Rackspace Hosting , the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, announced at Citrix Summit 2011 today the availability of the Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform. The hosted virtual desktop platform utilizes Rackspace’s comprehensive hosting services and may be paired with industry leading desktop virtualization solutions from Citrix and other joint channel partners. The offering enables customers to host their virtual desktops on their choice of dedicated and/or cloud solutions.

The market for hosted virtual desktop platforms is growing considerably as virtual desktops are increasingly adopted in the enterprise.  In fact, Gartner expects mainstream adoption of virtual desktops to take place in 2012 through 2014, with 70 million users by 2014[i]. Desktop virtualization solutions, such as Citrix XenDesktop® and Citrix XenApp™, deliver on-demand virtual desktops and applications anywhere users are and on almost any device, including PCs, smartphones, and even tablets. Because of this, virtual desktops can provide:

• Improved productivity,
• Increased flexibility and mobility for the workforce,
• Improved business agility, and
• Simplified desktop management.

By hosting virtual desktops with Rackspace, companies can free up IT resources for more critical internal business operations.

“As enterprises realize the strategic value of the business agility, workforce flexibility and management efficiency offered by desktop virtualization, they are rapidly growing their implementations,” said Matt Lull, senior director, global strategic alliances for Citrix Systems.  “Rackspace’s hosted virtual desktop platform gives enterprises instant access to the infrastructure they need, whether it’s a dedicated environment for virtual desktop infrastructure or for shared hosted desktops. We’re excited to build on our portfolio by offering this joint solution, which enables us to extend new innovations in virtual desktops to our customers.”

 

The Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform uniquely combines RackConnect®, best-of-breed partner solutions and Fanatical Support® to deliver an unmatched solution in the marketplace. With RackConnect®, customers can deploy a virtual desktop solution that utilizes Private Cloud to help address security and compliance concerns and to manage and control servers while benefiting from the scale and cost effectiveness of the CloudServers for XenApp environments. The Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform can also allow customers to reduce deployment times of upgrades and new infrastructure deployments while reducing CAPEX.

 

The Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform offers a solution that utilizes best-of-breed partner solutions for virtual desktop network and storage. It also combines powerful compute platforms with highly scalable and efficient NetApp^® storage which enables the provisioning of thousands of virtual desktops quickly with virtually instant storage cloning.

 

By working with Rackspace, channel partners and VARs can add the Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform to their portfolio of offerings, without the additional expenses associated with purchasing the hardware and hiring resources to manage the environment.

 

“We’re tapping our vast community of partners and their networks to provide customers with a hosted virtual desktop platform that offers them choices,” said Odus Wittenburg, vice president of enterprise solutions for Rackspace. “Providing Fanatical Support on top of our solutions portfolio produces exceptional business outcomes for our customers and that is what we do best. By working with partners like Citrix and their network of nearly 9,000 partners, we can utilize their exceptional software and application solutions, which is what they do best.”

 

As a leader in web hosting and cloud computing, Rackspace is committed to providing resellers and channel partners with premier hosting as the foundation for configuring solutions for their customers.  This Rackspace offering will also be available directly to resellers through the Rackspace Partner Program.

 

With the announcement of the Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform, Rackspace and Citrix will launch a hosted virtual desktop demo environment. This demo environment is hosted at Rackspace and optimally tuned utilizing Citrix software and NetApp® storage to give users the opportunity to experience desktop virtualization for 30 days from nearly any device. The hosted virtual desktops will have some common desktop productivity applications loaded for users to test how virtualized desktops perform in a “real-world” office environment. For more information about the Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform please visit: https://www.rackspace.com/hvd or https://www.rackspace.com/citrix