HEALTH

Citrix XenServer Provides the Underlying Server Virtualization Infrastructure to Enable Ultimate Flexibility in Providing Applications and Computing Resources as a Service: Citrix Systems today announced that it has been selected to deliver Server Virtualization infrastructure for Alatum, a ground-breaking industry-government partnership and Singapore’s largest commercial grid computing platform. Aligned to Singapore’s growth as a Shared Services hub in Asia, Alatum offers services to public sector agencies as well as commercial organisations looking for cost-effective, integrated and easily-managed IT solutions. Leveraging Citrix XenServer, a groundbreaking server virtualization product line from the Citrix Delivery Center product family, Alatum will be able to offer IT infrastructure as a service to its customers. A key advantage of Citrix XenServer is its ability to dynamically provision servers with both native and virtualized workloads, increasing Alatum’s responsiveness in turning on services for customers – on demand and on a pay-per-use basis over the Internet. “Citrix plays a major role in making the cloud computing era a practical reality for enterprises, public sector agencies, small and medium businesses. More than 215,000 companies around the world rely on Citrix every day to deliver applications and desktops as a cloud-like service to their users,” said Yaj Malik, Area Vice President for ASEAN at Citrix Systems. “Working with the partners in Alatum, we are pleased to extend our server virtualization capabilities to enable them to host and deliver successful cloud services to their end users with the same performance, security and reliability.” XenServer Powers Grid Computing The unique capabilities of Citrix XenServer for supporting cloud computing environments led Singapore Computer Systems (SCS), a channel partner of Citrix Systems and the managed service provider for grid computing services in Alatum, to exclusively select XenServer to deliver the virtual infrastructure for the SCS cloud, commencing with an initial set of 200 servers. The SCS data centers are transformed by XenServer into dynamic delivery centers that can deliver IT infrastructure services to the Alatum customers on-demand and on consumption based pricing model. “We are extremely pleased to partner with Citrix, a pre-eminent industry leader in virtualization technology that delivers fast, reliable and secure cloud services for our customers,” said Alvin Kok, Executive Vice President, SCS. “By offering either utility-based or on demand-based billing for virtualized servers, we present tremendous cost savings and business values for enterprises, SMBs and government agencies especially in this economic climate.” Citrix XenServer offers powerful virtual infrastructure capabilities that are well suited to service provider environments, while offering the full spectrum of enterprise virtual infrastructure features which include: * Cloud-proven scalability of the Xen hypervisor which powers most of the world’s largest clouds, with the optimal performance, powerful dynamic workload management, Virtual Machine (VM) high availability and dynamic virtual storage management capabilities that are unique to Citrix XenServer. It enables cloud providers to host and manage any combination of Windows and Linux environments with enterprise class availability and scalability to support massive deployments. * XenServer can be incorporated into service providers’ existing management solutions through powerful programmable web-services based APIs and scripting technologies, and supports industry-standard management APIs standardized in the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). * XenServer, through the recently released Project Kensho features, has the ability to import and export VMs in the DMTF OVF (Open Virtualization Format) portable virtual machine format, to permit easy import and export of VMs from other virtualization platforms, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. “Cloud computing is the next major wave that will transform today’s computing model,” said Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. “Many clouds that offer services based on the Xen hypervisor have asked Citrix to help them offer a richer set of virtualized IT infrastructure services such as Windows support, high availability and disaster recovery for workloads to their enterprise customers with guaranteed service levels as well as consumption based pricing. XenServer product line brings together the service delivery infrastructure building blocks that have been proven in the world’s largest clouds and enterprise datacenters, enabling massively scalable architectures that support rapid innovation and cost reduction.”