Citrix Systems, Inc. today announced the general availability of the Citrix® NetScaler® VPX™ virtual appliance (see separate news release titled, “Citrix NetScaler Goes Virtual”) and unveiled a new Citrix Ready™ Open Networking Program to support it. The new program establishes a powerful partner ecosystem to support Citrix NetScaler VPX, the industry’s only leading application delivery and load balancing solution that is available as a virtual appliance. With the introduction of the Open Networking Program, Citrix is making it easier for ISVs, enterprise customers and cloud infrastructure providers to create powerful virtual networking solutions they can confidently integrate with a broad range of partner solutions already verified to work with NetScaler VPX.

“The availability of the NetScaler VPX virtual appliance will put complete web application delivery functionality within the reach of any organization adopting Oracle Applications,” said Tom Herrmann, vice president, global ISV management and programs at Oracle. “Through our Application Integration Architecture for Partners initiative, Citrix and Oracle have worked closely to validate and document how NetScaler appliances enhance the delivery of Oracle Applications. By making NetScaler available as a virtual appliance, Citrix is making it easy for Oracle Applications customers of all sizes to obtain these same benefits.”

Open Networking Program

The Citrix Ready Open Networking Program establishes a broad partner ecosystem to support the deployment of virtualized NetScaler services into nearly any environment. By leveraging the program, Citrix customers can confidently build comprehensive application delivery infrastructures using NetScaler VPX and integrate with a multitude of partner solutions:

• Platform Partners - Provide a broad array of deployment options for NetScaler VPX software.
• Application Partners - Validate interoperability with NetScaler VPX and deliver turnkey solutions with tightly-integrated NetScaler load balancing and application delivery.
• Cloud and Hosting Providers - Offer on-demand application networking to customers in both shared and dedicated service models.
• Solution Partners - Complement NetScaler VPX functionality to provide holistic and comprehensive solutions, including cloud-based messaging security and flexible identity management products.

“SoftLayer Technologies is proud to add the Citrix NetScaler VPX virtual appliance to our portfolio of cloud-based services,” said Nathan Day, chief technology officer and co-founder of SoftLayer. “With NetScaler VPX, SoftLayer can now provide our customers with the industry’s best load balancing and application optimization as an on-demand, cloud-based service.”

“Joyent is excited to offer NetScaler VPX virtual appliances on demand,” said David Young, CEO and Founder of Joyent. “Joyent customers with applications running in the Joyent Public Cloud can now benefit from world-class load balancing, application acceleration and security functionality of NetScaler.”

Charter members of the new Citrix Ready Open Networking Program partners include Ankeena, Apere, Arista, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Joyent, Oracle, SoftLayer, Trend Micro and Vyatta. A complete list of certified partners and solutions can be found at http://www.citrix.com/ready/list/products?family=netscaler%20VPX.

NetScaler VPX Virtual Appliance

Since its May 2009 debut as a publicly available tech preview release, NetScaler VPX has been downloaded and evaluated by thousands of enterprise customers and cloud infrastructure providers eager to bring needed flexibility and efficiency to their datacenters. Now available for general purchase, NetScaler VPX is poised to expand the market for advanced web application delivery technology.

“Availability of software-based application delivery controllers (ADCs), especially those offering advanced feature sets, will drive a significant expansion of the overall ADC market,” said Joe Skorupa, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. “Soft ADCs will emerge as a strategic platform for enterprise architects to optimize the delivery of mission-critical applications.”

NetScaler VPX makes it simple and cost effective for organizations of all sizes to deploy market-leading application delivery capabilities for every web application. By combining broad platform support, affordable licensing and gigabit performance, NetScaler VPX brings advanced application delivery technology to both common and emerging customer scenarios not addressed by appliance-only deployments:

• Making Shared Services Work in Cloud and Enterprise Datacenters - NetScaler VPX enables next generation multi-tenancy architectures, bringing application-specific and tenant-specific acceleration, security and traffic management close to the application in a flexible software tier. This complements NetScaler MPX hardware appliances at the data center edge that are handling large-scale services common to all tenants.
• On-demand Load Balancing and Application Delivery - For the first time, industry-leading application delivery and load balancing can be provisioned as an on-demand service by cloud and hosting providers seeking to enhance the elasticity and profitability of their offerings. Datacenter architectures are freed from the inherent rigidity of appliance-only solutions.
• Moving NetScaler Upstream in the Application Lifecycle - NetScaler VPX makes critical application optimization, security and management technology capabilities readily accessible to development teams so that application delivery can be “baked” into the application. Additionally, it addresses thorny configuration support and change management issues by allowing evaluation of application delivery policies in test and stage environments, before promoting into production environments.

Free NetScaler VPX Express Edition

For easy evaluation and limited production deployments, Citrix is offering NetScaler VPX Express Edition, which can be downloaded and activated at no cost. NetScaler VPX Express provides all IT professionals - including networking managers and application development and test teams - a simple, risk-free option to evaluate advanced web application delivery technology. It also provides an affordable option for inserting NetScaler technology into non-production test and development environments, allowing policy and configuration changes to be tested before they are promoted into a live environment.

“The overwhelming customer response to our NetScaler VPX solution validates our strategy to expand the overall market for NetScaler technology by making it available as a virtual appliance,” said Klaus Oestermann, vice president and general manager of the NetScaler Product Group, Citrix Systems. “The Open Networking Program is a powerful ecosystem around which customers can confidently build integrated, efficient application delivery infrastructures using leading technologies and products.”

Pricing and Availability

NetScaler VPX is available today from Citrix Solution Advisors worldwide. In addition to being available with Standard, Enterprise and Platinum Edition feature sets, NetScaler VPX Express Edition can be downloaded for free from http://www.citrix.com/netscalervpxexpress. NetScaler VPX is also available as an on-demand, cloud-based service from cloud vendors such as SoftLayer.