaluate ProfileUnity with FlexApp.”

ProfileUnity with FlexApp offers key benefits to customers, including:

• Simplifies management of non-persistent Windows environments dramatically because fewer master images must be maintained
• Promotes greater desktop virtualization ROI and economies of scale because more workers can use the virtual desktop infrastructure
• Reduces desktop administrator time on maintenance and troubleshooting activities
• Significantly lowers TCO as organizations realize optimal license use and reduce storage requirements
• Virtualizes the installation of an application location, not the application itself, thus appears native to the OS, therefore, applications are instantly usable without any modifications

“ProfileUnity with FlexApp changes the game for managing our users within our Citrix environment,” said Sam Ault, System Administrator for Turner Bros. “In our testing and production environment, our users have been able to ‘FlexApp’ virtually every application we’ve tried. The solution is highly capable of delivering on its promise of separately managing the installation of user applications, while leaving the underlying golden image intact for streamlined management.”

How ProfileUnity with FlexApp Works
ProfileUnity with FlexApp is enabled by the administrator for select users or groups within the ProfileUnity central console. Users are provisioned a VHD (virtual hard disk) to store their applications separately from the OS and local session. Users install applications just as they would normally, and ProfileUnity with FlexApp “hooks” the installation of program, adding specialized “links” both into the local Windows operating system and into the user’s managed ProfileUnity with FlexApp settings.

ProfileUnity with FlexApp perfectly complements thin application technologies, allowing administrators to support both corporate applications and UIA today. The work and development of the May release reflects the “heavy lifting” for the next version of ProfileUnity with FlexApp, scheduled for the fall timeframe 2012, which will deliver departmental installed applications (DIA) in addition to UIA. Combining these three types into the ultimate application-delivery triad permits the most cost-effective virtual desktop environments, reducing the number of master images needed as well as storage.

“Liquidware is looking to bring a management layer to self-installed apps,” said Andrew Wood, Analyst, The Virtualization Practice. “As a solution for managing custom applications in non-persistent VDI, FlexApp is an admirable start and lays the ground for DIA in future. I think DIA is a technology that can open the door to desktop virtualization for many more companies, and we will watch with close interest the impact that Liquidware Labs has on this space.”

Related posts:

1. Liquidware Labs Strategic Partnerships Help Accelerate Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Adoption Rates
2. Liquidware Labs Unveils Stratusphere Designer for Virtual Desktops
3. Liquidware Labs and Red Hat Collaborate To Accelerate End-to-End Server and Desktop Virtualization

Additional benefits of a virtualized rack workstation include the ability to centralize, secure and manage data, leverage worldwide talent pool, share resources for improved cost effectiveness and run performance critical applications that require the host system and data to be in close proximity. Users can connect to the powerful, dependable and manageable Dell Precision R5500 via Dell and non-Dell computing devices including thin clients, laptops, desktops or other mobile devices that have a loaded Citrix Receiver™.

“The Dell Precision R5500 offers the highest user density available on a XenServer certified platform for XenDesktop HDX 3D Pro, with four concurrent users per host,” said Derek Thorslund, director of product management, HDX technology at Citrix. “This makes it a very attractive option for customers looking to deliver high-end 3D professional graphics while keeping their intellectual property safe in the data center.”

Citrix XenServer with HDX 3D Pro enables the virtualized workstation environment with a dedicated discrete graphics card per user or virtual machine. The dedicated graphics provides the user with full access to the graphics card in a virtualized environment. Users can configure their Dell Precision R5500 with up to four NVIDIA Quadro® 2000 mid-range graphics cards, with other high-end NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards available soon. Dell’s 2U rack workstation offers industry standard bus slots with options of up to five full-height and full-length PCIe slots, and industry standard graphics and GPU compute cards including the newest NVIDIA Quadro and NVIDIA Tesla® solutions.

“This new rack workstation configuration from Dell provides designers and engineers with a unique virtualized desktop performance option,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. “Dell's R5500 powered by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs gives these users an opportunity to experience the full power of high-end OpenGL, Direct X and CUDA applications in a small form-factor, virtualized desktop environment.”

In addition to high-end graphics support, the R5500 provides the full scalability and powerful performance of Dell’s high-end tower workstations in a 2U form factor. It is purpose-engineered for professionals who run compute and graphics intensive workloads and require extreme performance with remote capability. It offers high-performance Intel Xeon processors with memory capacity of up to 192GB¹ and dual-wide GPU slots that scale up to 450 watts, up to six 2.5-inch SAS HDDs or five SATA HDDs.

“We are working closely with Citrix and NVIDIA to enable new usage models to address the needs of our workstation customers,” said Efrain Rovira, executive director of Dell Precision workstations. “This industry first four-GPU XenServer certification delivers increased productivity and flexibility to our customers, and it adds to the list of innovations we’ve introduced to the workstation industry.”

Availability
Citrix XenServer with GPU pass-through is available worldwide through Citrix and Dell S&P. The starting price for the Dell Precision R5500 is $2,742 USD.

Visit Dell at NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in booth #17 and #18 this week to see the Dell Precision R5500 workstation and learn more about the new Citrix XenServer GPU pass-through certification.

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2. ISu Lab1 : Building Virtualization Infrastructure using VMWare Workstation – Part1
3. VMWare Workstation 8: Virtualization Improved

As the industry moves from the PC Era to the Cloud Era, the explosion of mobile devices and new applications is driving IT to provide anywhere access on any device. With millions of seats deployed worldwide, Citrix XenDesktop® is answering this need by providing simple and flexible solutions for the user along with the security and cost-savings benefits necessary to IT. Desktop virtualization has allowed enterprises to deploy virtual desktops at scale, across multiple datacenters and geographies. With this increase in scale, they are building datacenters, managing thousands of virtualized desktops and creating custom deployment scripts for automation, management and personalization of virtual applications and desktops. Whether customers are starting with a virtual desktop or private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, today there is clearly a need for the path leading to Project Avalon.

Introducing Project Avalon
Project Avalon delivers on the industry’s need for the next phase in cloud services – transforming any Windows application or desktop into a cloud service that can be seamlessly delivered across any network, to any device. Project Avalon enables those using private cloud solutions to create the following scenarios currently enjoyed via public cloud offerings today.

Quickly and simply deploy Windows apps and desktops as a cloud service
As virtual desktop deployments increase in size and scale, organizations are looking to cloud deployment models to enable self-service, cost effective, flexible and agile infrastructure to deliver Windows apps, desktops and data across private and public clouds. Project Avalon is a highly optimized and tuned integration of XenDesktop and CloudStack™ that enables multi-tenant deployment across multiple locations and multiple clouds, and delivery across any network to any device. Project Avalon provides organizations with the ability to shift apps and desktops into public clouds to deliver capacity on demand. This helps many customers today looking to support business continuity and disaster recovery initiatives, as well as those looking to better equip people in everyday scenarios such as enabling contractors, offshoring projects and integrating mergers and acquisitions.

• Automate and efficiently provision, manage and orchestrate apps and desktops Project Avalon provides the ability to define and automate the creation of a workspace that can scale to any number of users from 100 to over one million. Any user, regardless of the workspace size, still experiences the same performance characteristics, network configuration and isolation requirements all while having the orchestration engine complete the deployment – hands-free. When it comes time to update apps or desktop images, the admin simply points to the new image, and Project Avalon handles draining servers and migrating subscribers without manual intervention.
• Manage technology transitions at a business pace without taxing IT resources Project Avalon is built upon an open architecture that eliminates technology-specific management of Citrix XenApp®, XenDesktop, Windows Server, hyper-visor technology or public cloud offerings. The ability to “mix and match” enables IT to focus on delivering desktops and applications based upon business needs, rather than vendor-introduced technology transitions.
• Seamlessly deliver a secure, cost-effective personalized workspace to every userUnlike “vanilla” Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offerings in the market today, Project Avalon with integrated cloud storage via Citrix ShareFile® provides the capability to ensure that user profiles, settings and application data are securely delivered to every user. Regardless of where the information is coming from or the type of device it is going to, the virtual desktop experience remains persistent and personal each and every time.

Inside Project Avalon
Project Avalon creates an infrastructure that transforms any desktop to an Amazon-style cloud. By leveraging the new Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack. Avalon will also make it easy for existing Citrix customers to adopt new features at whatever pace they like, allowing them to “mix-and-match” different versions of Windows Server, XenDesktop and XenApp – and span across any mix of public and private clouds. Project Avalon also incorporates and extends the app orchestration technology from the Citrix Cloud Provider pack, which is available to over 2000 Citrix Service Provider (CSP) partners and hundreds of thousands of hosted desktop users. Service providers can deploy Project Avalon as a highly scalable, fully multi-tenant, multi-site cloud and deliver self-service enabled, personalized Windows apps and desktops to organizations of all sizes that will seamlessly integrate with enterprise private clouds.

Project Avalon’s integration with ShareFile enables personalized user setting and data across all deployment models leveraging cloud economics. CloudGateway™ delivers Project Avalon apps, desktops and data to any device via secure self-service enterprise app store Citrix NetScaler® powers the world’s largest clouds today and ensures security, high performance, reliability and availability.

Availability
At this point in time, we are not announcing availability of Project Avalon. Citrix XenDesktop and CloudStack are available separately at this time. Also, authorized Citrix Service Provider partners have exclusive access to the Citrix Cloud Provider Pack which provides them with efficiencies in the data center, superior end-user experience with all types of apps, and support for every type of device.

Related posts:

1. Citrix CloudGateway Delivers End User Computing for the Cloud Era
2. The Difference Between Citrix Project Independence and VDI
3. Citrix Unveils “Follow-Me-Data” Fabric to Enable the Personal Cloud

ScaleXtreme completed a rigorous verification process to ensure compatibility with Citrix CloudStack™, providing confidence in joint solution compatibility. Customers can be assured that ScaleXtreme’s cloud-based systems management tools have successfully passed a series of tests established by Citrix, and can be trusted to work effectively with CloudStack in order to accelerate cloud provisioning and to facilitate cloud patching, budget control and management.

“As a member of the Citrix Ready program, we are able to offer customers intelligent solutions that combine the ScaleXtreme management platform with Citrix products such as CloudStack,” said ScaleXtreme CEO Nand Mulchandani. “Citrix is a powerful partner, and we’re pleased that it is playing a pivotal role in the future of cloud computing infrastructure.”

Mr. Mulchandani will be addressing the audience of the Citrix Synergy™ event in San Francisco’s Moscone Center at 4 p.m. on May 10. The event, which goes from May 9 to May 11, includes case studies, learning labs and presentations from thought leaders. Mr. Mulchandani’s talk is entitled “Architecture and design for the federated cloud future.”

ScaleXtreme provides a single view, unifying the management of an organization’s server environment – spanning private and public cloud machines, different public cloud providers running on any virtualization platform and even physical servers. It works with a variety of operating systems and technology stacks and helps users rapidly scale server deployments using templates. This announcement comes after ScaleXtreme introduced support for CloudStack in October. More information on the support can be found here: http://scalextreme.com/press-releases/ScaleXtreme-Introduces-support-for-Citrix-CloudStack.

ScaleXtreme recently announced a number of additional features, including the industry’s only cloud cost management tools, which enable IT professionals to gain visibility into cloud provider costs, establish role-based budgets and prevent the launch of unauthorized cloud machines.

ScaleXteme products also come equipped with cloud-based patch management automation which provides customers the ability to schedule, deploy and automate patches for multiple machines, as well as the on-the-go iPhone application that gives system administrators a unified view of their cloud instances through a single, simple interface.

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1. CumuLogic PaaS is Verified as Citrix Ready
2. Citrix Unveils Next Phase of CloudStack Strategy
3. Kontiki Cloud-Based Enterprise Video Platform Verified as Citrix Ready

Today’s announcements make it easier for companies of all sizes to go mobile – empowering employees to interact securely with any combination of people, data, apps and devices – then bringing it all together in a seamless, integrated experience for end users.

People
The Citrix mobile enterprise strategy begins with a focus on empowering people to work from anywhere, with anyone, on any device. To enable today’s increasingly mobile workforce, Citrix today announced GoToMeeting® HDFaces for the iPad, combining video conferencing, audio conferencing and screen sharing into a single, seamlessly integrated experience for mobile workers. This breakthrough all-in-one solution makes it easy to collaborate face-to-face while on the go, all from the convenience of a lightweight mobile tablet.

Today’s mobile workstyles also require a new approach to team collaboration. To address this growing demand, Citrix today unveiled the first solution from its recent acquisition of Podio. The new Citrix Podio offering delivers a powerful cloud-based team collaboration platform for companies of all sizes. Unlike complex PC Era solutions, Podio brings the power of mobile and social to team collaboration, making it easy for people to work the way they want in dynamic team workspaces, across any mix of employees, contractors and partners.

Finally, Citrix made it easier for IT to support workers when they themselves are on the go. The new GoToAssist® for mobile devices lets IT professionals provide live support from anywhere, connecting to employee computers and solving problems directly from their iPad, Android tablets or Android phone.

Data
The second pillar of the Citrix mobile enterprise strategy is a focus on data. The centerpiece of this strategy is Citrix ShareFile™, a powerful cloud-based file sharing service that makes it easy for people to share files with others, and to ensure that their information follows them across devices, regardless of where it was initially created and saved.

To expand this cloud file sharing capability to a broader set of enterprise customers, Citrix today unveiled the new ShareFile StorageZones technology, giving enterprise customers the ability to choose optimal locations for storing corporate data – either off-premise in the public cloud, or on-premise, within their own private datacenters. The new ShareFile StorageZones technology makes it easier for enterprise customers to meet security, compliance and performance requirements, without giving up the simplicity and elasticity of cloud-based data services.

Citrix also announced it is plugging ShareFile into its popular Citrix Receiver™ software client, used by millions of people around the world every day to access business applications on any PC, Mac, tablet or smart phone. As a result of this integration, end users will be able to open, view, edit, save and share documents on their personal and mobile devices, regardless of where those documents were initially created. This breakthrough new integration delivers on the promise of bringing follow-me-data to people as they move across different devices.

Apps
The third component of the Citrix mobile enterprise strategy centers on applications. With most business applications today designed for Windows, desktop virtualization has gained significant momentum as the primary way of delivering Windows apps and desktops as a service from the datacenter. To make it easier for customers to get started with virtual desktops, Citrix today announced a new RemotePC option as part of the popular FlexCast® delivery technology in its market-leading Citrix XenDesktop® product line. Using the new RemotePC capability, XenDesktop customers will be able to quickly turn existing office PCs into distributed VDI hubs without setting up additional servers and storage in the datacenter. This innovative new solution makes it easy for IT to give end users fast, secure remote access to all the apps and data on their office PC from any device. Once IT is ready to move to a more full-service VDI implementation, these distributed RemotePC images can be easily moved into the datacenter to run in a traditional hosted VDI model for better consolidation, security and management efficiency.

As the app landscape shifts, an increasing percentage of business applications are being delivered as web, SaaS, cloud and mobile apps. As this transition occurs, businesses need a simple way to secure and control this diverse mix of apps, while giving users easy, self-service access to all their work apps and data from a secure company app store. To deliver on this promise, Citrix today announced Citrix CloudGateway 2, a powerful new update to its unified storefront solution that adds extensive mobile application management capabilities, including full support for native HTML5, iOS and Android apps. The new CloudGateway release also adds integration with ShareFile, giving customers a single unified control point for all apps and data enterprise-wide.

Devices
The fourth pillar of the Citrix mobile enterprise strategy focuses on devices. The centerpiece of this strategy is Citrix Receiver, the company’s universal software client, available on more than two billion PCs, Macs, thin clients, tablets and smartphones worldwide. Citrix Receiver makes it easy for customers to support bring your own (BYO), flex-working and work-from-home initiatives to enable mobile workstyles, regardless of the devices chosen by end users.

Citrix XenClient® extends the Citrix device support strategy to corporate laptop users with a secure, client-side hypervisor that runs directly on the laptop, even when disconnected from the network. Citrix strengthened its leading position in this market today with the acquisition of Virtual Computer, a provider of enterprise-scale management solutions for Xen-based client hypervisors. Citrix will combine the newly-acquired Virtual Computer technology with XenClient to create the new Citrix XenClient Enterprise edition. The combined solution will give corporate laptop users the power of virtual desktops to go, while making it far more secure and cost-effective for IT to manage large fleets of corporate laptops across a distributed mobile enterprise.

The final component of the Citrix device strategy centers on its innovative new Citrix HDX System-on-Chip (SoC) initiative, launched last October at Citrix Synergy Barcelona. This groundbreaking program was designed to enable an entirely new generation of devices, capable of running high-definition virtual desktops and apps at game-changing price points and form factors.

Citrix was joined by multiple partners today to unveil the first wave of devices featuring the new HDX SoC technology. New thin clients from ATrust, Centerm, NComputing and ThinLinx reduce the cost of high-performance HDX Ready thin clients by more than half, dramatically improving the return on investment for desktop virtualization just six months after the HDX SoC program was first announced. Citrix partner HP also unveiled an innovative new All-in-One zero client that uses Power-over-Ethernet and consumes a mere 13 watts of power, less than half that of comparable devices on the market today. Citrix expects additional innovations in price and design based on the new HDX SoC program to be announced by these and other partners in the coming months.

Bringing it All Together in a Seamless Experience for End Users
While enabling the mobile enterprise is a central focus for business and IT decisions makers worldwide, it is also increasingly important for end users. From the user perspective, however, enabling a mobile workstyle is far more personal. Users today have little patience for outdated applications, systems and devices that are complex to learn and operate, and will increasingly go around IT if simple solutions are not offered. Supporting these users means going beyond individual tools to provide a seamless experience where everything they need just works – intuitively, naturally and easily.

To deliver on this vision, Citrix announced a series of integrations between its user-facing apps like GoToMeeting, GoToAssist, Podio, ShareFile and Citrix Receiver – along with additional support for third-party apps and services like Evernote, GetSatisfaction, Microsoft Skydrive and Google Apps. By delivering innovative integrations between these apps and services, Citrix customers can ensure that their broader mobility and personal cloud strategies also resonate with end users who think less about the “Mobile Enterprise,” and more about “ME@work”.

Related posts:

1. Citrix Extends Its Commitment to the Mobile Workstyles Revolution
2. Citrix Unveils Next Phase of CloudStack Strategy
3. Citrix Accelerates Cloud Data Strategy with Acquisition of ShareFile

The Kontiki Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) enables employees using a virtual desktop environment to experience high quality video for the first time. At the core of its EVP is the Kontiki Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN), which provides high quality video delivery across your entire organization, regardless of location or device. In fact, large enterprises with many satellite offices that use video will benefit most from the Kontiki solution. Desktop virtualization is being rapidly adopted by organizations of all sizes and employees expect to experience high-quality video, as they do on a traditional PC. With Kontiki’s peer-assisted technology, every client computer acts as a server. Instead of each client having to get data exclusively from central servers, computers using Kontiki get their video from another client computer that is physically closer than the central server. This dramatically improves the utilization of your existing network as the burden moves from the Wide Area Network (WAN), where the central servers are, to the Local Area Network (LAN), which results in less congestion in your network.

“We’re excited to be a Citrix Ready partner and believe Kontiki adds significant value to virtual desktop users. The Kontiki solution enables users of Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 to experience high quality video: a smooth and streamlined viewing experience,” said Dan Vetras, President and CEO, Kontiki. “We look forward to showing you just what the Kontiki platform can do at the Citrix Synergy Conference.”

“The ability to deliver a high-quality video experience is critical to enterprise-wide deployments of virtual desktops. Citrix Ready partners like Kontiki help ensure our customers have the confidence that partner solutions are optimized for Citrix XenDesktop. Kontiki’s peer-assisted delivery technology provides a high quality viewing experience for XenDesktop users at branch offices while conserving network bandwidth by avoiding redundant data streams," said Derek Thorslund, director of product management, HDX technology at Citrix.

Stop by booth #508 in the Solutions Expo at the Synergy Conference to learn more about the Kontiki delivery difference.

• Who: Kontiki
• What: Citrix Synergy Conference, Solutions Expo
• When: Tuesday through Thursday, May 8-10, 2012
• Tuesday, May 8th, 7-10 pm (Welcome Reception)
• Wednesday, May 9th, 12:30-5 pm
• Thursday, May 10th, 12:15-5 pm
• Where: Moscone West Convention Center, booth #508

About Kontiki

Powered by innovative technology, Kontiki pioneered the enterprise video platform and enterprise content delivery network markets, providing superior cloud-based content delivery across the enterprise. Kontiki’s video solutions enable consumer-grade video engagement with enterprise-grade control over video delivery for the world’s largest companies, including American Airlines, Wells Fargo, Nationwide and Nestle, serving nearly 1.5 million users worldwide. Kontiki offers organizations the unique ability to globally deliver video on demand or live broadcasts to 100% of their employees, regardless of location, and to the full range of today’s business devices, including smart phones and tablets, without congesting networks or compromising video quality.

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NetScaler is already well established as the industry’s leading internet delivery system, touching an estimated 75 percent of internet users each day. The new NetScaler 10 release builds on this leadership to deliver the world’s most advanced “cloud networking platform”, giving customers a single integrated solution that brings the elasticity, simplicity and expandability of the cloud to networks of any size. This powerful combination helps customers deliver public and private cloud services with the best performance, security and reliability to any device.

Introducing NetScaler TriScale Technology

The centerpiece of NetScaler 10 is the product’s new TriScale technology, a revolutionary advancement of the NetScaler architecture that brings multi-dimensional scalability to enterprise datacenters and provider networks. This innovative approach delivers the unique capability to Scale Up the performance of a single appliance for greater elasticity, Scale Out to expand capacity by deploying NetScaler appliances in a unified cluster, and Scale In by consolidating multiple networking functions into a single NetScaler service delivery platform to dramatically simplify network infrastructure – all with the same powerful, but simple, management capability.

For the first time, datacenter and cloud managers can provide a comprehensive set of network-based services at virtually unbounded network flexibility and scale. This ensures that network infrastructure always has the capacity and performance to handle the demands of even the most intensive application or service in the most efficient way possible – and that customers never overpay for capacity they don’t need.

The new TriScale technology enables customers to:

1. Scale Up elasticity with 5x faster performance on-demand with the simple NetScaler Pay-As-You-Grow software-based licensing model. This eliminates costly over provisioning, avoids regular ‘forklift’ appliance upgrades, and obviates the need to buy expensive chassis-based systems just to reserve empty slots in anticipation of future growth.
2. Scale In consolidation with the multi-function NetScaler SDX platform to simplify datacenter networks, eliminate appliance sprawl and streamline operational management by consolidating up to 40 independently managed devices into a single, easy-to-manage appliance. Unlike alternative solutions, the new NetScaler TriScale technology consolidates multiple appliances with no loss of functionality, and no performance compromises.
3. Scale Out to expand capacity up to 32x by seamlessly adding appliances to existing NetScaler deployments in a “plug-and-play” fashion with TriScale clustering, without the need to stand up redundant high-availability pairs. For the first time, datacenter managers can build a highly efficient infrastructure that meets current application demand, and then scale incrementally as traffic increases, with the capability to reach unprecedented performance levels exceeding 1 terabit/sec (Tbps).

More than 160 new Features

In addition to the new NetScaler TriScale technology, NetScaler 10 also includes more than 160 new features, capabilities and enhancements, including:

• New ActionAnalytics™ provide real-time monitoring and adaptive policy controls that transform raw data gathered by NetScaler into actionable information to deliver better business intelligence and automatically tune application and service delivery policies across public and private clouds.
• Built-in cloud connectivity with Citrix CloudBridgeTM, making it easy for customers to extend their enterprise datacenters into external clouds with optimal security, performance and manageability.
• New scalability, security and visibility enhancements for NetScaler DataStream™ technology that improve the performance of database infrastructures - further extending the product’s leadership in the emerging arena of database scaling.
• New capabilities to power the delivery of virtual desktops with Citrix XenDesktop®, including support for smartcard authentication for secure access to virtual desktops, and sophisticated policy management that completely separates virtual desktop management from on-going network administration tasks.
• Powerful advancements to the Citrix Application Firewall™ module, making it easier to protect against leakage of sensitive data and fully supporting the common event format (CEF) standard. These improvements make it easier for security analysts to correlate app firewall data to gain greater insights into the increasingly sophisticated threats facing all types of web and cloud applications.

Pricing and Availability
NetScaler 10 software is supported by NetScaler MPX™ hardware appliances, NetScaler VPX™ virtual appliances, and NetScaler SDX virtualized multi-tenant appliance platforms. NetScaler 10 software is available today, with list prices starting at $2000. The new software release is available at no additional charge for existing Citrix NetScaler customers with a valid NetScaler maintenance agreement. Citrix TriScale clustering capabilities are currently offered in controlled availability. Citrix TriScale clustering upgrade licenses will be available for purchase later in Q2 2012.

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1. Citrix CloudStack 3 Brings the Power of Amazon-Style Clouds to Customers of All Sizes
2. New NetScaler Cloud Gateway Orchestrates Delivery of SaaS, Apps
3. Citrix Unveils End-to-End Cloud Networking Lineup

The transition to the Cloud Era is fueling a massive build out of cloud infrastructure, projected to exceed $11 billion by the end of 20141. This new market will feature thousands of successful clouds of all shapes and sizes, ranging from business, infrastructure and developer offerings, to consumer, mobile and gaming services. The proposed Apache CloudStack project will make it easier for customers of all types to deliver cloud services on a platform that is open, powerful, flexible and “Proven Amazon Compatible.”

Open Source in the Cloud Era
Unlike previous generations of computing, the Cloud Era is being fueled in large part by open source technology that was first proven at scale in large production clouds, then made available to customers of all sizes under open source licenses. The Apache Software Foundation is leading the way with highly successful projects like Hadoop, Hive and Cassandra that were initially developed in large, successful clouds like Facebook and Yahoo!, then released for broader use under the Apache License. This proven method for incubating and advancing leading open source cloud projects is ideal for bringing a vibrant community of vendors and developers together to accelerate innovation, interoperability and standardization. As the first step in this strategy, Citrix CloudStack 3 will be released today under Apache License 2.0, and the CloudStack.org community will become part of the highly successful Apache Incubator program. Citrix will further support the project with a significantly increased investment in engineering, community support and marketing. (See separate Citrix announcement today: CloudStack Citrix to Become a Platinum Sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation)

More to Come At Citrix Synergy 2012
Citrix CEO Mark Templeton and GM of Cloud Platforms, Sameer Dholakia, will discuss today’s announcement and unveil further details about the company’s broader cloud strategy at the upcoming Citrix Synergy 2012 conference May 9-11 in San Francisco. Citrix will also sponsor two CloudStack Design Summits within the year, bringing together a broad range of partners, developers and users to engage, learn and collaborate on the newly launched project.

Broad Ecosystem Support
In addition to more than 100 successful production deployments, CloudStack has been verified to work with more than 2,200 products and services across the industry as part of the Citrix Ready Cloud Community Program - building on a rich tradition of interoperability that is immediately inherited by the proposed Apache CloudStack project. In addition, Citrix was joined in today’s announcement by more than 50 independent software vendors, providers and technology partners demonstrating their support of the CloudStack project including ActiveState, Alcatel-Lucent, Alurium, Apalia, Appcara, AppFog, Big Switch Networks, Brocade, BT, Caringo, Clogeny, Cloud Central, CloudSoft, Contegix, CumuLogic, Datapipe, Engine Yard, enStratus, Equinix, Extreme Networks, GigaSpaces, GoDaddy, Gluster, GreenQloud, Hortonworks, HostBill, Intel, jclouds, Juniper Networks, IDC Frontier, Kaavo, KT, LeaseWeb, LogicWorks, Midokura, NetApp, Nexenta, Ninefold, OpsCode, Puppet Labs, Racemi, RightScale, rPath, Scale Computing, ScaleXtreme, Scalr, ServiceMesh, Softlayer, Sungard, SwiftStack, Tata Communications, TCloud Computing, TrendMicro, UShareSoft, VMTurbo, Vyatta, Zenoss and Zuora.

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1. Citrix CloudStack 3 Brings the Power of Amazon-Style Clouds to Customers of All Sizes
2. Citrix Changes the Game in Cloud Infrastructure with Cloud.com Acquisition
3. Citrix Accelerates Cloud Data Strategy with Acquisition of ShareFile

Focused on entrepreneur-led innovation, the Startup Accelerator provides seed investments to select startups from around the world, enabling them to benefit from the global Citrix presence, its entrepreneur-friendly environment, large customer base and seasoned go-to-market strategies to help further their ideas.

In the next two months, the Citrix Startup Accelerator is providing several opportunities at premier Silicon Valley events for entrepreneurs to present their business ideas to potentially secure funding:

• Startup.Synergy Challenge: Applications are now open to participate in the Citrix Startup.Synergy Challenge. Interested companies can apply between now and April to be in the running for the next round of investments by the Citrix Startup Accelerator. Three early finalist companies will be chosen to present live to a panel of judges on May 9 at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco. One company will be immediately offered a $100,000 investment from Citrix and inclusion in the 2012 Startup Accelerator class subject to the terms of the Startup Accelerator Program.
• DEMO Spring 2012: Produced by IDG Enterprise in conjunction with VentureBeat, the DEMO Spring 2012 conference, April 17-19 in Santa Clara, Calif., will focus on emerging technologies and new product innovations. The DEMO conferences have earned a reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow's cutting-edge technologies, and have served as launch pad events for companies such as E*Trade, Palm, Salesforce and Tivo. Citrix will be a gold sponsor of the event and provide onsite opportunities for emerging startups to apply to the 2012 Startup Accelerator class and potentially secure up to $250,000 in funding.
• Startup.Synergy: This track at Citrix Synergy will provide insight into the incredible fluidity of mobile workstyles and the new demands placed on IT for the cloud services that empower them. It will provide an inside look at tomorrow’s multibillion tech companies, a framework to appreciate how quickly these companies are proliferating and showcase how the Citrix Startup Accelerator is building new bridges to this ecosystem. Startup.Synergy tickets provide entry to Citrix CEO Mark Templeton’s Synergy Opening Keynote presentation at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, May 9, with lunch in the Solutions Expo at 12:30 p.m., followed by the Startup.Synergy afternoon track. To purchase your One Day Pass ($295), please visit the Synergy registration page.

Since launching the program in 2011, Citrix Startup Accelerator has announced investments in 11 innovative companies that are poised to change the face of cloud, mobile, virtualization, networking and collaboration technologies. The program expects to announce several more new investments in 2012 as a result of this year’s application process.

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Citrix CloudStack is a key component of the Citrix cloud computing portfolio, providing customers with solutions that make it easy to Build new clouds, Connect to existing cloud services, and Deliver any cloud with the best security, performance and reliability. The Cloud Era is built on a completely different set of assumptions than past generations of IT – in fact, many of the exceptions from the PC Era now represent the norm in the Cloud Era. This is forcing enterprise IT organizations to reevaluate IT strategies, causing them to search for lower costs, greater capacity and improved agility. The Citrix cloud portfolio is designed to help customers accelerate this Cloud Era innovation by making inexpensive compute power accessible to anyone, allowing people to work from anywhere any device, and enhancing business agility.

Since its introduction, CloudStack has rapidly become the leading commercial open source platform for building, managing and delivering highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds for a wide range of customers such as Datapipe, Edmunds.com, IDC Frontier, Nokia Research and Zynga. CloudStack is designed to ensure organizations can build production cloud environments on a platform designed for economics, elasticity and scale. It is not a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud-like management layers on top. Rather, it was designed from the ground up as an open, multi-hypervisor platform to help customers build public and private clouds the way the world’s most innovative clouds are built – simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient.

New capabilities in CloudStack 3 focus on openness, flexibility and completeness and include:

• Cloud-Optimized Virtualization Platform: While maintaining a strong commitment to being hypervisor agnostic with support for leading platforms such as KVM, OVM, vSphere and Xen®, CloudStack 3 includes a cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer® 6 as a core integrated feature. With four of the top five world’s largest public clouds in production (Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, Softlayer) leveraging XenServer® or Xen® as the virtualization platform of choice, this unification brings unparalleled new levels of scale, manageability, security, multi-tenancy, and virtual switching integration that is currently unavailable in traditional enterprise virtualization solutions from other leading vendors.
• Network-as-a-Service Integration: As Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) becomes a key differentiator for providers looking to deliver advanced enterprise solutions in the cloud, CloudStack 3 now provides tight integration with Citrix NetScaler®, delivering a fast, secure, reliable cloud experience for an estimated 75% of all internet users each day. CloudStack supports NetScaler SDX™ and VPX™ appliances, and makes it easy to extend network level integration to products like Citrix CloudBridge™ and Citrix CloudGateway™. This brings virtual networking to a new level, ensuring increased security, performance and connectivity between public and private clouds that are delivered as integrated services within the platform.
• Built-In Network Services Catalog: In addition to NetScaler integration, CloudStack continues to build upon its rich and flexible network offerings by enabling service providers to upsell network services through the creation of custom catalogs of network service options. This capability, a first among cloud platform providers, enables cloud administrators to follow a cloud implementation model that best fits their environment and workloads.
• Brilliantly Simple User Interface: Citrix has long been known for its focus on delivering beautifully simple, consumer-like experiences for end users. The new CloudStack 3 release reflects this focus with a brilliantly simple out-of-the-box user experience that enables even the most novice cloud user to quickly build, launch and manage their own workloads on the cloud. The combination of self-service administration, coupled with advanced orchestration and automation, enables new IT services to be delivered in minutes, instead of weeks.
• OpenStack Swift Integration: CloudStack 3 new supports Swift, the OpenStack object-storage technology for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of standardized servers to store petabytes of accessible data.

Citrix Ready for the Cloud – Building the World’s Largest Cloud Computing Ecosystem
Citrix is also unveiling a Citrix Cloud Community Program, which introduces over 2,200 products and services that are Citrix Ready® verified to work with Citrix cloud solutions. The program showcases hundreds of leading technology companies and service providers who are partnering with Citrix to build the largest cloud computing ecosystem in the industry.

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