According to rumours in the press today, XenServer will soon be given away free of charge. As this is very new news, I don't know the ins and outs, I'm sure we will hear more over the coming days, but, if it's true, this would be something of a sensation. We can supposedly expect an announcement on Monday 23rd February.
As I understand it, the XenServer Enterprise product, as it is at the moment, will become free of charge. The only thing that is currently available in the Enterprise Edition that will be removed in the free one is the automated HA functionality. Obviously the extended HA possibilities that the Marathon tie-up enabled will also remain a chargeable option, nor will Provisioning Server (currently available in the Platinum Edition) be included. However XenMotion, XenCentre, Resource Pooling and all the other cool stuff will be in the free edition. Existing users will be able to download a new license file free each year. None of this has officially been confirmed yet I hasten to add.
Apparently, Citrix are aligning themselves with Hyper-V and are bringing out a set of management tools, called Citrix Essentials (not at all confusing, considering Citrix have another product called Access Essentials!) These tools will manage both XenServer and Hyper-V environments and Citrix will charge for these instead of the hypervisor technologies.
My initial thoughts are twofold:
Firstly, this move is perfectly in sync with the original dogma of the Xen project: that hypervisors - and, more broadly, virtualisation - should be free to everyone. Simon Crosby and Prof. Ian Pratt, the two main XenServer gurus at Citrix, have always said that this technology has such profound benefits, it should become a standard as quickly as possible and should, therefore, not be subject to the barrier of a financial outlay. Effective management of these virtual environments, on the other hand, is fair game.
Secondly, VMWare are going to have a field day on this unless Citrix have some very well-prepared arguments. I'm sure they will do, a move like this will cause such a stir, it surely won't have been dreamed up over night, nevertheless I can see lots of headlines to the tune of "XenServer price now reflects real value of product" or "Citrix admits defeat and gives up virtualisation battle" by the VMWare lovers (and/or Citrix haters) out there.
Having said that, perhaps the laughs will also have a touch of nervousness about them too, once this sinks in. VMWare will certainly get a few cheap shots out of this announcement and good luck to them, but, in the long run, where does this actually leave them? Can they really withstand such an aggressive joint attack from Microsoft and Citrix? How long will VMWare be able to continue justifying their extortionate prices? Will Citrix continue to invest in XenServer? How will this announcement affect those users who have already bought XenServer?
Lots of questions. Hopefully we will get some answers over the next few days.
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Clouds on the horizon
With 2009 now well underway (Happy New Year everyone, I hope your festive periods were relaxing, fruitful and merry, although perhaps not in that order), it's time to look ahead and try and get some idea of where the famously speedy - and often shortlived - IT sector trends will take us this year.
Virtualisation, I think we can all agree, took a giant leap forward last year, with general acceptance, at least on a server level, showing signs of ever-increasing maturity. I can't imagine many of the major companies in the UK not now employing VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft or A.N.Other virtualisation vendor somewhere in their estate, whether in live usage or on test networks. The next step is of course ensuring desktop virtualisation catches on as well as server virtualisation has/is and VMWare and Citrix will no doubt continue their dogfight for a while to come. They both appear to be doing very much the same thing now on the VDI front, which is testament to the strength of their technologies on the one hand, but, on the other, has resulted in a straight drag-race to get the missing components of a real, workable virtual desktop infrastructure out there, tested and into production. By that I mean offline VDI, automisation, storage management and the other issues that experts like Brian Madden would like to see solved before VDI can go mainstream. Exciting stuff but I think nirvana is still some way off.
Obviously the economic environment will have an impact on IT spending but I'm so bored with the doom and gloom stories that help make recessions self-fulfilling prophesies that I refuse to take part in it.
Microsoft released their Windows 7 beta and promptly crashed their own download site after reportedly limiting it to 2.5 million copies. For the whole world. They have now taken away the limit so everyone can get it, but only until 24th January. It is significant that it took Microsoft over 5 years (after XP) to take Vista to market yet Windows 7 has a beta release just 13 months after the Vista release date. Despite Microsoft's pathetic protestations of Vista adoption "en masse", I hardly think we need any further proof that Vista was and is a total flop. Windows 7, however, should achieve what most IT vendors were hoping for months ago, namely the opportunity for customers to completely re-evaluate their IT strategy and refresh the whole kaboodle. For Citrix specifically, being such a dominant, infrastructure-level software, this is manna from heaven. The days of clumsy client-server computing might now, finally, be consigned once and for all to the past, with administrators hopefully replacing it with dynamic data-centres, accelerated web apps, virtualised infrastructures and a work-from-anywhere-with-anything-as-long-as-you're-working kind of approach.
Which brings me on to what I see as the most important trend, certainly within our sector of the market: Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS). Just to clarify for those unfamiliar with the terms: Cloud Computing involves removing the on-site infrastructure and licenses required to run your applications and purchasing a service from a 3rd party instead. None of the apps are then stored locally on your own premises, they are stored "in the cloud" so to speak, i.e. in the Internet, and provided to you according to your requirements, a bit like gas or electricity. Or even your telephone and, as with your phone, you pay a fixed fee per month or per year and are charged separately for overusage if you exceed your agreed limits.
So you take apps away from the desktop, stick them in a back-end datacentre somewhere and allow users to access them in a secure, controlled manner over the web. Haven't we heard this before somewhere? Citrix have been advocating and selling this style of application delivery very successfully for years with XenApp and its predecessors. So is SaaS complementary to Citrix? In my opinion, no. Not in the slightest. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Cloud Computing is as much of a competitor, long-term, to the Citrix/VMWare virtual infrastructure vision as, say, Google Apps presents to Microsoft Office. Ultimately, they will probably co-exist reasonably happily but I suspect battle has already commenced on a small scale.
I just wonder why you would buy into virtual desktops, put together the necessary infrastructure to run them, then have to support and maintain everything ad infinitum, when you can just pay someone else to do it all for you? And you can choke their throat rather than your own if it goes wrong. I may be wrong here but, with the advent of web front ends for most corporate apps, added to the fact that about 90% of new apps are being developed for the web, SaaS appears to me to be a more logical and cost-effective route to go down, especially outside of the large enterprise space.
Where Citrix and VMWare can get involved, and both have thrown their hats into the ring already, is by helping streamline the infrastructure that the SaaS providers need. Citrix have done this with Citrix Cloud Centre, which is basically NetScaler, WANScaler and XenServer cobbled together. But this has nothing to do with the core business of XenApp and, as I see it, neatly sidesteps XenDesktop almost entirely.
Naturally, a lot of companies are jumping on this bandwaggon and a lot has been written about it. I have found several interesting articles such as Jeremy Geelan listing what he sees as the top 50 companies in this space, Stephen Arnold stating who he thinks is leading the wave and The Register with a usage poll. There are, as with everything, plenty of plus and minus points to Cloud Computing and I will discuss these, as well as going into a bit more detail around the threats and opportunities I see for Citrix, in a separate article in the next few days.
Virtualisation, I think we can all agree, took a giant leap forward last year, with general acceptance, at least on a server level, showing signs of ever-increasing maturity. I can't imagine many of the major companies in the UK not now employing VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft or A.N.Other virtualisation vendor somewhere in their estate, whether in live usage or on test networks. The next step is of course ensuring desktop virtualisation catches on as well as server virtualisation has/is and VMWare and Citrix will no doubt continue their dogfight for a while to come. They both appear to be doing very much the same thing now on the VDI front, which is testament to the strength of their technologies on the one hand, but, on the other, has resulted in a straight drag-race to get the missing components of a real, workable virtual desktop infrastructure out there, tested and into production. By that I mean offline VDI, automisation, storage management and the other issues that experts like Brian Madden would like to see solved before VDI can go mainstream. Exciting stuff but I think nirvana is still some way off.
Obviously the economic environment will have an impact on IT spending but I'm so bored with the doom and gloom stories that help make recessions self-fulfilling prophesies that I refuse to take part in it.
Microsoft released their Windows 7 beta and promptly crashed their own download site after reportedly limiting it to 2.5 million copies. For the whole world. They have now taken away the limit so everyone can get it, but only until 24th January. It is significant that it took Microsoft over 5 years (after XP) to take Vista to market yet Windows 7 has a beta release just 13 months after the Vista release date. Despite Microsoft's pathetic protestations of Vista adoption "en masse", I hardly think we need any further proof that Vista was and is a total flop. Windows 7, however, should achieve what most IT vendors were hoping for months ago, namely the opportunity for customers to completely re-evaluate their IT strategy and refresh the whole kaboodle. For Citrix specifically, being such a dominant, infrastructure-level software, this is manna from heaven. The days of clumsy client-server computing might now, finally, be consigned once and for all to the past, with administrators hopefully replacing it with dynamic data-centres, accelerated web apps, virtualised infrastructures and a work-from-anywhere-with-anything-as-long-as-you're-working kind of approach.
Which brings me on to what I see as the most important trend, certainly within our sector of the market: Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS). Just to clarify for those unfamiliar with the terms: Cloud Computing involves removing the on-site infrastructure and licenses required to run your applications and purchasing a service from a 3rd party instead. None of the apps are then stored locally on your own premises, they are stored "in the cloud" so to speak, i.e. in the Internet, and provided to you according to your requirements, a bit like gas or electricity. Or even your telephone and, as with your phone, you pay a fixed fee per month or per year and are charged separately for overusage if you exceed your agreed limits.
So you take apps away from the desktop, stick them in a back-end datacentre somewhere and allow users to access them in a secure, controlled manner over the web. Haven't we heard this before somewhere? Citrix have been advocating and selling this style of application delivery very successfully for years with XenApp and its predecessors. So is SaaS complementary to Citrix? In my opinion, no. Not in the slightest. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Cloud Computing is as much of a competitor, long-term, to the Citrix/VMWare virtual infrastructure vision as, say, Google Apps presents to Microsoft Office. Ultimately, they will probably co-exist reasonably happily but I suspect battle has already commenced on a small scale.
I just wonder why you would buy into virtual desktops, put together the necessary infrastructure to run them, then have to support and maintain everything ad infinitum, when you can just pay someone else to do it all for you? And you can choke their throat rather than your own if it goes wrong. I may be wrong here but, with the advent of web front ends for most corporate apps, added to the fact that about 90% of new apps are being developed for the web, SaaS appears to me to be a more logical and cost-effective route to go down, especially outside of the large enterprise space.
Where Citrix and VMWare can get involved, and both have thrown their hats into the ring already, is by helping streamline the infrastructure that the SaaS providers need. Citrix have done this with Citrix Cloud Centre, which is basically NetScaler, WANScaler and XenServer cobbled together. But this has nothing to do with the core business of XenApp and, as I see it, neatly sidesteps XenDesktop almost entirely.
Naturally, a lot of companies are jumping on this bandwaggon and a lot has been written about it. I have found several interesting articles such as Jeremy Geelan listing what he sees as the top 50 companies in this space, Stephen Arnold stating who he thinks is leading the wave and The Register with a usage poll. There are, as with everything, plenty of plus and minus points to Cloud Computing and I will discuss these, as well as going into a bit more detail around the threats and opportunities I see for Citrix, in a separate article in the next few days.
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
Signing off
Well that's it folks, I'm on holiday now until 5th January so a last few words to wish you all a very merry Christmas and an even merrier New Year. Or, if you're Chinese, enjoy continuing work as normal until January 26th.
It's been an eventful year, virtualisation has taken a foothold and steadily makes its way towards mass market, only now to be replaced with the next IT buzzwords: Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS) - more on that in the New Year.
Citrix tricked us all into attending 2 Summits in Orlando, when actually Summit will not now happen in the autumn (which was the reason behind having a second Summit and aligning it properly), it's happening in the spring in Las Vegas. Still, I didn't mind, I got to play 4 new fantastic Florida golf courses.
The usual software product updates showed no sign of slowing down, XenApp 5.0 was probably the most important of these, although XenServer 5.0 was a huge improvement too, and XenDesktop finally hit the market.
The COMPUTERLINKS product portfolio shrunk, then grew, then shrunk a bit and we were ultimately snapped up by Barclays Private Equity. The credit crunch started to nip at our ankles, then steadily worked its way up the leg -and is now well and truly savaging many companies' crown jewels.
Personally, I can look back on a very successul and rewarding 12 months. Work has been good, we have shown considerable growth this year, and I got married in September to the most wonderful person in the world. Still can't get used to wearing this ring though, I've already (almost) lost it several times.
And, last but not least, I am extremely pleased about the birth, and subsequent first unsteady steps, of this blog. In just 7 months, it has gone from zero to... wait for it... over 1,000 visitors! And, for 6 or 7 weeks of that, my Google Analytics counter wasn't working properly, so it's actually probably many more than that. I am truly over the moon that people share an interest in what I write and I look forward to continuing with it next year. Until then, I wish all readers a very enjoyable and relaxing festive period. Be good - and if you can't be good, be good at it.
Rupert
It's been an eventful year, virtualisation has taken a foothold and steadily makes its way towards mass market, only now to be replaced with the next IT buzzwords: Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS) - more on that in the New Year.
Citrix tricked us all into attending 2 Summits in Orlando, when actually Summit will not now happen in the autumn (which was the reason behind having a second Summit and aligning it properly), it's happening in the spring in Las Vegas. Still, I didn't mind, I got to play 4 new fantastic Florida golf courses.
The usual software product updates showed no sign of slowing down, XenApp 5.0 was probably the most important of these, although XenServer 5.0 was a huge improvement too, and XenDesktop finally hit the market.
The COMPUTERLINKS product portfolio shrunk, then grew, then shrunk a bit and we were ultimately snapped up by Barclays Private Equity. The credit crunch started to nip at our ankles, then steadily worked its way up the leg -and is now well and truly savaging many companies' crown jewels.
Personally, I can look back on a very successul and rewarding 12 months. Work has been good, we have shown considerable growth this year, and I got married in September to the most wonderful person in the world. Still can't get used to wearing this ring though, I've already (almost) lost it several times.
And, last but not least, I am extremely pleased about the birth, and subsequent first unsteady steps, of this blog. In just 7 months, it has gone from zero to... wait for it... over 1,000 visitors! And, for 6 or 7 weeks of that, my Google Analytics counter wasn't working properly, so it's actually probably many more than that. I am truly over the moon that people share an interest in what I write and I look forward to continuing with it next year. Until then, I wish all readers a very enjoyable and relaxing festive period. Be good - and if you can't be good, be good at it.
Rupert
Friday, 12 December 2008
Citrix always gets the blame
I know this is geek humour rather than real humour, but I found an amusing entry this morning on Computerworld blogs, which I hope they don't mind me slightly amending here. Just goes to show why Citrix brought out EdgeSight - Citrix automatically gets the blame for everything!
A user catches their administrator in the hallway and asks her to look at his PC, because Microsoft Outlook takes soooo long to come up when he launches it. "I thought maybe he was referring to a Citrix log-in problem, as my organization works in a Citrix environment," says admin. "I watched him log into Outlook and saw a reminder window pop up."
Then several more reminders appear. And more. And still more.
When the count reaches about 20, the user tells admin that this is going to take a while. Admin offers to clean them out while user goes back to his meeting.
"Apparently he had not been 'dismissing' any of his appointment reminders in quite some time," admin says. "It took over an hour for all the reminders to finally come up. And no wonder - this user had 1,611 of them. I have now shown him how to dismiss an appointment, so hopefully they won't stack up again."
A user catches their administrator in the hallway and asks her to look at his PC, because Microsoft Outlook takes soooo long to come up when he launches it. "I thought maybe he was referring to a Citrix log-in problem, as my organization works in a Citrix environment," says admin. "I watched him log into Outlook and saw a reminder window pop up."
Then several more reminders appear. And more. And still more.
When the count reaches about 20, the user tells admin that this is going to take a while. Admin offers to clean them out while user goes back to his meeting.
"Apparently he had not been 'dismissing' any of his appointment reminders in quite some time," admin says. "It took over an hour for all the reminders to finally come up. And no wonder - this user had 1,611 of them. I have now shown him how to dismiss an appointment, so hopefully they won't stack up again."
Monday, 8 December 2008
Citrix XenServer: Phoenix from the flames?
It's been over a year now since Citrix announced their acquisition of XenSource and eventually re-branded not only the server virtualisation product to XenServer but also their flagship product, Presentation Server, to XenApp. The theory behind this was that the term Xen = virtualisation and the second section of the word simply denoted which kind. XenDesktop followed earlier this year and, not forgetting NetScaler, we had the Citrix Delivery Center (sic).
As an original distributor of XenSource before the acquisition, we have been pushing XenServer for some time now. As such, it has been really disappointing for it not to have taken off in the way we all wanted. This is, of course, music to VMWare's ears and Mike DiPetrillo, a VMWare employee and prolific blogger, took a swipe at it a few weeks ago. Furthermore, one of the analysts I speak to quite regularly ceased regarding XenServer as a viable competitor in the server virtualisation space quite some time ago. All in all, not great news, particularly when you recall the extent of Citrix's investment. 500 million dollars was looking like a snip when you considered how heavily the announcement rained on VMWare's IPO parade, but, at that stage, the sales were expected to back up that PR coup much more effectively than they have. Even Roger Baskerville has jumped ship and I've met few people more enthusiastic about XenServer as he was (with the notable exception of Simon Crosby of course).
All of this puts me in a slightly difficult position. Regular readers might expect me to try and vindicate the XenServer-naysayers; they would no doubt also expect me to pour considerable scorn over Citrix's continued claims that it is gaining in market share and they would surely expect me to join the growing ranks of doubters about its future. In actual fact, a part of me wants to because it would be both easy and fun, but, after careful consideration, I won't do anything of the sort. And here's why.
Citrix XenServer is only now, with the recent version 5.0 release, capable of going toe-to-toe with VMWare and not coming away with much more than perhaps a bit of a fat lip. Unfortunately for Citrix, all the hype around XenServer was at a time when the product was, shall we say, in the "catching-up phase" and VMWare didn't have many problems defending its territory. Nowadays, it is a much more able competitor, as recent high-profile wins at Tesco and SAP have gone some way to proving. Customers will see a completely different product in proof of concepts now - one that has undergone 3 major releases in a year and is now true enterprise class.
Secondly, there is still a massive market out there for virtualisation. Virtually (pun fully intended) every presentation I've seen in the past couple of years has included a slide saying only 8%/10%/12% of servers are currently virtualised. Talking to one of my contacts at Citrix recently, he highlighted an article that the magazine The Economist had recently published stating that data centres account for 1.5% of America's carbon emissions - and this figure is growing each year. Bearing in mind the airline industry accounts for 1.8% (and think how much criticism they come under), should we not be thinking about ways to reduce this before the tree-huggers realise and start torching our X5s?
If you put XenApp on XenServer, Citrix tell us you can get 73% more users on a box. If someone brought out a product that reduced the airline industry's carbon emissions by 73%, they'd be a very rich person indeed. That last statement is deliberately obtuse and wildly inaccurate by the way, but you get the point - recession or no recession, there is a lot of cash out there and, regardless of VMWare's revenues, Citrix XenServer is still ideally positioned to be successful because it solves a major problem. I listened to an excellent soothsayer at the COMPUTERLINKS University recently. Do you know what people will spend most of their IT budgets on in the next few years? Correct. Virtualisation.
Thirdly, I just get the feeling there is too much going on for it not to be a success in the end. Citrix have signed OEM agreements with Dell, HP, NEC and one or two others, they have teamed up with Marathon to offer industry-leading high availability and NetApp and Dell EqualLogic on the storage side, they seem to be able to develop at about twice the speed of others, you can interchange XenServer VMs with Microsoft VMs as and when you like, they have a great industry spokesman in Simon Crosby, the market is going the way they want and, perhaps most significantly, COMPUTERLINKS is no longer the leading disti in the UK. I say this with a tinge of irony because of course it's been great being top disti for XenServer most of the year but, having now been overtaken, it's a sign that the big boys in the Citrix channel are starting to take it on, not just the specialists that have been selling it up to now.
Don't get me wrong, VMWare will remain the top dog for a long time to come but don't write off Citrix XenServer just yet. If nothing else, it gives customers a real choice for a change.
As an original distributor of XenSource before the acquisition, we have been pushing XenServer for some time now. As such, it has been really disappointing for it not to have taken off in the way we all wanted. This is, of course, music to VMWare's ears and Mike DiPetrillo, a VMWare employee and prolific blogger, took a swipe at it a few weeks ago. Furthermore, one of the analysts I speak to quite regularly ceased regarding XenServer as a viable competitor in the server virtualisation space quite some time ago. All in all, not great news, particularly when you recall the extent of Citrix's investment. 500 million dollars was looking like a snip when you considered how heavily the announcement rained on VMWare's IPO parade, but, at that stage, the sales were expected to back up that PR coup much more effectively than they have. Even Roger Baskerville has jumped ship and I've met few people more enthusiastic about XenServer as he was (with the notable exception of Simon Crosby of course).
All of this puts me in a slightly difficult position. Regular readers might expect me to try and vindicate the XenServer-naysayers; they would no doubt also expect me to pour considerable scorn over Citrix's continued claims that it is gaining in market share and they would surely expect me to join the growing ranks of doubters about its future. In actual fact, a part of me wants to because it would be both easy and fun, but, after careful consideration, I won't do anything of the sort. And here's why.
Citrix XenServer is only now, with the recent version 5.0 release, capable of going toe-to-toe with VMWare and not coming away with much more than perhaps a bit of a fat lip. Unfortunately for Citrix, all the hype around XenServer was at a time when the product was, shall we say, in the "catching-up phase" and VMWare didn't have many problems defending its territory. Nowadays, it is a much more able competitor, as recent high-profile wins at Tesco and SAP have gone some way to proving. Customers will see a completely different product in proof of concepts now - one that has undergone 3 major releases in a year and is now true enterprise class.
Secondly, there is still a massive market out there for virtualisation. Virtually (pun fully intended) every presentation I've seen in the past couple of years has included a slide saying only 8%/10%/12% of servers are currently virtualised. Talking to one of my contacts at Citrix recently, he highlighted an article that the magazine The Economist had recently published stating that data centres account for 1.5% of America's carbon emissions - and this figure is growing each year. Bearing in mind the airline industry accounts for 1.8% (and think how much criticism they come under), should we not be thinking about ways to reduce this before the tree-huggers realise and start torching our X5s?
If you put XenApp on XenServer, Citrix tell us you can get 73% more users on a box. If someone brought out a product that reduced the airline industry's carbon emissions by 73%, they'd be a very rich person indeed. That last statement is deliberately obtuse and wildly inaccurate by the way, but you get the point - recession or no recession, there is a lot of cash out there and, regardless of VMWare's revenues, Citrix XenServer is still ideally positioned to be successful because it solves a major problem. I listened to an excellent soothsayer at the COMPUTERLINKS University recently. Do you know what people will spend most of their IT budgets on in the next few years? Correct. Virtualisation.
Thirdly, I just get the feeling there is too much going on for it not to be a success in the end. Citrix have signed OEM agreements with Dell, HP, NEC and one or two others, they have teamed up with Marathon to offer industry-leading high availability and NetApp and Dell EqualLogic on the storage side, they seem to be able to develop at about twice the speed of others, you can interchange XenServer VMs with Microsoft VMs as and when you like, they have a great industry spokesman in Simon Crosby, the market is going the way they want and, perhaps most significantly, COMPUTERLINKS is no longer the leading disti in the UK. I say this with a tinge of irony because of course it's been great being top disti for XenServer most of the year but, having now been overtaken, it's a sign that the big boys in the Citrix channel are starting to take it on, not just the specialists that have been selling it up to now.
Don't get me wrong, VMWare will remain the top dog for a long time to come but don't write off Citrix XenServer just yet. If nothing else, it gives customers a real choice for a change.
Wednesday, 26 November 2008
Almost ir-RES-istible
Last week I attended the Distributor Conference for RES Software, one of the multitude of Citrix/VMWare eco-system vendors. If you haven't heard about RES, you should really take a look - it's one of the software makers that doesn't get half the respect it deserves. And I don't say that just because COMPUTERLINKS works with them as a distributor, but because I know what a great product they offer.
RES are a Dutch company based in the south of the Netherlands, not too far from Eindhoven. They actually have an enormous feature list but only (currently) two products: Powerfuse and Wisdom. Oddly, the huge list of capabilities represents as much of a challenge as it does an opportunity. Whilst a particular feature may prove a deal-clincher for one company, it may be totally irrelevant for the next. On the other hand, with the software capable of solving so many problems, it is highly unlikely there won't be one killer feature in there for everyone, thus pretty much any company that uses IT is a potential target.
In the same way as Citrix XenDesktop releases the operating system from its dependence on the device (as XenApp does with applications), Powerfuse essentially gives the "user workspace" independence from the operating system. By a workspace, RES mean all the personal settings that a user has, everything from the background picture of their kids to mapped drives and printers and email signatures. This is a very powerful ideology, particularly with the advent of virtual desktops, or VDI, and, as such, it is no surprise that RES count VMWare just about as important a partner as Citrix. Having said that, RES doesn't actually care how you deliver/deploy/install your apps, it works for every way.
Personally, I believe Citrix should have bought RES rather than the Sepago technology they did acquire to solve the problem of roaming profiles, they would have got an awful lot more functionality in RES. Brian Madden counts user workspace management as one of the 5 things he thinks need to happen before VDI can really take off. I have no idea why they didn't buy them, but then I am not privy to that sort of information. I can only presume they would've been too expensive, I would be surprised if the reason had had anything to do with the actual product.
The 2nd product, Wisdom, is a runbook automation product that relieves administrators of many painful and laborious tasks, such as setting up new user accounts, automating provisioning of resources, turning off devices overnight etc. Some of the techies here at COMPUTERLINKS worked out you could save the cost of Wisdom licenses in 6-9 months, just by turning off a few PCs at night and saving the energy they sap. Software that pays for itself in 9 months on one single feature is pretty good in anyone's book.
To be honest, some of what RES offers can be done in other ways, for example with group policies and Active Directory, however the simplicity of RES, added to the sheer amount of functionalities available, are certainly the major buying factors. Security is another one. A good example might be giving a user (doctor perhaps) a specific USB key (by registering the serial number of the USB to that person) and only allowing access to the system when the key is plugged into the device. As I say: possible with other products of course, but there really aren't any other vendors out there who can do so much for so little money.
RES is not without its challenges, not least in terms of awareness. Many have simply not heard of them. AppSense is RES' main competitor, particularly in their home market of the UK, however RES do offer one big advantage for British resellers and distributors and that is that, somewhat refreshingly, they refuse to take end user deals direct. AppSense are famous, or perhaps infamous, within the channel for betraying their partners when they feel like it.
I can't do RES any real justice on a short blog, except to recommend a trial. See for yourself. As regular readers will know, my blogs are fiercely independent and I wouldn't laud a product so openly if I didn't genuinely believe it myself.
RES are a Dutch company based in the south of the Netherlands, not too far from Eindhoven. They actually have an enormous feature list but only (currently) two products: Powerfuse and Wisdom. Oddly, the huge list of capabilities represents as much of a challenge as it does an opportunity. Whilst a particular feature may prove a deal-clincher for one company, it may be totally irrelevant for the next. On the other hand, with the software capable of solving so many problems, it is highly unlikely there won't be one killer feature in there for everyone, thus pretty much any company that uses IT is a potential target.
In the same way as Citrix XenDesktop releases the operating system from its dependence on the device (as XenApp does with applications), Powerfuse essentially gives the "user workspace" independence from the operating system. By a workspace, RES mean all the personal settings that a user has, everything from the background picture of their kids to mapped drives and printers and email signatures. This is a very powerful ideology, particularly with the advent of virtual desktops, or VDI, and, as such, it is no surprise that RES count VMWare just about as important a partner as Citrix. Having said that, RES doesn't actually care how you deliver/deploy/install your apps, it works for every way.
Personally, I believe Citrix should have bought RES rather than the Sepago technology they did acquire to solve the problem of roaming profiles, they would have got an awful lot more functionality in RES. Brian Madden counts user workspace management as one of the 5 things he thinks need to happen before VDI can really take off. I have no idea why they didn't buy them, but then I am not privy to that sort of information. I can only presume they would've been too expensive, I would be surprised if the reason had had anything to do with the actual product.
The 2nd product, Wisdom, is a runbook automation product that relieves administrators of many painful and laborious tasks, such as setting up new user accounts, automating provisioning of resources, turning off devices overnight etc. Some of the techies here at COMPUTERLINKS worked out you could save the cost of Wisdom licenses in 6-9 months, just by turning off a few PCs at night and saving the energy they sap. Software that pays for itself in 9 months on one single feature is pretty good in anyone's book.
To be honest, some of what RES offers can be done in other ways, for example with group policies and Active Directory, however the simplicity of RES, added to the sheer amount of functionalities available, are certainly the major buying factors. Security is another one. A good example might be giving a user (doctor perhaps) a specific USB key (by registering the serial number of the USB to that person) and only allowing access to the system when the key is plugged into the device. As I say: possible with other products of course, but there really aren't any other vendors out there who can do so much for so little money.
RES is not without its challenges, not least in terms of awareness. Many have simply not heard of them. AppSense is RES' main competitor, particularly in their home market of the UK, however RES do offer one big advantage for British resellers and distributors and that is that, somewhat refreshingly, they refuse to take end user deals direct. AppSense are famous, or perhaps infamous, within the channel for betraying their partners when they feel like it.
I can't do RES any real justice on a short blog, except to recommend a trial. See for yourself. As regular readers will know, my blogs are fiercely independent and I wouldn't laud a product so openly if I didn't genuinely believe it myself.
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
It's a NetScaler Jim, but not as we know it
I think it's fair to say the NetScaler product line has never really been regarded by most as an integral part of the Citrix portfolio. Or at least the technology behind it is not typically something you would associate with Citrix. The buyers are different, the established Citrix channel partners don't always have the networking background required for it and Citrix's arch-rivals in this space, F5, do not compete on anything else that Citrix do. Citrix bought NetScaler a few years ago as a result of the great name it had made for itself powering most of the top portals on the web (Google, Amazon, MSN, Betfair and so on). Citrix rarely hesitate to remind you that 75% of Internet users go through a NetScaler box on any given day. However, the considerable success in the dot-com arena has not been replicated on the corporate side and F5 have had the finance sector, in particular, pretty much sewn up. Until recently that is. Such things as Microsoft Sharepoint and other vendors basing their future innovations very much around web-based front ends are pushing NetScaler's talents further into the limelight. NetScaler revenues from corporates are, for the first time ever, now superceding the dot-com results. Citrix's latest initiative is to build on recent customer successes in accelerating XenApp farms and, by convincing some of the more archetypal Citrix partners to take it on, try and fold this hitherto apparently undesirable stepchild into the Citrix family bosom.
The approach is to be two-fold. NetScaler is essentially a load balancer but has a huge array of more advanced capabilities such as offloading SSL traffic, application firewalling (from the purchase of Teros), multiplexing TCP connections, SSL VPN, caching and compression, to mention but a few. Often, a customer will buy NetScaler for just one or two of these capabilities but end up using more and more of them once the box is in and they become familiar with it.
XenApp is a domineering software, both in the sense that it is resource hungry as well as being a mission-critical, infrastructure-level software so load balancing is critical to performance. XenApp has a much more refined system of assigning users logging in to servers than Microsoft's default "round-robin" system, however it becomes problematic when you need to take things further and introduce fail-over data centres or more advanced DR capabilities for example. Global server load balancing and pro-active, on-the-fly content switching play a large part in enabling a more fault-tolerant, disaster-proof infrastructure, not to mention performance enhancements for the users. NetScaler can also improve XenApp farm performance considerably by relieving the servers of a lot of the XML brokering required to render applications and, of course, accelerating Web Interface, which a lot of companies now use instead of Program Neighborhood (sic).
This is, perhaps strangely, a relatively untapped market for Citrix but one with lots of potential and, crucially, one in which F5 are always going to be on the back foot. Citrix have optimised NetScaler for use with XenApp and competitors naturally aren't going to be able to compete. It is common knowledge that Citrix have over 200,000 customers. For non-disclosure reasons, I can't say how many of those currently employ NetScaler to do what I have outlined in this article, but we were told the figure at Summit last week and it is low.
The second factor that should help align NetScaler more closely with the general Citrix message is the dynamic data centre scenario that has been talked about for a while now. I wrote an article a few months ago about "green IT" (which I published on this blog in September) where I talked about how, in a perfect world, the use of servers (or even whole data centres) could be, or perhaps even should be, aligned more precisely to actual consumption requirements. Basically, I was advocating turning on boxes when they're needed and switching the things off when they're not. NetScaler could play a vital role in this.
The GSLB option does what you'd expect. In the event of a data centre fall-out, all traffic is re-routed elsewhere with no need for any DNS changes. Not only that, it also provides pro-active optimisation of traffic so users get the best service possible, regardless of where they are in the world. Add into the mix the other things NetScaler excels at - policy-based access control, SSL VPN, app firewalling (PCI DSS anyone?) etc. - and NetScaler arguably becomes not just integral, but actually the lynchpin of the truly dynamic data centre. Which is something of an improvement on being an unwanted stepchild.
And finally, we must remember the latest IT buzzword on everyone's lips: "cloud computing". Citrix announced at VMWorld that they now not only have the Citrix Delivery Center (sic) but also C3 - Citrix Cloud Center. This is an amalgamation of XenServer, WANScaler, Workflow Studio and, of course, NetScaler, designed specifically for this new wave of computing that many expect to overtake current architectures relatively quickly. (But cloud computing is a whole topic in its own right and, as such, shall be reserved for a future blog where I hope to also include some reflections on the recent tie-up with Akamai as I believe this could be crucial.)
Will all this help to sell more NetScalers? Almost certainly. I've not even talked about:
1) the fact that Citrix have developed configuration wizards to ease NetScaler deployments,
2) how easy it can be to convince an Access Gateway customer to upgrade to a NetScaler,
3) the imminent release of v9.0 where we can expect specific application integration and
4) that training programs are going online and will cost about 20% of what they used to.
There's a whole lot more to NetScaler than initially meets the eye, it's just a question of whether resellers (and customers) will see it.
The approach is to be two-fold. NetScaler is essentially a load balancer but has a huge array of more advanced capabilities such as offloading SSL traffic, application firewalling (from the purchase of Teros), multiplexing TCP connections, SSL VPN, caching and compression, to mention but a few. Often, a customer will buy NetScaler for just one or two of these capabilities but end up using more and more of them once the box is in and they become familiar with it.
XenApp is a domineering software, both in the sense that it is resource hungry as well as being a mission-critical, infrastructure-level software so load balancing is critical to performance. XenApp has a much more refined system of assigning users logging in to servers than Microsoft's default "round-robin" system, however it becomes problematic when you need to take things further and introduce fail-over data centres or more advanced DR capabilities for example. Global server load balancing and pro-active, on-the-fly content switching play a large part in enabling a more fault-tolerant, disaster-proof infrastructure, not to mention performance enhancements for the users. NetScaler can also improve XenApp farm performance considerably by relieving the servers of a lot of the XML brokering required to render applications and, of course, accelerating Web Interface, which a lot of companies now use instead of Program Neighborhood (sic).
This is, perhaps strangely, a relatively untapped market for Citrix but one with lots of potential and, crucially, one in which F5 are always going to be on the back foot. Citrix have optimised NetScaler for use with XenApp and competitors naturally aren't going to be able to compete. It is common knowledge that Citrix have over 200,000 customers. For non-disclosure reasons, I can't say how many of those currently employ NetScaler to do what I have outlined in this article, but we were told the figure at Summit last week and it is low.
The second factor that should help align NetScaler more closely with the general Citrix message is the dynamic data centre scenario that has been talked about for a while now. I wrote an article a few months ago about "green IT" (which I published on this blog in September) where I talked about how, in a perfect world, the use of servers (or even whole data centres) could be, or perhaps even should be, aligned more precisely to actual consumption requirements. Basically, I was advocating turning on boxes when they're needed and switching the things off when they're not. NetScaler could play a vital role in this.
The GSLB option does what you'd expect. In the event of a data centre fall-out, all traffic is re-routed elsewhere with no need for any DNS changes. Not only that, it also provides pro-active optimisation of traffic so users get the best service possible, regardless of where they are in the world. Add into the mix the other things NetScaler excels at - policy-based access control, SSL VPN, app firewalling (PCI DSS anyone?) etc. - and NetScaler arguably becomes not just integral, but actually the lynchpin of the truly dynamic data centre. Which is something of an improvement on being an unwanted stepchild.
And finally, we must remember the latest IT buzzword on everyone's lips: "cloud computing". Citrix announced at VMWorld that they now not only have the Citrix Delivery Center (sic) but also C3 - Citrix Cloud Center. This is an amalgamation of XenServer, WANScaler, Workflow Studio and, of course, NetScaler, designed specifically for this new wave of computing that many expect to overtake current architectures relatively quickly. (But cloud computing is a whole topic in its own right and, as such, shall be reserved for a future blog where I hope to also include some reflections on the recent tie-up with Akamai as I believe this could be crucial.)
Will all this help to sell more NetScalers? Almost certainly. I've not even talked about:
1) the fact that Citrix have developed configuration wizards to ease NetScaler deployments,
2) how easy it can be to convince an Access Gateway customer to upgrade to a NetScaler,
3) the imminent release of v9.0 where we can expect specific application integration and
4) that training programs are going online and will cost about 20% of what they used to.
There's a whole lot more to NetScaler than initially meets the eye, it's just a question of whether resellers (and customers) will see it.
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