Year: 2015

Last week, Citrix held its annual Synergy conference in Orlando. During the conference Citrix made several announcements which will be summarized in this blogpost.

Citrix Workspace Cloud, which is a Software as a Service offering is capable of managing what Citrix calls workspace services, both on-premises or in the cloud. The Workspace Services consists of:

• Applications and Desktops, providing secure access to virtual Windows, Linux, web apps, and desktops using XenApp and XenDesktop
• Mobility Management, providing mobile app delivery and device security based on XenMobile
• Secure Documents, which provides share, sync and secure content from cloud and on-premises storage services based on ShareFile
• Lifecycle Management, providing blueprinting, automation and management for the design and deployment of enterprise workloads such as XenDesktop, XenApp, XenMobile, NetScaler and Citrix WorkSpace Suite
• Concierge, providing real-time support and service for workspace subscribers allowing for remote support of mobile and web applications.

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Last Friday, Storage Newsletter published an article written by Jared Rinderer a senior research analyst at the Equity Capital Research Group stating that Cisco is planning to acquire Nutanix. While the news isn’t officially announced by either Cisco or Nutanix, Rinderer provides an extensive analysis detailing the reasoning behind this expected acquisition.

Nutanix, provider of converged infrastructure, basically a physical server containing both compute and storage driven by an Installed Hypervisor of choice, this server, called a node can be stacked allowing storage to be shared in a single storage pool. Nutanix was founded in 2009 and since then was funded for a total of more than 312 million dollar. The latest funding round was in September last year where Nutanix raised 140 million dollar. Besides Nutanix also SimpliVity and VMware with its EVO:RAIL solution provide similar solutions.

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During its annual Synergy conference last week, Citrix announced the availability of Service Pack 1 for version 6.5 of its virtualization platform XenServer. Version 6.5 of XenServer was released in January this year, as covered by virtualization.info at that time.

Service Pack 1 provides the following new functionality:

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12 years ago, in 2003, virtualization.info started to track virtualization market and, in 2010, cloudcomputing.info was launched as a sister publication with a focus on the cloud computing market.

In these 12 years .info News team evolved as these markets themselves have done.

Alessandro Perilli, founder and former chief editor of both publications, joined Gartner as Research Director and now is GM of Cloud Management Strategy at Red Hat where has been recently joined by Massimo.

Claudio has been hired from Google and others were also absorbed from Fortune 500 companies or founded their own. These successes confirm the talent of those who contributed and are still contributing to our mission: tracking the evolution of virtualization and cloud computing markets, as well as their technology impact in the IT world, offering ahead of the curve, exhaustive coverage of both industries.

Today we are pleased to welcome Alessandro Fontana as the latest addition to our team.

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Last week, Microsoft held its annual Ignite conference in Chicago, Illinois. Ignite is the new name for a series of technical conferences targeted to IT Professionals, which replaces the earlier Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) and TechEd conferences among others.

During this technical event, several announcements were made which are summarized below.

Windows Update for Business

Windows Update for Business will be a free service for Windows Pro and Enterprise devices. Windows Update for Business is build on top of Windows Update and targeted towards end-user devices within business. Windows Update for Business will provide Distribution rings, maintenance windows, peer to peer delivery and will integrate with existing management tools like System Center. More information about Windows Update for Business can be found here.

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Citrix announced its financial results for first quarter 2015.

The revenues for the first quarter were $761 million for an increase of 1% compared to Q1 2014.

Net income was $29 million and non-GAAP operating income was $106 million, a decrease compared to $119 million for Q1 2014.

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VMware released the results about its growth for Q1 2015.

VMware, announced a total  revenue growth of $1.51 billion, for an increase of 11 percent compared to Q1 2014. License revenues were $576 million, with an increase of 3% from same quarter last year.

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VMware has released a paper titled: "VMware AlwaysOn Desktop Design Guide". The paper which contains 30 pages describes a high-availability solution for virtual desktops (VDI) and is based on View in VMware Horizon 6.

The design described in this guide can help organizations to build a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for non-stop access to desktops hosted in the data center. The design covers streamlined application updates, enhanced data security, and mobile access for users. Two-factor authentication and hypervisor-based antivirus protection provide maximum security.

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Microsoft has released a free ebook titled:"Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Field Experience". System Center Operations Manager provides the monitoring component as part of the Microsoft System Center Suite.

The book which contains 128 pages covers field experiences and will help you understand what you can do to enhance your Operations Manager environment, and will give you the opportunity to better understand the inner workings of the product, even if you are a seasoned Operations Manager administrator.

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In February this year, VMware acquired Immidio including its products AppScriber and Immidio Flex+. Now VMware has rebranded the product as VMware User Environment Manager.

User Environment Manager is available as standalone product or as a part of VMware Horizon Enterprise. Citrix customers can also take advantage of User Environment Manager as part of the VMware Horizon Application Management Bundle. User Environment Manager licenses are available on a named user/device or per concurrent connection basis.