Cisco & Citrix Extend Their Cloud and VDI Alliance
October 12, 2011
Cisco and Citrix, which paired up a year ago September to cash in on virtualized desktops, are expected to announce Wednesday that they’ve signed a five-year strategic alliance to collaborate on the technology and its marketing. They will also share the costs…
They’re after large-scale high-definition (HDX) virtual desktop deployments. So far they’ve only managed to collect 100 customers and a drop-in-the-bucket 100,000 desktops, a pitiful showing for companies of their size and influence that claim to deliver the industry’s highest virtual desktop densities and best performance.
The first deliverable out of the new pact is for Cisco networking to be made Citrix HDX-aware by the end of the calendar year.
Cisco said it will deliver a new release of its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) optimized for Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix HDX technology.
Announced as part of the next phase of Cisco’s VXI (Virtualization Experience Infrastructure) – its validated virtual workspace solution – WAAS is supposed to enhance the performance of virtual desktops and applications over Cisco networking infrastructure by up to 70%, cut bandwidth by up to 60%, support twice as many virtual desktops and in the process cut costs.
The Cisco widgetry is actually supposed to work with both virtual and physical desktops, provide a LAN-like experience and print faster.
Cisco says that with physical desktops, its Identity Services Engine (ISE) knows what type of device is accessing the network, what information that device can obtain, and where it is – like inside a company firewall or in a public area.
Cisco’s Unified Computing System servers are credited with contributing to the improvements by doubling the fabric capacity, quadrupling bandwidth to the server, reducing latency by 40% and expanding the number of virtual desktops supported in a single UCS management domain by over 500%.
Cisco suggests that all this increased intimacy with Citrix won’t impact its close relationship with virtualization market leader VMware.
In Q4 Citrix and Cisco expect to deliver their optimized user experience for virtual desktops and applications on Cisco’s rich media, voice, video and collaboration endpoint devices.
That means its Virtual Experience Clients (VXCs) – otherwise known as Linux-based thin clients – and its Cius tablet will be integrated with Citrix’ XenDesktop and Citrix’ Receiver universal software client.
Cisco also expects to put out a software appliance, a Cisco VXC 4000, that’s supposed to repurpose a traditional PC and make it into a media-capable virtual desktop client that accesses corporate applications and data virtually, and uses local media processing for real-time collaboration.
It will work with both XenDesktop and VMware View on either XP or Windows 7 desktops. A voice-supported version is targeted for global availability in Q4 too.
The worldwide hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market is expected to reach 70 million units or 15% of enterprise desktops and laptops by 2014 according to Gartner.