Cloud transformations are almost always hybrid. Companies usually wind up with some resources in the public cloud and some on premises.

Citrix Cloud was designed with this assumption at its core. For on-prem resources, we know that hyper-converged solutions can provide great benefits in terms of performance and ease of administration. That’s why we’re so excited to announce that Cisco HyperFlex is now a verified Citrix Ready as an HCI Workspace Appliance, giving customers the ability to create a true hybrid-cloud solution for Citrix Workspace that is fast to deploy and easy to manage.

The solution received the Citrix Global Partner Innovation Award for Cloud Acceleration earlier this month at Citrix Summit ’19 in Orlando, Florida, on January 6.

https://twitter.com/ciscoDC/status/1083075941939773441

Today, at Cisco Live in Barcelona, Spain, Cisco announced HyperFlex 4.0. This latest release boasts a number of new, powerful features, including the ability for customers to simplify computing at the edge with HyperFlex Anywhere and Cisco Intersight.

Edge computing environments pose a unique challenge for the demands of virtual app and desktop workloads. That’s because while users working in branch locations have the same needs and performance expectations of users working back at HQ, branch offices often don’t have expert IT resources on hand to deploy and manage infrastructure.

Balancing the need for a robust infrastructure across these edge locations with cost and complexity is a growing challenge for IT. Over-provision infrastructure and personnel and your per-user costs can easily skyrocket. Under-provision and performance issues take center stage as user experience suffers.

Citrix and Cisco have teamed together to solve these challenges by making it possible for IT to centralize the delivery and management of everything. What used to be on-premises-only, Citrix technology can now be delivered as a service with Citrix Cloud services. Citrix Cloud services simplify the delivery and management of Citrix technologies, helping you to extend existing on-premises software deployments or move 100 percent to the cloud.

With HyperFlex Anywhere, Cisco enables edge clusters to be deployed and centrally managed, with global scale through Cisco Intersight. It enables a common cloud-based HCI management system to deploy and manage hundreds of HyperFlex Edge systems in single view. And, to meet smaller footprint requirements in edge environments, HyperFlex 4.0 allows scaling down to as little as two nodes.

There are a number of use cases for Citrix Cloud with HyperFlex Anywhere, including:

  • Branch office with no or limited local IT staff
    • Benefit of centralized management and deployment via Cisco Intersight
    • Ease of virtual desktop and app deployment with Citrix Cloud services
    • Onsite infrastructure but expertise located at Headquarters
  • SMB
    • Traditional virtual desktop and app deployment is too complicated and too costly
    • HyperFlex Edge and Citrix Cloud services simplify deployment and reduce cost
    • Ability to deploy solution using IT generalists

Congratulations to Cisco on the release of HyperFlex 4.0. Customers can now look forward to leveraging Cisco HyperFlex to take Citrix Workspace easily and cost-effectively to the edge.