Today at Citrix iForum™, the world’s largest application delivery conference, Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS) announced a unique new PowerSmart capability designed to help customers reduce datacenter power consumption as a core property of their application delivery infrastructure. The new PowerSmart feature, which will be available as part of the company’s flagship Citrix Presentation Server™ product line, will enable customers set policies that automatically dial server power down based on application traffic levels, allowing companies to more effectively manage power during non-peak hours.

HP is the first server vendor to demonstrate support for the new PowerSmart feature in conjunction with its power management tools for the HP ProLiant portfolio of servers. By combining Citrix’s market-leading application delivery infrastructure with HP’s ability to help customers achieve better datacenter efficiency, customers can support green initiatives by increasing utilization of their existing infrastructure and lowering their consumption of power and cooling resources. As a result, they can go green while saving potentially millions in datacenter costs.

As companies of all sizes become increasingly dependent on applications to run their businesses, the cost and power consumption of datacenters has grown rapidly. In fact, according to Gartner, “most large enterprise IT organizations typically spend in the region of four to eight percent, in some cases 10 percent, of their total IT budgets on energy. But the twin factors of power hungry hardware and rising energy costs could lead to this figure rising by up to four times within five years.”¹ Using Citrix application delivery infrastructure helps IT organizations overcome these challenges by virtualizing servers in the datacenter, consolidating application workloads more efficiently and optimizing application traffic over the network. The addition of new features like PowerSmart improves this even further by enabling more intelligent server provisioning and load management based on specific knowledge of how applications are being used.

“The key to any effective response to green IT challenges is to be able to maintain, and even increase, the capacity of IT infrastructure while reducing its energy consumption. By powering down unused Presentation Servers during off-peak usage, we are helping our customers be more green and at the same time putting money right back into their wallets,” said Scott Herren, vice president and general manager, Application Virtualization Group, Citrix Systems. “We are poised to work with HP to further develop our green computing initiatives and enable customers to enhance their IT operations while reducing power requirements.”

“Working with Citrix, HP is helping customers achieve better business outcomes through reduced energy consumption, power costs, and the overall carbon footprint,” said Scott Farrand, vice president, Industry Standard Server Software, HP. “Our collaboration with Citrix on power management makes our server management tools even better for the user, the business and the environment.”

Availability

PowerSmart is compatible with all current versions and editions of Citrix Presentation Server and iLO-enabled HP servers. It will be available in December to all Citrix Presentation Server customers as a free download at www.citrix.com/cdn.