The complexity of IT infrastructures is a growing challenge in IT environments -- with an ever-increasing number of physical servers, operating systems, and applications, and their widely differing storage needs. In addition, IT departments face the constant demand to respond more rapidly to changing business priorities, application demands, and user dynamics -- all without compromising security or manageability or increasing server count.   

To address these challenges, Citrix and NetApp have teamed to co-develop an optimal solution for unifying storage management and server virtualization.  Citrix StorageLink Adapter for NetApp Data ONTAP -- a powerful integration between Citrix XenServer™ and NetApp intelligent storage solutions, simplifies configuration and management, reducing costs while enhancing business agility.

While other virtualization products waste valuable server resources on proprietary management of storage services, Citrix XenServer enables each hardware component to do what it does best: NetApp storage systems can deliver optimal data management and performance, and servers can direct their power to business-critical application workloads. Directly coupling NetApp arrays to XenServer allows customers to leverage the built-in thin provisioning, snapshotting, cloning, deduplication, disaster recovery, backup and restore functions built into NetApp systems, optimizing performance, availability and scalability of their virtual infrastructure. By incorporating the best practices for configuration, allocation and administration into the NetApp Data ONTAP Adapter, Citrix XenServer makes optimal management of storage in a virtualized environment automatically -- allowing organizations to unify virtualization management for reduced management cost and increased agility.