Citrix, Leostream Grab Early VMworld Headlines
VMworld, Day 1, Late Edition: Couple of good product announcements to cover while we wait for VMware to open the freaking press room at 2 p.m. on the first day of their big, annual show with reporters walking all around the building wondering where they can hold interviews and otherwise conduct business.
Anyway, last Friday, Citrix closed out its week of one-upping VMware when it bulked out Citrix OpenCloud, its cloud service provider infrastructure platform, and announced "a definitive agreement" to purchase VMLogix, which is known for its LanManager virtual lab management package.
Citrix says the VMLogix deal, which it is billing under the category of "Open Lifecycle Management" will make it easy for IT teams to "build, share and deploy production-like environments on-demand in both private and public clouds, and migrate virtual workloads between production stages in a single mouse click -- even across different hypervisors."
Under the heading of "Open Cloud Interoperability," and as part of its OpenCloud vision, Citrix will be assimilating OpenStack, an open-source cloud management and orchestration stack it has been working on with Rackspace, NASA, Dell (the hot new virtualization upstart), and "dozens" of other business partners, inside and outside of the cloud.
Citrix also announced an Open Cloud Networking" addition that uses Open vSwitch technology and the OpenFlow protocol.
For its part, Leostream shows why a good connection broker can keep a company in business (not that anybody out there has built a really horrid one) with the unveiling of Leostream Connection Broker 7.0. This latest iteration of the company's vendor-independent package for virtual hosted desktop software tightens relationship with VMware View (I did not say anything about a stranglehold). Speaking of View, as a quick aside, I am assured that the long-awaited re-debut of View 4.5 (It only got half announced the first time) will indeed take place this week.
Anyway, Leostream Connection Broker 7.0 enhances the company's already solid grip on really big enterprises through its new compatibility with a range of mobile devices, including Apple, iPad and iPod Touch. According to Leostream, "The new version also includes VMware enhancements, Connection Broker cluster management capabilities, desktop failover plans, and a number of powerful features that streamline the management of VDI).
In the real world of users, the new mobile links make it easy, for example, for doctors and clinicians to access sensitive healthcare data -- which is protected by many new, stringent regulations in addition to HIPAA -- and use that data as they want without ever removing it from their hospital or health care institution.
According to Leostream CTO Eric Hanselman, his company's goal is to provide software that evolutionizes as opposed to revolutionizes existing systems by integrating seamlessly into legacy environments. "If you can build this as a fresh solution, OK, but in a large enterprise, a lot of the big pieces are already built. This can be a complex beast, and we don't want to be the manager of everything," he says.
Leostream Connection Broker 7.0 is currently in data and scheduled to ship on September 20. It costs $75 per seat for a perpetual license.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/30/2010 at 12:48 PM