Citrix and NetApp simplify on-premises data sharing

Citrix Systems and NetApp have jointly developed a software and hardware package optimized for Citrix's ShareFile with StorageZones

By Mikael Ricknäs, London | Friday, 09 November 2012
Citrix Systems and NetApp have jointly developed a software and hardware package optimized for Citrix's ShareFile with StorageZones.

ShareFile with StorageZones is Citrix's enterprise-friendly answer to cloud-based file storage and sharing services like DropBox, Apple's iCloud and Google's Drive, and allows CIOs to place data in the organization's own data center as opposed to in the cloud.

Enterprises can now meet compliance and data sovereignty requirements, while users can still access their documents and images from anywhere at any time. Storing data close to users also helps improve performance, the two companies said on Wednesday.

By joining forces, Citrix and NetApp hopes to help enterprises simplify and accelerate on-premise, large-scale data sharing and storage deployments, they said. The two have seen to it that StorageZones works with NetApp's FAS and V-Series storage systems running its clustered Data ONTAP software.

The integration lets enterprise take advantage of features such as de-duplication and compression to decrease the amount of storage needed to host employee content.

De-duplication does that by eliminating duplicated content, so if two users are storing the same image there only needs to be one copy.

NetApp's Snapshot technology can be used to backup and recover the data.

This is the second time in less than a month Citrix and NetApp have joined forces to make life a little easier for IT staff.

Last month the two companies announced they are working on integrating NetApp's storage software with Citrix's CloudPlatform and the Apache CloudStack project, offering features such as storage automation and virtual machine backup and recovery.

On Wednesday, Citrix also announced two new NetScaler MPX hardware appliances aimed at smaller enterprises, it said.

The MPX 5550 and MPX 5650 cost from US$14,000 and are now shipping. They can be used for load balancing, SSL processing and traffic inspection to protects against threats such as cross-site scripting and SQL injections.