Citrix has announced the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance Program, with Atlantis and HPE collaborating with Citrix on the first offering in it, the HPE Intelligent Edge Workspace. It is a turnkey virtual workspace appliance with mid-market simplicity and pricing.
Patrick Brennan, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Applications & Platforms, Atlantis
At its Citrix Summit partner event in Las Vegas, Citrix is announcing the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance Program. It lets hyper-converged appliances from hardware and storage partners connect to Citrix Cloud to automate the setup and maintenance of XenApp and XenDesktop, and thus simplify hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) for mid-market customers who have been discouraged by its complexity.
The first vendor partners, and the first solution, in the new program have also been announced. HPE and Atlantis Computing have collaborated on the HPE Intelligent Edge Workspace. It is based on the 1U 4-Node HPE Edgeline EL4000, Atlantis USX, and the Citrix Cloud Virtual Apps and Desktops package powered by XenApp/XenDesktop.
“There is nothing else like this on the market – a purpose-built workspace appliance,” said Patrick Brennan, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Applications & Platforms, at Atlantis. “It takes the hardware and presents it with virtual workspaces in mind, and extends it to the components of the Citrix Workspace Infrastructure. The piece HP brings to the table is the HPE Edgeline 4 node 1 U box that leverages Moonshot, and has a very small form factor. This is the server they announced in London at HPE Discover in December.”
Brennan emphasized that this kind of appliance can have a significant impact in accelerating virtual workspace adoption in the midmarket.
“It has turnkey automated deployment, with four easy steps to set it up,” he said. “Those four things combined make it very simplistic in nature. The midmarket segment of the market has been basically prohibited from adopting virtual workspaces because they have been too complex. This simplifies the entire stack. It can now be deployed in hours, instead of days, weeks or even months.”
Brennan also said it significantly reduces the price, which has been another barrier to mid-market adoption.
“This will drive down the cost of the midmarket play, which we think will be especially important as Windows 10 gains momentum,” he said. “This will be an excellent vehicle to make the switch to virtual workspaces.”
Atlantis, which has been in the VDI space for over a decade, is a long-established Citrix partner. Last year, the two companies announced an extension of their partnership with the integration of the Citrix Workspace Suite software stack running on Citrix XenServer with Atlantis HyperScale all-flash hyper-converged appliances and USX software-defined storage solutions. Later in the year, they extended that relationship by simplifying management, combining infrastructure, applications and management into a single workspace platform-as-a-service.
“This is the next evolutionary step in that partnership,” Brennan said.
Atlantis also has an established relationship with HPE, most recently around an OEM agreement to offer all-flash hyper-converged appliances on HPE servers.
“Many of our Citrix implementations in the past have been on HPE hardware, so it made sense to team up together on this,” Brennan said.
The HPE Intelligent Edge Workspace will go to market through HPE’s partner and sales channels.
