Record breaking Synergy 2010: Virtualisation reaches new heights

Synergy San Francisco 2010, which was held on 12-14 May, was filled with excitement and insight into the virtualisation revolution, featured stories of outstanding customer successes through virtualisation, and announced innovative new Citrix and partner solutions. The electric atmosphere generated in the Synergy keynote speeches for the record audience of over 4,500 spilled over into more than 60 technical sessions where IT professionals honed their skills on critical new virtualisation, networking and cloud technologies.

Mark Templeton, Citrix President and CEO, began the conference by discussing the emerging environment of workshifting - the ability to use technology to move people’s work and computing to a better place. Workshifting is enabled by the virtualisation, cloud and networking technologies that Citrix provides.

Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst of IDC, and Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Inc, built on the virtualisation and cloud story in their keynote speeches. Gens pointed out three game changers. First, mobility: with 220 million smartphones and over 500,000 mobile phone applications now available globally, “controlling devices will be impossible” in the future. To be successful, businesses must stop controlling devices and offer centrally managed virtual client environments instead. Second, the cloud: the old “arthritic IT” is going to be rapidly replaced with a scalable, self-service, and pay-per-use cloud computing model. Third, the information avalanche: we now have .8 zettabytes of information; by 2020, we will have 35 zettabytes. Virtualisation of resources will help manage it.

While data is avalanching, Dell pointed out that there is a growing convergence of that data. The device used to access data shouldn’t matter anymore. “Companies must leverage virtualisation to support worker flexibility and to deliver data to users wherever they are and whatever device they are on,” he said, echoing Templeton. If you don’t do this?  “When something comes along that people want, you stand in the way at your own peril,” he warned.

Virtualisation, networking, and cloud solutions in action

Synergy showed what virtualisation, networking and cloud solutions mean to real businesses today.  
The Innovation Award presentation introduced solutions that achieved exciting, tangible benefits for 11 award finalists. The 2010 Innovation Award winner, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, virtualised all the desktops and applications in its data centre and let workers get the corporate desktop on demand on the iPhone, Mac, or PC.  This freed their knowledge workers from the office and a traditional desktop, and gave them the device independence and mobility demanded by their dynamic business environment.

Another video presentation showed that virtualisation is not just for big businesses. Campbell, California Union School District will save $1.2 million over four years while providing leading edge education services to its students and staff through desktop virtualisation.

Creating such success means adopting innovative new technologies and the Best of Synergy Award, given in partnership with IDG’s Computerworld magazine, recognised innovative technologies that provide real value to businesses.  App-DNA AppTitude won the Process Improvement Award and the Best of Show Award, Kaviza VDI-in-a-box won the Business Efficiency Award, and Avistar C3 Integrator won the Process Improvement Award. App-DNA AppTitude is a compatibility testing solution that can provide a rapid assessment of 100 percent of an organisation’s applications. It saves months of manual testing, hours in application remediation - and budgets. Check out all eight award nominees to see the solutions that could make you an Innovation Award winner next year!

Building upon the excitement of the award-winning customer and partner solutions, Citrix made several new product and partnership announcements.

Mark Templeton said he was making what “we believe is the most important desktop virtualisation announcement to date,” when he introduced Citrix XenClient, a groundbreaking client-side virtualisation solution, developed in collaboration with Intel, that allows centrally managed virtual desktops to run directly on corporate laptops and PCs - even when they are disconnected from the network. It runs multiple virtual desktops on the same laptop, giving employees the freedom to run their personal desktops simultaneously with, but in isolation from, the secure corporate laptop.

Citrix Synergy product announcements

Synergy also introduced:

• Citrix Cloud Solutions – Seven new turnkey cloud solutions that make it easy for cloud providers to deliver business services to enterprise customers, while letting them leverage existing investments, including third-party virtualisation technologies and tools.  
• Citrix XenServer 5.6 – Delivers additional features across the product line for the free XenServer and the more advanced Enterprise and Platinum editions.   
• Citrix NetScaler VPX support for business-critical Microsoft solutions  – Lets Microsoft data centre administrators apply NetScaler acceleration, load balancing and security features as a native Hyper-V workload directly from within System Centre.
• HDX Nitro technologies  – Include groundbreaking innovations at all levels of desktop virtualisation to seamlessly select the fastest and most efficient path for both displaying and executing content.
• Safe Zone technology – Automatically encrypts all data created by corporate applications, storing them transparently in dedicated safe zone directories. Safe Zone can also wipe laptops remotely at the end of a contract or if the laptop is lost or stolen.
• Pay-as-You-Grow Burst Packs – Scale the performance of NetScaler solutions in response to sudden spikes in application traffic, ensuring high availability and performance during traffic spikes without having to overpay for capacity not needed under normal conditions.

Finally, two new solution partnerships to further extend of the reach of virtualisation in the enterprise were announced.

Wyse Technology and Citrix announced Wyse Xenith, the industry’s first zero client which requires no local configuration or management, has virtually no attack surface for malware, and launches a full Windows desktop in seconds. Xenith is a device as small as a modem. In a short, simple demo, it was taken out of the box, connected to cables, turned on, and in moments a XenDesktop-delivered corporate desktop appeared on the screen.

McAfee, Inc. and Citrix announced a strategic partnership to provide granular endpoint security policies for each virtual desktop while also addressing scalability, performance and complexity challenges that arise from virtualisation.

The Synergy keynote speeches were a dazzling display of Citrix and partner virtualisation, networking and cloud solutions that are achieving unparalleled strategic benefits for customers worldwide. If you missed any of it, you can see it again at Synergy Buzz. Take a deep breath and dive in.