PHD Virtual Technologies Announces Citrix Investment

PHD Virtual Technologies, in backup and recovery for virtual machines, has signed an investment agreement with Citrix Systems. In coordination with the arrangement, Insight Venture Partners made an additional funding investment. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

"PHD Virtual Technologies is a prime addition to the rapidly growing XenServer ecosystem with the recent expansion of its enterprise-class backup and recovery offerings to include Backup for Citrix XenServer,” said Andy Cohen, senior director of strategic development, Citrix. “The technology and team make PHD Virtual Technologies a strong partner and attractive investment opportunity. We look forward to working with them to meet the needs of joint customers and continue to grow our opportunities in the server virtualization market.”

“As our customers virtualize increasingly critical workloads, they want the flexibility of a heterogeneous hypervisor environment and scalable systems management tools. The business objectives of the Citrix XenServer Product Group and PHD Virtual are very much aligned,” said Thomas Charlton, Chairman and CEO of PHD Virtual Technologies. “We will use this financing event to accelerate our worldwide expansion and capitalize on the market opportunity that exists for our technology in XenServer and XenDesktop deployments.”

“We are happy to have Citrix join PHD Virtual as shareholders and strategic partners. XenServer and XenDesktop are both growing very strongly and have tremendous growth potential in the virtualization market,” said Michael Triplett, Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners. “We are pleased to extend PHD Virtual’s unique software architecture, and best-in-class backup and disaster recovery for virtual environments to support both XenServer and XenDesktop.”

PHD Virtual has just announced their new Backup for Citrix XenServer product which builds on the robust legacy of the award-winning esXpress 4.0. PHD Virtual’s products are the only enterprise data protection solutions that operate independent of the hypervisor offering greater stability and more security. Customers got their first look at the new XenServer product during the recent Citrix Synergy in San Francisco.

Using PHD Virtual Backup for Citrix XenServer,
customers will enjoy the benefits of:

• The fastest and most cost effective backup that minimizes storage requirements
• The most reliable solution for data integrity with source side deduplication and enhanced self healing backups
• And since PHD Virtual’s products already support XenDesktop, leveraging the same solution across their virtual environment.

PHD Virtual Backup for Citrix XenServer will be commercially available in September.