Some friends of ours over at 360is have come up with a clever way of displaying their capabilities and services around XenServer: a free administration poster. This rounds up such things as internal networking diagrams, essential commands, guests & templates and hardware essentials in an easy-to-read overview, ready to print out and keep handy in a XenServer-based data-centre. There are 2 versions of the poster, a printer-friendly black & white option or, as Nick describes it, a "printer toner industry stimulus package": the midnight version.
More information here: http://360is.blogspot.com/2009/03/xenserver-administration-poster.html
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Monday, 16 March 2009
Financial Times column piece
I know I've been particularly slack the last few weeks and not updated my blog. There are plenty of things to write about and I will get round to them, but there simply aren't enough hours in the day at the moment.
In the meantime, I'm very proud to be able to say I have been published in the Financial Times' Digital Business section under the Personal View column. For reasons of copyright, I can't re-publish it here but I can link to it so here it is: http://tinyurl.com/a8w34h
In the meantime, I'm very proud to be able to say I have been published in the Financial Times' Digital Business section under the Personal View column. For reasons of copyright, I can't re-publish it here but I can link to it so here it is: http://tinyurl.com/a8w34h
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Citrix XenServer to become free
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.
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.
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.
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