Citrix adds OS provisioning to lineup

Ardence technology digested

By Austin Modine • Get more from this author

Posted in Virtualization, 11th October 2007 23:07 GMT

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Ten months after the Ardence acquisition, Citrix is ready to add the technology to its lineup.

What was once Ardence's on-demand provisioning technology has become Citrix Provisioning Server. It's designed to stream datacenter and desktop operating systems and workloads to both virtual and physical machines from a central location.

Citrix reckons the software is quite complementary to its more recent acquisition of server virtualization start-up, XenSource.

Lou Shipley of Citrix said Provisioning Server also saves IT managers the grief of fussing over systems that may not be patched at the same level. The software allows users to build a single golden image and immediately provision away.

In addition, customers can benefit from improved security and power management by placing the PC operating systems in the data center.

Dell, which has already been working with Ardent's tech, has jumped on the revamped software. They announced Wednesday a streamed desktop package that includes the Citrix software. We've got the details here.

Shipley said Dell is currently the only OEM vendor to pick up the package, but claims there is a lot of interest with other manufacturers. "There's nothing we can announce right now," said Shipley.

It's likely any such announcements will arrive as Citrix's iForum expo draws nearer.

In the meantime, Provisioning Server will be sold through Citrix channels as a stand-alone product or as part of packages. ®

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