Citrix enhances HDX Tech for virtual desktops

              

BANGALORE, INDIA: Citrix Systems Inc., today announced a new breakthrough addition to its market leading HDX Technology, ensuring a high-definition virtual desktop experience even for the most demanding high-end professional graphics environments.

The new HDX 3D technology, available as a feature of Citrix XenDesktop, delivers rich, high-definition desktop experience applications to users in any location, over any network. Combined with the full portfolio of HDX technologies in XenDesktop, the new HDX 3D capability allows organizations to leverage talent globally while still housing data centrally, assisting in real-time collaboration among dispersed design teams and ensuring the security of critical intellectual property.

HDX 3D is part of an extensive range of HDX technologies from Citrix that go well beyond a single protocol to address potential problems in all parts of the IT infrastructure, from the datacenter, to the network, to the device. Combined with the company’s groundbreaking HDX Adaptive Orchestration technology, XenDesktop can dynamically adapt to changes in the environment by applying the best technologies for each unique user scenario.

“Desktop virtualization, and XenDesktop in particular, has really picked up steam in 2009. A critical success factor to mass adoption in the enterprise remains the ability to ensure a PC-like experience over any network, which is particularly critical for employees who work with high-end graphics, design software, animation and the like. Although these use cases have not historically been considered within the reach of Centralized Virtual Desktop architectures, in many cases they may make an ideal use case if a powerful user experience is achieved,” said Michael Rose, research analyst, IDC. “It is exciting to see new technology innovations like HDX 3D in XenDeskop, which extends multimedia performance and makes virtualization a viable solution for a broader set of users.”

Now Citrix XenDesktop with HDX technologies can deliver virtual desktops to all office-based users within the enterprise – including the most advanced professional graphics power users – through a single desktop virtualization product. Other technologies being introduced to the market consume excessive amounts of bandwidth and are only capable of delivering slow and frustrating performance, such as user click and mouse response time over the wide area network (WAN). XenDesktop with HDX 3D provides the best performance possible over the WAN, and over a local area network (LAN) HDX 3D consumes 10x less bandwidth<1> than alternatives while still providing a high-definition user experience. This allows IT to implement virtual desktops without going through any expensive network upgrades.

“We are looking at how we can centralize desktops with 3D applications in the datacenter. This can be really challenging because the performance is so critical. XenDesktop with HDX 3D for Professional Graphics finally provides a solution that can deliver strong 3D application performance remotely, which will help us better meet the needs of our students,” said Brandon Combs, information technology analyst for the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning at the University of Cincinnati.

In industries such as manufacturing, engineering and graphic design, architecture and animation, design teams are often geographically-dispersed but still require the ability to collaborate and work from the same source files. These teams also work with highly-valued intellectual property where security is paramount. Without the right technology for support, enterprises are hampered in their ability to be nimble and tap into talent in multiple geographies. Teams who are co-located across the world must often work sequentially on projects, incurring the cost of travel and shipping to collaborate while running the risk of exposing critical IP to security breaches. Desktop virtualization provides significant business benefits to these organizations – among them, making secure, global collaboration possible. Design teams can collaborate in real time and keep IP safely housed in the datacenter.

XenDesktop with HDX 3D delivers these benefits by centralizing the OS, applications and data in the datacenter, and quickly and securely delivering desktops with the user experience required. Enterprises no longer have to compromise on delivering maximum performance even to users over the WAN.

HDX Sets the Standard in Virtual Desktop User Experience

Citrix HDX includes a broad set of technologies designed to enable a high-definition user experience of virtual desktops and applications in today’s multimedia-rich computing environment. These technologies reside across the entire end-to-end delivery system. Citrix HDX Technology provides built-in value to XenDesktop, delivering a high-definition experience of a virtual desktop to every type of desktop user, even high-performance graphics users.

User experience remains the most critical element required for organizations to broadly adopt desktop virtualization. Citrix continues to drive innovation in user experience and its desktop virtualization product portfolio will be further enhanced this year with HDX technologies that enable the delivery of multimedia applications –including rich media, voice and video – to users anywhere.

“Citrix continues to raise the bar on desktop virtualization user experience with HDX 3D delivering the best real-time graphics performance. Unlike other players in the market, we’ve invested 20 years in innovating what it takes to deliver desktops and apps to users. The addition of HDX 3D significantly enhances our breadth of capabilities that ensure an unparalleled experience for every user in every scenario,” said Raj Dhingra, vice president and general manager, XenDesktop product group at Citrix Systems. “XenDesktop with HDX Technology provides the only desktop virtualization solution that can deliver the best possible user experience for every user type without sacrificing performance over the LAN or WAN.”

Availability

HDX 3D will be available at the end of September as a feature of Citrix XenDesktop Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum editions for all new and existing XenDesktop customers at no additional charge.