Citrix Acquires Storage Virtualization Company Sanbolic

Citrix announced it has acquired storage virtualization company Sanbolic to complete its virtualization portfolio for app delivery and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments. Sanbolic's software-defined storage platform unifies management of heterogeneous storage, and enables scale-out file serving and block storage management. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Citrix says it will blend the workload-oriented solutions from Sanbolic into its XenDesktop, XenApp, and XenMobile products to cater to specific workload needs. It also notes that over 200 of its clients already use Sanbolic's storage virtualization products in on-premise or cloud-based storage, networking, and compute infrastructure.

Co-founders Eva Helen and Momchil Michaylov started Sanbolic over 13 years ago in Waltham, Massachusetts, to help bring the benefits of hyperscale economics to enterprise storage and workloads. The company's software-defined platform abstracts underlying hardware and lets management and access be defined by individual workloads. The platform also allows customer deployments to be distributed across multiple locations and clouds.

Citrix Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer Geir Ramleth said, "Infrastructure complexity continues to hinder VDI and application delivery deployments. By leveraging Sanbolic technology with XenDesktop and XenApp, Citrix is able to address this problem head on, delivering solutions to our customers that simplify the infrastructure and reduce the overall cost of deployment and management."

In the realm of enterprise software defined storage, Sanbolic competitor ScaleIO was acquired by EMC in 2013. Last year, EMC also acquired cloud storage management company TwinStrata.