Today at Citrix Synergy, the event where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet, Citrix Systems, Inc. announced the new Citrix Ready Open Storage Program. This new program makes it easy for third-party storage vendors to certify interoperability of their products with Citrix XenServer, using the company’s innovative new StorageLink technology. As a result, enterprise customers can rest assured that any environment virtualized with XenServer will work seamlessly with all of their existing storage, backup and disaster recovery systems. Because Citrix StorageLink technology is also available for the Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V platform, these certifications apply equally to servers virtualized with Hyper-V, ensuring unprecedented interoperability between XenServer, Hyper-V and all of the industry’s leading storage systems. Charter members of the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program incorporate more than 20 major storage vendors, including Brocade, CA, Dell, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, LSI, Microsoft Corp., NetApp and Symantec (see end of release for additional comments of support from partners).

Citrix StorageLink for XenServer

The Citrix StorageLink technology makes it easy for a company’s server and desktop virtualization infrastructure to fully leverage all the resources and functionality of existing storage systems. StorageLink reduces cost and complexity by providing one click access to native storage services and offers easy, wizard-driven storage setup and maintenance management for virtualization administrators. StorageLink is available to customers as part of the Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V product line, which offers a broad range of advanced virtualization management capabilities for both XenServer and Hyper-V environments.

“With the StorageLink capabilities in Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, Microsoft customers will be able to obtain even more value from their existing investments,” said Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization and System Center, Microsoft Corp. “By enabling our customers to use the high performance storage array capabilities with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, it makes it even easier for them to integrate virtualization into their existing IT frameworks, and allow them to create more scalable, manageable and agile virtual infrastructures.”

Citrix Ready Open Storage Program

The Citrix Ready Open Storage Program enables third-party storage vendors to verify that their products have been tested to deliver the following customer benefits:

• Optimal Use of Storage Capabilities: Ensures that capabilities built into existing storage arrays, such as thin provisioning, de-duplication, and off-host performance, can be easily and fully utilized by customers directly in their virtualization environment.
• Improved Server and I/O Performance: Allows for virtual machine (VM) operations such as cloning and snapshot requests to be implemented directly in the storage array, with no host involvement. This dramatically enhances total system performance and allows customers using virtualization to take full advantage of all the power and innovation provided in their storage systems with no compromise, just as they are able to do on bare-metal systems today.
• Consistent VM Storage Management: Connects storage to VM utilization in a manner consistent with existing storage practices, allowing each VM its own storage when viewed from a storage management perspective. In the past, customers using virtualization have been forced to keep VMs on a single storage volume, which makes it extremely difficult for storage administrators to monitor their existing storage management systems.
• Industry Standard Support: StorageLink technology supports industry standard Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and offers easily implemented custom adapters for non-SMI-S arrays. It also supports storage on both iSCSI and FibreChannel interconnects.
• Improved Security: Using StorageLink, customers can optionally perform SAN fabric zoning for improved security. Fabric zoning provides hardware level assurance that only authorized servers are allowed access to the storage environment.
• Multi-Hypervisor Interoperability: StorageLink enables a wide range of storage solutions to work seamlessly with XenServer, Hyper-V, and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, and includes interoperability features between the two virtualization platforms. This breadth of interoperability gives customers support for two of the fastest-growing virtualization platforms in the industry. No matter what their business needs, customers have a choice of a solutions that can help them reduce operational complexity for users and development and test costs for partners.

Detailed technical information, SDKs and test kits can be found in the Citrix Communities site.

Citrix Ready Product Verifications Up Four-Fold in Last Year

The Citrix Ready Open Storage Program is just one aspect of the company’s efforts to ensure broad third-party support for Citrix products. Citrix has demonstrated the continued momentum of its Citrix Ready Program by adding more than 1,800 product verifications representing a wide range of technologies from the datacenter to the desktop, a four-fold increase over the past 12 months. The company has achieved this exponential growth by innovatively expanding the Citrix Ready Program with new self-service partner test kits, introducing the Citrix Ready Virtual Lab as a cloud service and creating the Web 2.0-based Citrix Ready Community Verified site which allows users to share Citrix compatibility information online.

“The Citrix Ready program continues to enable customers to rapidly deploy Citrix products with confidence alongside our partner ecosystem,” said John Fanelli, vice president of solutions and community marketing at Citrix. “In addition to quadrupling the number of partner products verified in just twelve months, we are continuing to expand the value of the Citrix Ready program through new and innovative programs, such as the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program.”

About the Citrix Ready Program

The Citrix Ready program identifies verified solutions that are trusted to enhance the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, the company’s end-to-end infrastructure for application delivery. The Delivery Center includes Citrix® XenApp™, Citrix® XenDesktop™, Citrix® XenServer™ and Citrix® NetScaler®. The Citrix Ready designation is awarded to third party products that have successfully met verification criteria set by Citrix, and gives customers an added confidence in the compatibility of the joint solution offering. Citrix Ready leverages industry-leading alliances and partner ecosystems to create solutions designed to meet various customer needs. Program incorporates over 2800 partners and who have demonstrated more than 9600 product verifications. Citrix earned industry recognition for the program earlier this year with its win of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) 2009 Alliance Excellence Award, because of its ability to create a strong community of alliances through implementation of new, innovative best practices. For more information about the Citrix Ready program can be found on the Citrix website. Citrix Systems » Citrix Ready Program