Citrix Enables Business Continuity for Hyper-V Customers

Extending its strategic virtualization partnership with Microsoft, Citrix Systems, Inc. announced  a new version of its virtualization management solution for Microsoft Hyper-V. The new Citrix Essentials 5.5 for Microsoft Hyper-V will now include Citrix StorageLink Site Recovery, a powerful set of tools that make end-to-end business continuity accessible, affordable, and easy to deploy. Citrix will make the solution available in both an Express edition, to provide customers an easy way to test and deploy disaster recovery, and as part of a full-featured Platinum edition.

As virtualization becomes more broadly deployed in corporate datacenters, companies of all sizes are increasingly moving mission-critical applications into virtual machine environments, enhancing the need for proven and reliable disaster recovery systems. Site recovery solutions for virtual environments, however, have remained complex and expensive to implement.  

Now, with the new StorageLink Site Recovery capability from Citrix, customers will be able to setup, test and manage disaster recovery services, including utilization of storage hardware for replication, through a single console, using a set of intuitive operations. In addition, new features in StorageLink Site Recovery allow customers to test ‘what-if’ disaster recovery scenarios, ensuring confidence that systems can be restored in the event of an outage. Customers can also choose to integrate recovery services directly with their existing systems management applications, making it easier than ever to protect key assets. In total, StorageLink Site Recovery provides customers with a comprehensive end-to-end solution that orchestrates the implementation, management, testing and failover processes – at significant savings when compared to alternate solutions.

“Customers are looking for a reliable, rapid site recovery strategy that isn’t time-consuming to implement and expensive to manage,” said Garth Fort, general manager of System Center marketing, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp. “We’re working with Citrix to deliver a configurable and integrated solution that removes the complexity associated with competitive solutions. With its new site recovery technology, Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V gives customers an easy way to improve disaster recovery and bullet proof application and data availability.”   

Citrix Extends Microsoft Server Virtualization,
Minimizing Risk in Deploying Disaster Recovery Services
As a result of this collaboration, Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center customers are able to minimize risk in introducing disaster recovery services by gaining immediate access to StorageLink Site Recovery Express, which is part of Citrix Essentials 5.5 for Microsoft Hyper-V Express edition. This edition allows recovery of unlimited Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines on up to two host servers at no additional charge. Organizations that require protection for more than two host servers can easily upgrade to the broader Platinum edition of Citrix Essentials 5.5 for Microsoft Hyper-V.

“We are continuing to build further capabilities into our virtualization management products. As we have done in desktop virtualization, our collaboration with Microsoft has once again resulted in solutions that bring a high degree of value to our joint customers. Customers that want to develop proof-of-concepts with disaster recovery services can deploy the Citrix Essentials 5.5 for Microsoft Hyper-V Express edition and those that want the functionality for their entire virtualization farm can upgrade to the Platinum edition. We will continue this partnership to extend our StorageLink Site Recovery solution to include additional business continuity services,” said Lou Shipley, vice president and general manager of virtualization management for the Datacenter and Cloud division at Citrix.

“Customers can reduce risk and administrative time by using proven automated disaster recovery solutions to support virtual infrastructures,” said Andrew Manners, vice president, marketing, HP StorageWorks. “By leveraging HP StorageWorks’ advanced virtual array features, StorageLink Site Recovery helps customers ensure critical business data is accessible in the event of disasters by automatically configuring replication and controlling failover of Microsoft Hyper-V environments.”

StorageLink Site Recovery
Enhances Full Citrix Essentials Solution
The new StorageLink Site Recovery technology available in the Citrix Essentials 5.5 for Microsoft Hyper-V offers advanced virtualization management capabilities that extend the benefits of Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center. These capabilities include dynamic provisioning services for deploying physical and virtual workloads from a single consolidated image, workflow management to automate IT processes, and lab and stage management for automating the lifecycle of software development processes. StorageLink Site Recovery adds disaster recovery services to these existing capabilities.

“It is difficult to align systems, networking and storage teams for disaster recovery planning and implementation. Then in the event of a disaster the same teams have to coordinate recovery. Disaster recovery can be an insurmountable task for organizations lacking either budget or expertise. The Citrix-Microsoft solution solves these challenges,” said Barry Barnett, senior systems engineer at OSIsoft, provider of highly-scalable and secure infrastructure for the management of real-time data and events.

Pricing and Availability
StorageLink Site Recovery is available immediately with Citrix Essentials 5.5 for Microsoft Hyper-V Platinum edition. The StorageLink Site Recovery Express edition will be available for download on December 23, 2009, as part of Citrix Essentials 5.5 for Microsoft Hyper-V Express edition.

Customers can download Citrix Essentials 5.5 for Microsoft Hyper-V Express edition free of charge. Citrix Essentials 5.5 for Microsoft Hyper-V Platinum edition is available for download at the following suggested list price:

• Express edition – available as a free download
• Enterprise edition – $1,500 per physical server
• Platinum edition – $3,000 per physical server