More than 10% of global Fortune 500 companies have downloaded and activated the Citrix XenServer virtualisation platform for production use in the past four months, according to Citrix Systems.
Activations among large enterprises, with over 150 000 user downloads, surged significantly after the release of the free XenServer 5.5 in June, notes the company.
Nick Keene, country manager of Citrix Systems SA, says: “Our traction within the global Fortune 500 is growing much faster than expected. The number of large enterprises putting it into production purely for server virtualisation in the last few weeks has been nothing short of amazing.”
Citrix believes the interest in XenServer 5.5 is due to it lowering the entry price of virtualisation, saving companies costs as budgets shrink.
The company says XenServer allows users to deploy and centrally manage full enterprise-class virtualisation on any number of servers with no upfront costs.
“Many industry observers assumed a free XenServer product would not have much appeal outside of medium enterprises and large-scale cloud providers,” says Keen, adding that the download figures from Fortune 500 companies seem to contradict this.
Related stories:
Citrix updates XenServer functionality
IT 'consumerisation' hits the enterprise
The desktop goes virtual
Share