Twenty Storage Vendors Join Citrix Ready Open Storage Program

At Citrix Synergy, Citrix Systems, Inc. announced the new Citrix Ready Open Storage Program. This new program makes it easy for third-party storage vendors to certify interoperability of their products with Citrix XenServer, using the company’s innovative new StorageLink technology.

As a result, enterprise customers can rest assured that any environment virtualized with XenServer will work seamlessly with all of their existing storage, backup and disaster recovery systems. Because Citrix StorageLink technology is also available for the Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V platform, these certifications apply equally to servers virtualized with Hyper-V, ensuring unprecedented interoperability between XenServer, Hyper-V and all of the industry’s leading storage systems. Charter members of the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program incorporate more than 20 major storage vendors, including Brocade, CA, Dell, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, LSI, Microsoft Corp., NetApp and Symantec (see end of release for additional comments of support from partners).

Citrix StorageLink for XenServer
The Citrix StorageLink technology makes it easy for a company’s server and desktop virtualization infrastructure to fully leverage all the resources and functionality of existing storage systems. StorageLink reduces cost and complexity by providing one click access to native storage services and offers easy, wizard-driven storage setup and maintenance management for virtualization administrators. StorageLink is available to customers as part of the Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V product line, which offers a broad range of advanced virtualization management capabilities for both XenServer and Hyper-V environments.

“With the StorageLink capabilities in Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, Microsoft customers will be able to obtain even more value from their existing investments,” said Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization and System Center, Microsoft Corp. “By enabling our customers to use the high performance storage array capabilities with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, it makes it even easier for them to integrate virtualization into their existing IT frameworks, and allow them to create more scalable, manageable and agile virtual infrastructures.”

Citrix Ready Open Storage Program
The Citrix Ready Open Storage Program enables third-party storage vendors to verify that their products have been tested to deliver the following customer benefits:

• Optimal Use of Storage Capabilities: Ensures that capabilities built into existing storage arrays, such as thin provisioning, de-duplication, and off-host performance, can be easily and fully utilized by customers directly in their virtualization environment.
• Improved Server and I/O Performance: Allows for virtual machine (VM) operations such as cloning and snapshot requests to be implemented directly in the storage array, with no host involvement. This dramatically enhances total system performance and allows customers using virtualization to take full advantage of all the power and innovation provided in their storage systems with no compromise, just as they are able to do on bare-metal systems today.
• Consistent VM Storage Management: Connects storage to VM utilization in a manner consistent with existing storage practices, allowing each VM its own storage when viewed from a storage management perspective. In the past, customers using virtualization have been forced to keep VMs on a single storage volume, which makes it extremely difficult for storage administrators to monitor their existing storage management systems.
• Industry Standard Support: StorageLink technology supports industry standard Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and offers easily implemented custom adapters for non-SMI-S arrays. It also supports storage on both iSCSI and Fibre Channel interconnects.
• Improved Security: Using StorageLink, customers can optionally perform SAN fabric zoning for improved security. Fabric zoning provides hardware level assurance that only authorized servers are allowed access to the storage environment.
• Multi-Hypervisor Interoperability: StorageLink enables a wide range of storage solutions to work seamlessly with XenServer, Hyper-V, and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, and includes interoperability features between the two virtualization platforms. This breadth of interoperability gives customers support for two of the fastest-growing virtualization platforms in the industry. No matter what their business needs, customers have a choice of a solutions that can help them reduce operational complexity for users and development and test costs for partners.

Citrix Ready Product Verifications Up Four-Fold
in Last Year
The Citrix Ready Open Storage Program is just one aspect of the company’s efforts to ensure broad third-party support for Citrix products. Citrix has demonstrated the continued momentum of its Citrix Ready Program by adding more than 1,800 product verifications representing a wide range of technologies from the datacenter to the desktop, a four-fold increase over the past 12 months. The company has achieved this exponential growth by innovatively expanding the Citrix Ready Program with new self-service partner test kits, introducing the Citrix Ready Virtual Lab as a cloud service and creating the Web 2.0-based Citrix Ready Community Verified site which allows users to share Citrix compatibility information online.

“The Citrix Ready program continues to enable customers to rapidly deploy Citrix products with confidence alongside our partner ecosystem,” said John Fanelli, vice president of solutions and community marketing at Citrix. “In addition to quadrupling the number of partner products verified in just twelve months, we are continuing to expand the value of the Citrix Ready program through new and innovative programs, such as the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program.”

About the Citrix Ready Program
The Citrix Ready program identifies verified solutions that are trusted to enhance the Citrix Delivery Center product family, the company’s end-to-end infrastructure for application delivery. The Delivery Center includes Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix XenServer and Citrix NetScaler. The Citrix Ready designation is awarded to third party products that have successfully met verification criteria set by Citrix, and gives customers an added confidence in the compatibility of the joint solution offering. Citrix Ready leverages industry-leading alliances and partner ecosystems to create solutions designed to meet various customer needs. Program incorporates over 2800 partners and who have demonstrated more than 9600 product verifications. Citrix earned industry recognition for the program earlier this year with its win of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) 2009 Alliance Excellence Award, because of its ability to create a strong community of alliances through implementation of new, innovative best practices.

About Citrix Synergy 2009
Born as a user conference more than 10 years ago, Citrix Synergy has been completely reconceived as the industry’s premier thought leadership event where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet. Citrix Synergy combines several events into one registration, including Virtualization Congress, Network World Live, Geek Speak Live and the Citrix iForum User Conference. Attendees can benefit by attending a single track, or by combining sessions from various tracks to custom-build a conference to suit their individual needs. With insights from a wide range of industry luminaries, solutions from leading vendors, and shared experiences from customers, attendees will see a quick return on their investment. .

“Acronis is proud to be part of the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program,” said Michael Coney, Acronis president and general manager, Americas. “Acronis helps assure Citrix XenServer customers that their virtual machines and data will be fully protected. By seamlessly integrating Acronis’ image-based backup technology with Citrix XenServer, IT managers can easily migrate from physical to virtual servers with a single, easy-to-use application—and shield against data loss.”

“Brocade is pleased to be a part of the new Citrix Ready Open Storage Program. As a leader in both data center and campus networking solutions, Brocade has the products and deep expertise to help data-intensive businesses maximize their infrastructure investments within highly virtualized environments. Brocade has worked closely with Citrix to ensure that Brocade data center products are fully integrated with Citrix StorageLink via the open standards-based SMI-S protocol. Through this collaborative relationship, Brocade and Citrix are helping customers simplify the integration of server virtualization and data center solutions while streamlining the overall management process." said Doug Ingraham, senior director of product management for Data Center Infrastructure at Brocade.

“In order to maximize cost savings and simplify management, businesses need increasingly tighter integration between virtual and physical infrastructure components,” said Eric Pitcher, vice president, technology strategy for CA’s Recovery Management and Data Modeling Business Unit. “The Citrix Ready program helps enable this close technology alignment so that customers can be more efficient in protecting data, applications and their critical IT business process with Citrix XenServer, CA ARCserve Backup and CA XOsoft High Availability solutions.”

“Compellent provides networked storage products that offer elegant interoperability with whichever best-of-breed hardware and virtualization technologies suit our customers’ business needs,” said Steve Anderson, director of alliance marketing at Compellent. “For some time we’ve provided a seamless experience for customers operating Citrix XenServer environments through our integration of virtualized storage applications like thin provisioning and automated tiered storage. As a founding partner of the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program, we are joining with Citrix to increase the choices customers can make in their virtual data centers, while maintaining the ease of management, proactive support, scalability and performance of the Compellent Storage Center architecture.”

“Many large enterprises today are looking for ways to reduce operational costs and complexity through virtualization to consolidate their servers, applications and operations. However, the benefits that enterprises reap in support of application and server virtualization can be shifted through underutilization of storage assets to support the virtualization effort. With Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V with StorageLink technology along with CommVault Simpana software, joint customers of all sizes gain the benefits of virtualization while unifying data management across both virtual and physical environments with a single management interface. Our customers will be able to immediately see ROI from their virtualization efforts by maintaining existing processes to best protect, manage and recover storage attached to virtual or physical machines,” said Mark Eastman, director, Alliances, CommVault.

“StorageLink provides a rich integration point between DataCore’s Storage Virtualization Software and Citrix Essentials,” notes James Price, VP of product and channel marketing for DataCore. “Most virtual environments encompass diverse storage devices with disparate or non-existent management tools. 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.”

“As a founding member of the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program, we’ve tightly combined the capabilities of Citrix StorageLink and Dell’s EqualLogic product line. Together they simplify storage management and provide high-performance storage solutions to Dell customers,” said Praveen Asthana, director of worldwide marketing for Dell storage and networking. “Virtualization users won’t have to disrupt existing storage management processes or invest in a whole new set of tools – providing considerable total cost of ownership savings.”

“Emulex and Citrix have built a strong partnership focused on providing customers with highly transparent and efficient cross-platform management support of storage resources in virtualized environments and integrated support for Emulex’s entire LightPulse® HBA product line within XenServer and Essentials solutions,” said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development, Emulex. “In addition, we are collaborating to extend these benefits to customers deploying network convergence, through testing and qualification as part of the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program.”

“FalconStor is committed to simplifying our users’ experience when it comes to the management and protection of applications hosted on our storage virtualization platform,” said Bernie Wu, vice president of business development for FalconStor Software. “With our participation in the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program, FalconStor will be able to deliver solutions to our joint customers that are fully compatible and integrated. This will enhance the performance experience, improve the storage virtualization, and optimize the management operations of comprehensive storage and data protection solutions in Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V deployments.”

“Customers need simple, reliable and scalable data protection when they virtualize their server infrastructures,” said Kyle Fitze, marketing director, Storage Platforms Group, HP. “The Citrix Ready Open Storage Program combined with HP’s industry leading storage portfolio helps customers simplify the process and accelerate the benefits of data center virtualization.”

“Because of the benefits it provides in the areas of flexibility and cost savings, the use of server virtualization technology will clearly be a key part of the IT infrastructure moving forward,” said Pete O’Brien, vice president of business development at InMage. “Programs like the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program simplify the deployment of storage technology in XenServer-based environments while at the same time providing the reliability of certified multivendor configurations, two factors that will make it easier for customers to meet their data and application recovery requirements using joint solutions from Citrix and InMage.”

“The Citrix Ready Open Storage Program accelerates the integration of server virtualization with leading storage system capabilities to enable customers to regain control of their datacenter,” said Vic Mahadeven, vice president marketing and product management, Engenio Storage Group, LSI. “The combination of Citrix and LSI solutions will enable users to dramatically increase storage capacity and improve server utilization, yielding a more rapid return on investment with less disruption to system availability.”

“The Citrix Ready Open Storage Program fully leverages NetApp’s existing integration with Citrix StorageLink for XenServer and Hyper-V, enabling joint customers to streamline their virtualized environments by simplifying the management process between servers and storage,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions marketing at NetApp. “This joint solution, which was named the Citrix Ready Solution of the Year in 2008, also allows customers to better take advantage of NetApp’s unique storage efficiency and data management solutions across not only their NetApp environments but also across their heterogeneous storage infrastructure. As a result, server administrators benefit from NetApp’s wide range of native capabilities such as deduplication, thin provisioning, and virtual clones, freeing up valuable CPU cycles from their servers while maximizing the return of their virtual server and storage investments.”

“Like PHD Virtual, Citrix is committed to leveraging the existing virtualization resources customers have already invested in,” said Joe Julian, executive chairman, PHD Virtual. “The new Citrix Ready Open Storage Program helps to simplify the management processes for every aspect of storage, including infrastructure and backup of virtual machines. When Citrix XenServer is paired with PHD Virtual’s Xpress for Citrix XenServer, customers use the virtual infrastructure to back it up, enabling the most scalable high performance backup of a virtual environment, at a lower cost and with no additional hardware investments.”

“Citrix is right on the money by streamlining the integration of virtualization and storage, making life simpler for end users,” said Bob Maness, vice president of worldwide marketing and channel sales, Pillar Data Systems. “By combining Citrix StorageLink with Pillar’s Application-Aware Storage technology, customers can more easily bring the industry’s highest efficiency rates to their virtualized environments. In today’s market, users need lower costs, higher ROI and optimum performance, and together, we’re delivering that as part of our mission to make storage efficiency a realistic goal for everyone.”

“QLogic’s Fibre Channel and Ethernet product strategy is well aligned with the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program,” said Satish Lakshmanan, director of product marketing, Host Solutions Group, QLogic. “Given our ongoing commitment to open standards-based storage and data networking solutions for the enterprise, the Citrix product portfolio complements QLogic’s focus on delivering superior performance to the customer seeking virtualized solutions. We look forward to extending our partnership with Citrix and further integrating QLogic’s innovative storage and data networking I/O virtualization features and management technologies with Citrix StorageLink.”

“RELDATA’s Unified iSCSI storage solutions and Citrix StorageLink are a perfect match to deliver high performance, flexible and cost effective SAN storage to virtualization platforms,” said David Hubbard, president and CEO, RELDATA. “StorageLink’s access model aligns perfectly with RELDATA’s model of simply growing storage non-disruptively, as needed. Together our products will deliver flexible, high performance storage solutions that reduce cost and complexity of storage for our customers.”

“As a Citrix Ready partner, SteelEye addresses market demand for extended disaster recovery protection through the delivery of real-time data protection solutions for XenServer,” said Bob Williamson, EVP of product management, SteelEye. “The Citrix Ready Open Storage Program provides an innovative open platform to ease integration of critical storage into advanced virtualization platforms.”

“The Citrix Ready Open Storage Program simplifies integration of validated storage solutions in virtualized infrastructure,” said Mark Davis, CEO, Virsto Software. “Virsto Software is pleased to be working with Citrix to deliver to customers advanced storage solutions for multiple virtualization platforms.”

Chris Akerberg, president and chief operating officer, Vizioncore, Inc. stated: “We believe the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program is an excellent initiative to combat the growing storage challenges customers face when implementing virtualized infrastructures. As a market leader in virtualization data protection and management solutions, Vizioncore is pleased to see Citrix addressing the key customer requirement to integrate server virtualization with their incumbent storage networks.”

“We understand that managing storage across the different layers of a datacenter – virtual machines, array servers and physical servers – can be a daunting, time-consuming, multi-stage process,” said Eric Lomascolo, director of product management at Xiotech. “For this reason, we’re excited to be involved in the Citrix Ready program so we can better help our customers provision and manage their storage with the application’s needs in mind. It is this type of approach that is critical to managing storage now and over the next five years, with organizational storage needs predicted to grow at even faster rates than we’ve seen over the past decade."