Networking communications giant Cisco announced a wide-ranging desktop
virtualization system and solutions comprising collaboration, borderless
networking and data center technologies from the company and an ecosystem of
virtualization vendors. Named the Cisco Virtualization Experience
Infrastructure (VXI), the system design integrates Cisco's Collaboration, Data
Center Virtualization and Borderless Networks architectures with desktop
virtualization software and devices.
The company said VXI is available immediately from Cisco and select Cisco
Data Center
and Unified Communications Authorized Technology Provider partners.
Among the Cisco technologies validated within VXI are the company's Unified
Communications applications optimized for virtualized environments and endpoints,
including the Cisco Cius tablet, the Cisco Quad platform, Cisco ACE
load balancing and application delivery, Cisco wide area application
acceleration software, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances and the company's
AnyConnect VPN client, Unified Computing System, Nexus and Catalyst families of
data center switches, as well as the company's MDS
multilayer SAN switches and Integrated
Services Routers.
VXI utilizes Citrix XenDesktop 5 and VMware View 4.5 desktop virtualization
software offerings and also supports management and security applications,
storage systems from EMC and NetApp, and
many Microsoft applications. Cisco collaborated with Wyse around hardware and
software technologies to help ensure applications attain high levels of
responsiveness when using the Cisco VXI system and associated
architecture. In keeping with Cisco's open ecosystem, devices from DevonIT
and IGEL have also been validated within the VXI system.
"IT and business leaders recognize the significant benefits of desktop
virtualization, but they also face the reality of having to integrate
specialized IT investments in video and telephony applications with their new
virtualized customer workspaces," said Manny Rivelo, senior vice president
of systems and architectures at Cisco. "Rather than deploy a parallel IT
infrastructure to support virtual desktops, Cisco VXI helps businesses take
advantage of current investments by unifying data center, collaboration and
networking architectures into one system."
Cisco also introduced two zero client devices designed to allow users to reap
the benefits of desktop virtualization without sacrificing the rich-media
collaboration experience inherent with high-powered PCs. Cisco further
announced that the Cisco Cius business tablet will be enabled to participate in
virtualized desktop environments at launch via the introduction of newly
designed client applications from Citrix, VMware and Wyse.
 |
