At Citrix Synergy 2009, DataCore Software announced that its Citrix Ready storage virtualization solutions will support Citrix StorageLink to integrate storage management under Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.  DataCore software delivers non-stop, true high availability, storage solutions for Server and Desktop Virtualization. Also at Citrix Synergy, DataCore featured live demonstrations showing how Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft Hyper-V customers can implement and manage high availability DataCore powered storage area networks (SANs) for their virtual infrastructures.   
 
DataCore and Citrix StorageLink – storage management for the Citrix and Microsoft virtual infrastructure worlds
“StorageLink provides a rich integration point between DataCore’s Storage Virtualization Software and Citrix Essentials,” stated James Price, vice president of product and channel marketing, DataCore Software.
 
Citrix StorageLink is a component of the new Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V products – enabling simpler, integrated deployment of virtualization and storage solutions.
 
“Most virtual environments encompass diverse storage devices with disparate or non-existent management tools,” continued Price. “DataCore consolidates the configuration, control and monitoring of these dissimilar disk subsystems under one unified management interface. This reduces complexity and costs by allowing administrators to satisfy the varied capacity, availability and performance needs of XenServer and Hyper-V virtual machines through coordinated and consistent requests, irrespective of the underlying storage hardware."
 
DataCore, Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft = practical VDI solutions
Microsoft and Citrix are partners in delivering virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with Hyper-V and XenDesktop. At the DataCore booth, visitors saw live demonstrations of XenDesktop running on Hyper-V, powered by DataCore to keep business applications up and running.
 
Availability
When it comes to desktops, 'availability' is what really makes storage and SANs relevant. If the storage goes down, the machines will go down – affecting perhaps tens, hundreds or thousands of users.
 
“This is exactly what we were demonstrating at the show,” notes Price. “running highly available XenDesktop virtual machines, built on Microsoft high availability in Hyper-V – all backed by DataCore’s non-stop and lightning-fast storage solutions. Attendees saw firsthand just how Hyper-V delivers a robust virtual machine environment for Citrix XenDesktop, while DataCore provides high availability and high performance storage for the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization platform.”
 
Performance
The second imperative with desktop virtualization is performance. DataCore demonstrated how its 'Mega Cache' feature can enable system administrators to run hundreds and thousands of virtual desktops simultaneously, delivering an unsurpassed user experience due to real-time performance.
 
DataCore makes high availability SANs practical – offering non-stop storage and high performance for Citrix and Microsoft Hyper-V environments
 
DataCore’s cost-effective, upgradable software based approach eliminates the need to buy expensive new SANs to attain robust shared storage essential to live migration and workload failover in Citrix and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.
 
“Many customers are stunned by the high costs and major overhaul generally proposed to put a new shared storage configuration in place,” cautions Price. “And there’s no getting past the sticker shock after hearing that 90% of their virtualization budget will be chewed up just to roll in a new SAN.” “Instead, DataCore storage virtualization software recasts all of their storage and any extra servers they may have into a fully virtualized, highly available, shared storage pool at a fraction of the cost, without compromising performance, functionality or peace of mind.”
 
Citrix + DataCore customer spotlight:
Washington Archives Management
“The bigger picture here is that technology like this has previously been prohibitively expensive for a small to mid-size business customer,” comments Tom Radford, System Administrator, Washington Archives Management. “Sure, large companies have been deploying virtual servers and virtual SANs, but they have had to pay a huge price for doing so. DataCore's SANmelody enables the small business to get this kind of virtualization environment built and to do so without paying for Fibre Channel or paying over $100,000 for the SAN alone, which is what has made having a SAN unattainable for a large number of customers - before DataCore paved the way.”