Today at Citrix Synergy, the event where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet, Citrix Systems, Inc. announced a variety of new offerings for its Citrix Cloud Center (Citrix C3) product family to further equip service providers with the infrastructure and product licensing needed to deliver successful clouds services to their customers. Following up to the initial debut of Citrix C3 last Fall, Citrix is now enhancing the C3 platform with the addition of Citrix® XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop, enabling service providers to deliver Windows applications and desktops as a service. Central to this added functionality is the new Citrix Service Provider (CSP) program which is designed specifically for service providers who provide hosted software services to end users. In addition, Citrix C3 has been updated to include new scalable, secure, multi-tenant virtual switch and application delivery controller capabilities. To further help customers gain experience with new cloud-based scenarios, Citrix is also unveiling a series of Citrix C3 Cloud Blueprints, which offer guidelines and best practices for testing virtualization, security and application services in a cloud environment. With these enhancements to the Citrix C3 platform and program – including the new Citrix C3 Lab based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) separately announced today – Citrix is providing an essential set of resources that help make cloud computing a reality for customers of all sizes.

“We have been extremely pleased to partner with Citrix to offer fast, reliable and secure cloud services for our customers,” said Alvin Kok, Chief, Alatum, Singapore Telecommunications Limited. “By leveraging Citrix C3, we have been able to bring tremendous cost savings and business values for enterprises, SMBs and government agencies alike, which are all great differentiators for us in this economic climate.”

Product Enhancements

The updates to the Citrix C3 product family enable service providers to create secure, highly performing, multi-tenant cloud infrastructure environments in a cost effective manner. New capabilities include:

• Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop – The incorporation of these two products into Citrix C3 enable service providers to take their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings to a new level. With Citrix C3, service providers can now effectively deliver any Microsoft Windows applications in the Software as a Service (SaaS) model and even deliver Windows Desktops as a Service (DaaS).
• The CSP program – The newest Citrix channel partner offering, the CSP program is designed specifically for service providers who provide hosted software services to end-user customers. The CSP program addresses the service provider market for offsite and multi-tenant hosting, where the end-user customer is not the licensee. The CSP program extends to service providers the “right to use” Citrix products as the underpinning of their delivery infrastructure and gives them the flexibility of a monthly “active subscriber” pricing and licensing model. Service providers always have access to the most current versions of Citrix products available in the program and only pay for actual end-user usage recorded during the previous calendar month.
• Citrix NetScaler VPX – A virtual appliance version of Citrix® NetScaler® (see today’s separate announcement), the new Citrix NetScaler VPX will be added to Citrix C3, enabling service providers to run multiple NetScaler instances simultaneously and provide true, cost-effective multi-tenancy web application delivery. In addition, service providers will be able to ensure the best application performance and most reliable service delivery by “cloud balancing,” which allows load balancing across multiple cloud infrastructures.
• Citrix XenServer – One of the key components of Citrix C3, XenServer™ will soon be enhanced with a new distributed virtual switch add-on to enable secure, multi-tenant, highly scalable public clouds. The switch will partition network traffic on a per-application basis, with resource and security guarantees, and offer full visibility into and control over inter-VM traffic both within a server and virtual network overlay.

Cloud-Proven Resources for SMBs and the Enterprise

As cloud computing continues to ride the hype/awareness cycle, corporations of all sizes are contemplating how to incorporate the cloud into their long range plans from both technology and business process perspectives. To answer these needs, Citrix is now providing Citrix C3 Lab Blueprints, giving IT professionals a set of common scenarios to test and prototype application compatibility, stage applications, as well as gain experience in datacenter-cloud interactions. The Citrix C3 Lab Blueprints provide architectural overviews, deployment guides, tips and tricks and discussion forums.

Availability

Citrix C3, with XenApp and XenDesktop, is available today. The Citrix Service Provider Program will be effective starting June 1, 2009. A technological preview of NetScaler VPX will be available for free download from Citrix.com on May 18, 2009. A technological preview of XenServer virtual switch for XenServer 5.5 will be available for free download from Citrix.com on June 1, 2009. Access to the Citrix C3 Lab and Citrix C3 Lab Blueprints is available today – to get started please visit http://community.citrix.com/display/cdn/Citrix+C3+Lab.