Citrix and Nutanix – good for now, maybe better for the future
- Summary:
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Running established Citrix business tools on top of Nutanix has performance advantages right now, but it could be better as a bridge from legacy to cloud in the near future.
There is the hope that it might give Citrix an additional performance and flexibility kicker following second quarter results which showed a positive jump after some slack results were followed by the launch of Workplace Services. This year’s Q2 results all but doubled to $103 million net income over the same period last year, after the launch was received with genuine ecstasy by delegates at the company’s Orlando conference in early May.
There is hope that it might give Nutanix some increased credibility in the legacy business and productivity applications space by being the vehicle that provides the many existing users us with that performance and flexibility kicker. Nutanix is obviously still going to suffer from being – in the eyes and perceived wisdom of many legacy users – something 'new’ and therefore inherently 'suspect’.
But there is another, as yet unspoken hope. It is during Q3 – the just about here and just about now – that Citrix is scheduled to start rolling out Workplace Cloud. The combination of this with Nutanix Acropolis could be the lever that legacy Citrix users might need to extend the increased business process delivery capabilities of Workplace Services out into cloud delivered service.
As reported back in May, Citrix has come up with connectors that allow both new applications and old legacy code to be added to the Workspace Cloud management console, giving users a choice of where applications are run. This means they can experiment with legacy applications to see how they operate in a cloud environment and end up with dynamically managed hybrid business environments.
The system also allows users and third party partners to create new workspaces that can be published to subscribers or staff. This means Citrix partners and user companies can create their own blueprints for their own service environments.
Having these available to run in an environment that builds hyper-converged, short-lifecycle operational environments could give businesses a good mix of both performance and operational agility with applications and tools that are familiar to all staff.
Current Citrix customers will, with this current deal, be able to exploit the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric to get linear scaling storage services to all desktops and applications. It also provides a boost to end user performance through the provision of data locality to reduce storage latencies and shadow cloning to minimise network traffic, particularly during a time of those wonderfully described `boot storms’.
They also get access to a wider selection of supported hypervisors, including the new Acropolis Hypervisor, which Nutanix claims to help reduce infrastructure costs and speed virtual desktop deployments.
My take
Citrix is another big legacy player that could have a lot to offer businesses in the cloud environment once it has the road to the cloud sorted out. A partnership with Nutanix could be a key part in that civil engineering project