Greetings all!
This week Citrix is hosting Summit 2014 in Orlando, FL and as always, the focus will be on meeting, greeting and updating the company’s world-wide eco-system of partners and resellers on its latest products, technologies and initiatives for the coming year.
A show that always garners a large audience and lots of enthusiasm for the new year, a lot of time will be spent discussing Citrix’s latest initiative around mobility via its XenMobile solution, a unified platform that enables organizations to provide their ever-expanding mobile workforces with secure access to company applications (i.e., mobile, Windows, SaS, Web-based) and data from any device while ensuring compliance with IT security policies.
Coinciding with the show comes the announcement of the upcoming release of Sanbolic’s Melio software, a Software-Defined Storage platform that focuses on the availability, usability, management and protection of an organizations most critical resource – its data. As a long-time Citrix-Ready partner that has been helping Citrix customers simplify and enhance the deployment and administration of their XenDesktop VDI environments for many years, Sanbolic’s latest software release allows customers to realize significant improvements in virtual desktop performance and scale while minimizing administration efforts and infrastructure opex costs.
Through the concept of Software-Defined Storage (SDS), or the use of commodity server hardware and storage devices to create scalable, high-performance, highly available storage systems with extensive storage management capabilities, Sanbolic is bringing the economics of storage (often found in large, cloud datacenters) to enterprise customers. By combining industry-leading virtualization technologies (Citrix XenServer, XenDesktop, XenMobile) with Sanbolic Melio, enterprise customers of all sizes can offer their global workforces secure, on-demand access to desktops, applications and data from any mobile device (i.e., smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.) while simultaneously minimizing Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM).
With the latest release of Melio, Citrix customers achieve the following:
* Simplified image management and high availability (PVS and MCS)
Taking advantage of highly available and highly scalable shared storage created with Melio, XenDesktop 7 administrators can store their PVS (vDisks) and MCS image files on a single storage volume, ensuring images are available for assignment to virtual desktop machines running on any host system. In addition, dynamic volume expansion means there’s always plenty of capacity to support an ever-growing image library; storage live migration allows images to be moved seamlessly between storage arrays; and cluster-wide snapshots offer a simple mechanism for backing up and recovering images at any point in time.
* User profile availability
As any VDI administrator knows, user profiles are an absolute necessity in a virtual desktop environment. Fortunately, insuring profiles are available at all times is an easy job for Melio. By consolidating user profiles onto a single volume accessed concurrently by multiple file servers, XenDesktop 7 administrators create a highly available file-serving environment that offers virtual desktop users continuous access to their profiles: if one of the file servers hosting the user profile file share goes offline unexpectedly, users can access their profiles through another file server. With no single point of failure and file servers sharing block-level access to user profiles, enhanced fault-tolerance and increased performance are achieved.
* SQL database availability
With XenDesktop 7 containing multiple databases crucial to configuring, managing and monitoring a VDI environment, it’s imperative these databases be available at all times. By detecting SQL Server failures and (automatically) moving databases to one or more online SQL Servers rapidly, Melio provides a simple, cost-effective solution for ensuring database availability without the costs, constraints or complexities associated with other SQL DB HA options and more significantly, regardless of what edition of SQL Server is being used.
* Enhanced VDI performance and scale
With the combined performance and scalability enhancements of Melio5 (i.e., hundreds of thousands of IOPs and up to 2048 nodes per cluster), XenDesktop 7 customers are able to easily meet the I/O demands of VDI while maintaining optimal performance levels as they scale their infrastructures seamlessly to support thousands of virtual desktops.
Going to Citrix Summit? Stop by booth #610 to learn more about how Sanbolic’s Melio software simplifies and enhances XenDesktop 7 VDI environments as well as other business-critical workloads such as SQL Server, file-serving and web-serving.
If you can’t make it to the show, visit us at www.sanbolic.com. While you’re there, browse through our solutions pages and see what Melio can do to help your organization reduce the time, effort and cost of deploying, managing and maintaining powerful solutions for delivering desktops, applications and data to your global workforce. You can also register to receive a free evaluation copy of Melio by clicking the “Download Melio 5.0 Free Trial” button on our home page and then clicking “Register” to create an account. We’ll approve your account right away so you can download a fully-functional evaluation copy of our latest software and see what it can do for your organization.
Enjoy the show!