Citrix Systems, the global provider of application delivery infrastructure, has unveiled what it terms a groundbreaking new version of Citrix XenServer - the company's enterprise-class, cloud-proven virtualisation platform.
Citrix XenServer is free to everyone who wants to use it for unlimited production deployment, the company says. The basic hypervisors have been free for some time, but with the new XenServer, a new standard is set in providing free virtualisation for practical use in real world environments, says Citrix Systems. There are also additional features incorporated, such as centralised multi-node management, multi-server resource sharing and full live motion.
Lowering the entry price of virtualisation helps address today's challenging economic climate, by making enterprise-class virtualisation more accessible to businesses of all sizes, regardless of budget, the company says.
XenServer is powered by the same Xen virtualisation engine that runs almost every independent cloud today. It will accelerate the adoption of virtualisation by bringing the simplicity, scale and economics of the cloud to enterprise data centres, to the over 75% of corporate servers that are still not virtualised across the globe.
“This is a very positive move that has the potential to accelerate the adoption of virtualisation for enterprise customers of all sizes and make it easier for external cloud providers to add full Windows support to their existing Linux offerings. Anyone who dismissed XenServer in the past as a legitimate player in enterprise virtualisation, clearly owes it to themselves to take a look at this offering,” says Mark Bowker, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
“This move is all about accelerating the adoption of virtualisation by tearing down the barriers of cost and complexity that have been in place for far too long,” says Nick Keene, country manager of Citrix Systems South Africa. “The faster we can help customers virtualise the millions of servers that remain unvirtualised today, the sooner they can start adding significant value on top, transforming static data centres into dynamic delivery centres where every application, desktop and server workload is delivered as an on-demand service.”
The Citrix XenServer release will be available for download from the Citrix Web site and other download portals by the end of March 2009.
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