Citrix Ready™ Open Storage Program is a new program makes it easy for third-party storage vendors to certify interoperability of their products with Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, using the company’s innovative new StorageLink™ technology. As a result, enterprise customers can rest assured that any environment virtualized with Hyper-V will work seamlessly with all of their existing storage, backup and disaster recovery systems.

• Get StorageLink free with Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V Express Edition
• Get the Virtual SAN Appliance for Citrix Essentials from DataCore™

Citrix StorageLink™ technology lets your virtual server infrastructures fully leverage all the resources and functionality of existing storage systems. StorageLink supports all third party storage architectures and delivers deep integration with leading storage platforms allowing you to switch seamlessly between XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V™ platforms. Citrix StorageLink provides organization with:

• Reduced cost and complexity by leveraging existing investments in storage systems.
  
• One click access to native storage services.
  
• Simplified, wizard-driven storage setup and maintenance.
  
  

StorageLink consists of several key components that work in concert to utilize your existing storage infrastructure throughout the configuration and ongoing management of your virtual environments.

• StorageLink Gateway enables automated discovery and one-click access to native storage services using any of the leading storage architectures and protocols, including DAS, NAS, SAN, iSCSI and Fibre Channel.
  
• StorageLink Resource Manager makes common actions in native storage arrays visible from within the virtualization management environment, including partitioning, snapshots, backups and data replication.
  
• StorageLink Image Manager provides a centralized library of virtual machine images that can be instantly converted between XenServer and Hyper-V and rapidly cloned and delivered to any number of target hosts.
  
• StorageLink Connect provides a set of clearly-defined open APIs that make it easy to link XenServer and Hyper-V environments to third party backup solutions and enterprise management frameworks.
  
  

Leveraging StorageLink technologies, Essentials for XenServer integrates storage management functions into the management console for the virtual infrastructure via wizards and workflow enabling you to utilize the advanced services native within your storage arrays. Rather than employing proprietary and necessarily segmented storage functionalities that duplicate existing systems and can consume valuable computing resources on the host environment, StorageLink reduces complexity and TCO allowing you to leverage golden images across hypervisor environments and both XenServer and Hyper-V virtualization platforms.