Citrix Systems just announced that more than 10 percent of Global Fortune 500 companies have downloaded and activated its Citrix XenServer virtualization platform for production use in the last four months, with activations among large enterprises spiking significantly after the release of XenServer 5.5 in June. Since making XenServer available for free unlimited production deployment earlier this year, more than 150,000 users have downloaded the product from hundreds of download sites in over 50 countries. With its latest release, XenServer has set a new standard for free virtualization, going beyond the basic hypervisors that have been free for years by adding powerful features such as centralized multi-node management, built-in storage and full live motion.  By providing a free, full-featured alternative that dramatically lowers the entry price of virtualization, Citrix has saved companies of all sizes millions of dollars and provided compelling value to IT organizations as they face shrinking budgets.

“Many industry observers assumed a free XenServer product would not have much appeal outside of mid-sized enterprises and large scale cloud providers,” said N. Louis Shipley, group vice president and general manager, XenServer Product Group at Citrix. “While XenServer has clearly been very popular in those traditionally strong segments, our traction within the Global Fortune 500 is growing much faster than most expected.  XenServer already has a strong presence in this base as a part of existing Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp deployments, but the number of large enterprises putting it into production purely for server virtualization in the last few weeks has been nothing short of amazing.  At the rate these deployments are growing, XenServer is going to take a lot of folks by surprise.”

A big reason for the recent surge among large enterprise organizations has been the release of XenServer 5.5 in June, adding a wide range of new enterprise-class capabilities. The Burton Group, in fact, recently certified Citrix XenServer 5.5 and its Citrix Essentials™ 5.5 management add-on as one of only two hypervisor platforms in the industry to meet 100 percent of the analyst firm’s required features for enterprise production.  To be certified as enterprise production-ready under Burton Group’s comprehensive evaluation criteria, a server virtualization platform must pass a rigorous examination of virtualization, computing, storage, networking, security, and management capabilities.

Additional Value with Citrix Essentials
While users have everything they need with XenServer to deploy and centrally manage full enterprise-class virtualization on any number of servers with no upfront costs, those who need more advanced virtualization management capabilities can purchase Citrix Essentials for XenServer.  The Citrix Essentials product line also extends the enterprise management capabilities of Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center, helping customers create highly scalable, manageable and agile virtual infrastructures within a Microsoft environment. Citrix Essentials enhances both of these high-growth virtualization platforms by adding expanded storage integration, automated lab and stage management and dynamic workload balancing.  This combination enables broad interoperability that makes it easier for customers to manage virtual machines across heterogeneous virtualization environments throughout the full application lifecycle, from lab and testing to production.

XenServer 5.5 is available for download at http://www.citrix.com/freexenserver, as well as hundreds of other download sites worldwide. Citrix Essentials 5.5 for XenServer and Hyper-V are also available for purchase or a 30-day trial version at http://www.citrix.com/essentials.

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