If you are reading this, you’ve probably already heard the announcement from Citrix today with regards to the Sanbolic acquistion. I wanted to share my thoughts on how this benefits existing XA/XD customers.
When you look at enterprise customers who have invested in XA/XD, 80-90% of these customers leverage PVS for workload provisioning. One of the most common architectural and operational challenge when it comes to PVS is image management, specifically the replication of images both among local PVS servers and also across datacenters. Customers typically leverage DFS-R/robocopy or some other replication tool provided by their SAN vendor but these solutions present unique challenges and increase cost. Sanbolic’s Melio will immediately help existing customers solve this challenge while also addressing high availability. Sanbolic also helps with image management and high availability for customers leveraging MCS. Today, a number of customers have XA/XD farms built out as DR solutions that are completely under utilized. Sanbolic helps scale out existing XA and XD sites across regions in an active active configuration thereby better utilizing resources and reducing costs.
Another key feature is Sanbolic’s “Software Defined Storage” product, which aggregates and optimizes disparate storage whether in your datacenter, a private cloud, a public cloud (AWS/Amazon/Azure) or a combination of these, through the use of Melio. This will help customers reduce the overall infrastructure costs while delivering optimal performance and addressing DR and HA. Sanbolic has also partnered with Fujitsu, HP and Lenovo to offer hyper converged solutions providing cost effective scale-out solutions.
All in all, this acquisition is extremely exciting and something that will help existing and prospective XA/XD customers build highly redundant, scalable solutions at lower costs while at the same time improving operational efficiencies. Not to mention the infinite possibilities that lie ahead as far as the evolution of Sanbolic under Citrix and how it will be integrated into the Citrix virtualization stack.
No information available yet on product pricing and packaging, but we should be hearing something soon! Stay tuned!