Virtualization News Desk

Citrix announced the expansion of its Citrix Delivery Center product family with three important new additions. Taking its inspiration from the world of digital media services where highly optimized delivery networks give subscribers in any location fast easy access to on-demand content, Citrix unveiled innovative new “repeaters” and “receivers” that help corporate IT organizations provide a similar level of service when delivering desktops and applications to end users around the world. These new additions further extend the value of Citrix Delivery Center, using advanced virtualization and networking technologies to help customers transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers” for the best performance, security, cost savings and business agility.

Just as digital television repeaters amplify and retransmit media signals to homes in a given neighborhood, the new Citrix Branch Repeater is an easy-to-deploy appliance that sits between corporate datacenters and branch offices, amplifying and retransmitting applications to branch office users. Similarly, the new Citrix Desktop Receiver and Citrix App Receiver are lightweight software clients that run on end user devices and are responsible for receiving the delivery of centralized desktops and applications with an unparalleled user experience. Both receivers offer an extensible architecture that will support plug-ins from existing Citrix delivery infrastructure systems as well as third parties.

Combined with the rest of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, these three new components provide an end-to-end application delivery infrastructure that stands in stark contrast to the traditional distributed computing model. Instead of requiring the installation and management of applications on every desktop – which results in complexity across an increasingly diverse user base – Citrix Delivery Center allows companies to centralize their applications and desktops closer to headquarters and deliver them to users in any location as a highly efficient on-demand service. This proven approach can dramatically reduce costs, improve security and enhance end user experience.

“Citrix is executing on its application delivery strategy with the Citrix Delivery Center,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “The company’s end-to-end architectural approach to IT virtualization and shift toward a service delivery model creates a unique opportunity for IT to improve its service level within the business. Citrix Delivery Center encompasses endpoints, datacenter servers and the network that bridges a common framework together that can be tuned to rapidly respond to change and workload demand. With these options, organizations can move toward a dynamic delivery center model and customize their virtualization strategies based upon physical assets, user locations, security requirements and operational objectives.”

Citrix Desktop Receiver – Enhancing the Delivery of Virtual Desktops
Citrix Desktop Receiver is a lightweight software client designed to work with Citrix XenDesktop to give office workers fast, easy, secure access to their virtual desktops from any location. In addition to ensuring full security and maximum bandwidth efficiency for virtual desktops accessed over the network, Desktop Receiver features an innovative Instant On technology that allows virtual desktops to start up in a fraction of the time it takes to boot PCs running a traditional installed desktop. Desktop Receiver also incorporates high-speed virtual delivery technology that makes day-to-day desktop usage feel as responsive and snappy as a locally installed desktop, regardless of how far away the user is from the datacenter where the virtual desktop is actually running.

Desktop Receiver will serve three primary use cases within a typical company. In the most common scenario, it will come pre-installed on a new class of devices called “desktop appliances” that are fully optimized for virtual desktop delivery and purchased by customers from leading hardware vendors as part of an overall desktop refresh program (see related announcements this week from Citrix Ready hardware vendors joining the new Citrix Desktop Appliance Program). IT organizations transitioning to a virtual desktop model can also install

Desktop Receivers on older PCs, breathing new life into them by allowing them to use virtual desktops running on modern, high performance servers in the datacenter. Finally, employees can download and install Desktop Receiver on their home PCs to securely access an office desktop from home, just as they might download Adobe Acrobat Reader or Flash Player to access PDF files or Flash-enabled websites.

Citrix App Receiver – Enhancing the Delivery of All Applications to All Users
Citrix App Receiver is a lightweight, auto-updating software client designed to work with Citrix XenApp and Citrix NetScaler to give any user fast, easy, secure access to any application from any location. It features a highly extensible framework with plug-ins designed to communicate with each of the core components of the Citrix Delivery Center product family to enhance performance, security, monitoring and end user experience. Existing Citrix software clients will be redesigned as service-controlled plug-ins that snap into App Receiver. This extensible architecture will also allow third parties to create plug-ins that snap into App Receiver to enhance other aspects of the end-to-end delivery process without cluttering up desktops with additional software clients. App Receiver will be transparent to end users and will simplify the application delivery process for IT administrators by giving them a single, easy-to-manage client footprint on each desktop.

“Transforming datacenters into delivery centers requires an end-to-end approach to application delivery that extends all the way to the client,” said Wes Wasson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Citrix Systems. “By extending the Citrix Delivery Center product family with repeaters and receivers, Citrix is taking the next logical step to make application and desktop delivery a truly on-demand service for millions of users worldwide.”

Bringing it All Together
With these new additions, the Citrix Delivery Center product family now includes four classes of infrastructure components deployed along the line-of-sight between applications and desktops in the datacenter, and end users in any location: controllers, gateways, repeaters and receivers. Citrix Delivery Center also includes tools that make it easy to orchestrate communications between each of these components and third-party systems. Each of these components plays a key role in making IT environments more secure, efficient and responsive to business changes.

Controllers

• XenDesktop – virtualizes and delivers Windows desktops
• XenApp – virtualizes and delivers Windows applications
• XenServer – virtualizes and delivers application workloads on servers
• NetScaler – optimizes and delivers web applications

Gateways: Citrix Access Gateway sits at the edge of the corporate network and provides secure application access to authorized users.

Repeaters: Citrix Branch Repeater stages the delivery of applications closer to branch office employees, consolidates branch services and accelerates application traffic over the wide area network.

Receivers: Citrix Desktop Receiver and Citrix App Receiver enhance the performance, security and user experience of desktops and applications delivered to end users.

Orchestration: Citrix Workflow Studio orchestrates communications across the Citrix Delivery Center by taking commands from virtually any product and presenting them as graphical objects that can be easily linked together on a visual workflow canvas. This allows administrators to integrate previously disconnected processes far more easily across Citrix and third-party products, allowing them to work together as a single cohesive system.

For more information on Citrix contact Fryske Helms, fryske.helms@edelman.com at A&R Edelman.

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