Dan's Take
Citrix Acquires Sanbolic
The move helps shore up a weakness in the Citrix lineup.
- By Dan Kusnetzky
- 01/12/2015
Citrix Systems Inc. just announced that it acquired Sanbolic to flesh out its technology portfolio to create software-defined datacenters. Here's the relevant information:
… Sanbolic technology enables customers to [use] software-defined storage to optimize the delivery of application-specific workloads, from any media type -- SSD, Flash and hard drives in NAS, SAN, server-side and cloud deployments -- improving storage load balancing, application availability and delivering the highest-performance end-user experience ...
Dan's Take: Now, Citrix Has All the Pieces
Citrix started its life as a supplier of access virtualization technology. That is, its first role was making it possible for users to access server-hosted applications, from a number of different client systems, as if those applications were running on the local machine.
Over time, other suppliers joined the party, including Microsoft, Wyse and VMware Inc. Citrix, however, offered tools allowing the largest array of client-side technologies to play with the largest selection of server platforms.
Later, Citrix acquired application virtualization, processing virtualization and network virtualization suppliers while it built a powerful set of management and security tools to manage and protect its virtualized environments (see this article to learn how the pieces of the model work together to create virtualized environments, and this one to learn how it relates to the popular catchphrase, "software-defined datacenters").
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The Kusnetzky Group Model of Virtualization. Citrix was weak in the Storage Virtualization layer.
What Citrix was missing, and what Sanbolic has in spades, is a complete, vendor-neutral, powerful storage virtualization product that supports the creation of a high-performance, highly scalable software-defined storage environment. Now, Citrix covers the entire waterfront.
This, I believe, is a great move by Citrix.
About the Author
Daniel Kusnetzky, a reformed software engineer and product manager, founded Kusnetzky Group LLC in 2006. He's literally written the book on virtualization and often comments on cloud computing, mobility and systems software. He has been a business unit manager at a hardware company and head of corporate marketing and strategy at a software company.