Dell, Cisco & NetApp Announce Integrations With Citrix

With Citrix Synergy 2012 underway in Barcelona this week, several Citrix partners have supporting announcements:

Cisco and Citrix advance partnership. Cisco (CSCO) and Citrix (CTXS) announced a significant expansion of their successful desktop virtualization partnership into three strategic areas:  cloud networking, cloud orchestration, and mobile workstyles. Cisco and Citrix intend to jointly integrate the Citrix NetScaler application delivery controller (ADC) to seamlessly coexist with other Cisco network and security services, such as Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) and Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA). The two will also develop an integrated cloud solution for enterprise and service provider deployments. For mobile workstyles a joint solution will link Cisco collaboration technology, including tighter integration of the Cisco Jabber client, with the Citrix Receiver self-service mobile access client and Citrix CloudGateway for enterprise mobility management. "As IT enters the mobile-cloud era, IT providers need to be more innovative about addressing customers' fast changing needs," said Cisco's Chief Technology and Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior, who was in Barcelonda for Synergy. "Over the past two years, Cisco and Citrix have collaborated to deliver significant innovation into the market.  Now we are excited to accelerate our partnership into cloud, networking and mobility."

Dell Validates Citrix architectures. Dell announced new additions and enhancements to its end-to-end cloud client computing portfolio. The solutions, which are specific to Citrix-based IT environments and now available in the US and Europe, are easy to select, deploy, and support, and deliver a cost effective and highly secure user experience to any device anywhere. Dell unveiled  vStart for VDI 50 and vStart for VDI 1000 as pre-engineered, pre-built and pre-integrated converged solutions to leverage XenDesktop and help organizations achieve benefits of desktop virtualization in a rapid, highly secure manner. Dell also announced new support for Citrix HDX 3D technology for zero- and thin-clients, enabling organizations to virtualize and centrally deliver 3D graphics intensive applications and high performing desktops with like native OS performance. “With an increasingly mobile workplace, the demand for desktop virtualization is accelerating. To address this need, Dell and Citrix are focused on delivering simple, repeatable, end-to-end solutions in the DVS portfolio that streamline deployment and management while expanding the addressable use cases,” said Krishna Subramanian, vice president of marketing and partner engagement at Citrix.

NetApp and Citrix simplify cloud storage.  Citrix and NetApp (NTAP) announced an extension of their current collaboration aimed at accelerating the adoption of enterprise cloud deployments. Together, the two companies will provide a fully integrated cloud orchestration and storage solution that will address storage automation, resource allocation, and virtual machine backup and recovery. The extended collaboration will pair NetApp unified storage solutions and Data ONTAP with both Citrix CloudPlatform and the Apache CloudStack project, providing users with a cloud-ready storage environment that will optimize storage utilization, simplify maintenance, and accelerate the transition to an agile data infrastructure. "NetApp supporting Cloud Platform powered by Apache CloudStack is an excellent proof point that this open source software project is offering customers the collaborative-based process they need," said Sameer Dholokia, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix. "We are excited to learn that NetApp will integrate its storage solutions with Apache CloudStack and Citrix CloudPlatform, and we look forward to the opportunities this will offer our joint customers."

Alcatel-Lucent works with Citrix for carrier cloud.  Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)  announced that it is working with Citrix to accelerate the arrival of a new class of ‘carrier cloud’ solutions that deliver high-performance cloud services designed to address the most stringent requirements of service providers, enterprises and consumers alike. Alcatel-Lucent's Citrix Ready solution, CloudBand Management System and CloudBand Node combine the computing power and flexibility of the cloud with the high performance, reliability and security of communications networks. Powered by CloudStack, it leverages the unique strengths of the service provider’s distributed infrastructure to deliver cloud services closer to customers with lower latency, better control of bandwidth and guaranteed quality of service.

CA and Citrix partner.  CA Technologies (CA) and Citrix announced that they are partnering to help enterprises and service providers increase agility and productivity by providing additional management and monitoring capabilities on top of Citrix cloud and desktop virtualization solutions. The first area of collaboration between the two companies focuses on leveraging CA Technologies management solutions to provide in-depth insight and control of public and private clouds built on Citrix Cloud Platform technologies. Secondly, CA management solutions will provide consistent lifecycle management, monitoring, and service level visibility for Citrix virtual app and desktop solutions. “The collaboration with Citrix is focused on enabling IT to deliver quality services across Citrix CloudPlatform and Citrix XenDesktop environments,” said Peter Griffiths, executive vice president, Enterprise Solutions and Technology Group, CA Technologies. “We look forward to working with Citrix to deliver end-to-end performance management and automation for Citrix-centric clouds, data center and network environments.”