Rackspace Hosting, the specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, announced the availability of the Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform. The hosted virtual desktop platform utilises Rackspace’s comprehensive hosting services and may be paired with desktop virtualisation 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. Desktop virtualisation 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.
By hosting virtual desktops with Rackspace, companies can free up IT resources for more critical internal business operations.
“As enterprises realise the strategic value of the business agility, workforce flexibility and management efficiency offered by desktop virtualisation, they are rapidly growing their implementations,” said Matt Lull, Senior Director, Global Strategic Alliances, 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 combines RackConnect, best-of-breed partner solutions and Fanatical Support. With RackConnect, customers can deploy a virtual desktop solution that utilises 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 utilises 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, Enterprise Solutions, 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 utilise their exceptional software and application solutions, which is what they do best.”


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