Last week during the annual Citrix Synergy Summit, RackSpace announced the availability of a new hosted Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) offering in cooperation with Citrix.
The new platform features RackSpace comprehensive hosting services, leveraging Citrix technologies such as XenServer, XenDesktop and XenApp. The platform, however, is not limited to Citrix technologies. Customers access the environment using a site to site connection between the corporate network and the RackSpace infrastructure.
Virtual desktop infrastructure deployments are becoming more and more common, as Gartner predicts them to reach 70 million users by 2014.
However, VDI adoption poses technical challenges and requires close interaction between the desktop, storage, network, virtualization and data center teams. This, together with the high cost of infrastructure and management, might push customers to evaluate carefully an offer of hosted VDI.
RackSpace claims that by joining its forces with Citrix, the new platform may deliver quick deployment, easy scaling and cost effective management of a flexible, cloud based VDI, while satisfying compliance requirements and privacy concerns.