Building the ecosystem: Citrix and Platform Computing

David Roussain of Citrix and Peter Dyer of Platform Computing brought me up to speed on how the two companies are working together to provide a highly managable, agile computing environment based upon virtual machines supported by Citrix XenServer and Platform Computing's VM Orchestrator 4.0.

Here's what Platform has to say about VM Orchesterator 4.0

Platform Computing, the global leader in High Performance Computing (HPC) management software, has announced the next version of its virtual environment management product for the enterprise data center, Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO) 4. Platform VMO 4 provides faster delivery of virtual computer environments to end users while optimizing resource utilization, availability, and power consumption, to improve an enterprise’s return on investment from its virtualization environment. The solution offers a cost-effective enterprise virtualization management solution for Citrix® XenServer™, with support for virtualization platforms from other vendors to be delivered in the coming months.

Effectively managing virtualization environments can be a challenge facing IT organizations today. Subsequently administrators need tools specifically built for managing virtualization deployments, optimizing computer resources, and removing performance bottlenecks in order to meet escalating business demands. Platform VMO 4 increases IT productivity and responsiveness to business service levels through a Self-Service portal that supports delegated administration and allows end users to request and control usage of their own VMs without administrator involvement. At the core of VMO’s automated management is  the multi-host dynamic resource management engine, which increases resource utilization across the virtual environment to remove bottlenecks and server silos according to flexible configurable policies that map to business priorities.

Snapshot Analysis

It's clear to me that both companies understand organizations' need for a fully developed ecosystem that includes products and services that take raw technology and turn it into  business solutions. Each of the suppliers brings a different "excellence" to the table and together they can offer their joint customers powerful solutions.

Platform Computing has been a fixture in the high performance computing world for well over a decade. It has been taking its orchestration and automation tools into new markets for quite some time. As it enters the market for orchestrating and automating virtualized environments, it faces a number of innovative competitors including suppliers such as Cassatt, Novell/PlateSpin, Racemi, Scalent Systems, Surgient, VMlogix and others. Platform hopes that its long years of success in the high performance/grid computing world will give it a leg up on the competition.

Citrix, by acquiring XenSource, has jumped into the competitive environment for virtual machine sofwtare for industry standard systems. It faces competition from VMware, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Virtual Iron and others. Citrix has dedicated itself to build the same type of ecosystem for Xen that it did for its presentation manager (now called XenApp). It knows that its ongoing success in the face of such strong competition is based upon it providing a framework and inviting other innovative companies to step in and add their "excellence" to that offered by Citrix.

It's been a successful approach and has offered Citrix customers a rich selection of products and services. I expect that this approach will prove valuable in the future.