Hot on the heels of a hopping Citrix Synergy two weeks ago, Citrix just broadcast on June 11, a fascinating discussion between senior Citrix, NetApp and Cisco executives on the incremental benefits IT departments are recognizing by hosting their XenDesktop deployments on FlexPod.

The panelists on this webcast are Bob Schulz, Citrix VP/GM of Desktop Virtualization, Jim McHugh, VP of Marketing for Cisco Unified Computing and NetApp's VP for Solutions, Patrick Rogers. They reflected on why FlexPod is such a popular platform for Citrix desktop and application virtualization deployments and on the ongoing collaboration between the three companies aimed at delivering the most scalable, simplified and cost effective virtual desktop environments for our mutual customers.

View the webcast here:

Of course -as vendors -we may not always be the most objective, so it's great reinforcement when we hear from customers and partners on the actual benefits they are seeing through their deployments. A couple of weeks before Synergy, Jim McHugh had the great pleasure of hosting industry experts, customers and partners on a very informal, yet informative webcast broadcast from the CiscoTV studio in San Jose.

During this panel discussion Uday Kiran of Wipro went into some details concerning the benefits Wipro saw from their FlexPod deployments for both internal VDI users as well as their Hosted VDI service offering. Faced with support for organization-wide BYOD, an employee base working for multiple customer engagements and stringent security, scalability and availability requirements Uday found FlexPod to provide the perfect platform. Reasons included:

• Superior virtual desktop density with linear performance scalability
• Vertical and horizontal scaling on the same architecture
• Rapid provisioning and integrated management for lower opex

View the complete webcast here:

Now with the release of XenDesktop 7 at Synergy in LA a couple of weeks back the benefits that FlexPod brings to the table are even greater.  The integrated, simplified architecture of XenDesktop 7, combined with Cisco's market leading data center and networking solutions and NetApp's industry leading storage offer IT organizations even more flexibility and manageability in delivering on the full range of user workspace and mobility requirements. Look out for the upcoming XenDesktop 7 on FlexPod Cisco Validated Design, which will help you accelerate and simplify your transition to XD 7.

If you didn't have the opportunity to meet up with Cisco at Synergy, Hopefully we will have the opportunity to host you at Cisco Live in Orlando in a couple of weeks. I will be posting another blog closer to the date describing the desktop virtualization presence of Cisco and our partners at CiscoLive.

Until then....

For more information on XenDesktop on FlexPod and other Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions you can check out .... www.cisco.com/go/citrix