Citrix Speeds Mobile Application Delivery With NetApp All Flash FAS

“Introducing NetApp all-flash arrays into our software development process has reduced storage latency up to tenfold, enabling us to increase the number of tests we can run and the accuracy of our results,” said Satish Sambandham, senior manager, product development, Citrix Systems, Inc.. “NetApp all-flash arrays give our engineering team the scale-out capacity, performance, and non-disruptive operations we need to deliver new features in our flagship XenApp and XenDesktop product lines with utmost speed and quality.“

Citrix has more than 300,000 customers worldwide that use its software to drive productivity and improve quality of life for workers around the globe. Citrix constantly improves and updates its products to deliver value to customers. However, manual testing of software was time consuming. Citrix wanted to improve efficiency and move further into DevOps by introducing new capabilities for automation.

Citrix needed a solution that could support automated testing on a large scale, drive down latency and would work well with the Xenserver and NFS shared storage. The company evaluated a variety of flash storage solutions and chose NetApp, Inc. because of its performance, flexibility, rich data management features, and the relationship between the two companies.

The team deployed FlexPod converged infrastructure with NetApp All Flash FAS storage systems running the clustered Data ONTAP OS for non-disruptive operations.

After installing the AFF storage system, Citrix noticed improvement. The team can run up to 125 tests in parallel, and with increased frequency. Testing at scale is consistent, fast, and reliable, and tests no longer need to be extended or repeated.

With this solution, Citrix can: