More than 10pc of Global Fortune 500 companies have downloaded and activated Citrix’s XenServer virtualisation platform in the last four months.
The company revealed that more than 150,000 users have downloaded XenServer since it became available earlier this year.
XenServer 5.5, goes beyond the basic hypervisors that have been free for years by adding powerful features such as centralised multi-node management, built-in storage and full live motion. By providing a free, full-featured alternative that lowers the entry price of virtualisation, Citrix says it has saved companies of all sizes millions of dollars and provided compelling value to IT organisations 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 virtualisation 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 organisations has been the release of XenServer 5.5 in June, adding a wide range of new enterprise-class capabilities.
While users have everything they need with XenServer to deploy and centrally manage full enterprise-class virtualisation on any number of servers with no upfront costs, those who need more advanced virtualisation management capabilities can purchase Citrix Essentials for XenServer.
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.
By John Kennedy
