Today at Citrix Synergy, the conference where mobile workstyles and cloud services meet, Citrix and NetApp announced an extension of their current collaboration aimed at accelerating the adoption of enterprise cloud deployments. Together, Citrix and NetApp will provide a fully integrated cloud orchestration and storage solution that will address storage automation, resource allocation, and virtual machine backup and recovery. The move greatly simplifies cloud storage deployment for the companies’ mutual customers and will result in faster transitions to private and hybrid clouds.

Over the past few years, cloud computing has evolved from a simple public compute utility model that addressed the needs of individual developers to one that has fundamentally shifted how enterprises deliver, manage, and consume IT services throughout their organizations.

Today, product integrations with NetApp® storage enable Citrix CloudPlatform to discover and seamlessly incorporate NetApp storage as primary and secondary storage. Moving forward, collaboration between the two companies will build on this existing success with a focus on combining NetApp unified storage solutions and Data ONTAP®, the world’s number one storage operating system, with both Citrix CloudPlatform and the Apache CloudStack project, providing users with a cloud-ready storage environment that will optimize storage utilization, simplify maintenance, and accelerate the transition to an agile data infrastructure.

Key Highlights

These integrations between Citrix and NetApp technology will focus on the following capabilities:

• NetApp OnCommand® Unified Manager. Support in Citrix CloudPlatform and Apache CloudStack will automate the provisioning and administration of storage service offerings within the product’s self-service portal, increasing agility while decreasing service deployment times based on policy-based resource allocation.
  

• NetApp virtual storage console (VSC) for Citrix XenServer®. NetApp plug-in for XenCenter empowers Citrix administrators to provision, deduplicate, resize, and delete storage repositories on NetApp storage. In VDI deployments, NetApp VSC for Citrix XenServer allows for cloning tens of thousands of VMs almost instantaneously with NetApp FlexClone® technology.