Citrix Acquires Sanbolic to Extend Software-Defined Data Center

How the Data Center Will Grow Up in Three Years

For the last few years, Citrix has been crafting a software-defined data center (SDDC) strategy that it is extending today via the acquisition of Sanbolic, a provider of software-defined storage management software.

Revealed at the Citrix Summit 2015 conference, Sanbolic CEO Momchil Michailov says the acquisition of Sanbolic enables Citrix to put in place a complete SDDC architecture that is application workload agnostic.

Leveraging open source XenServer virtualization software and its NetScaler application delivery controller software, Citrix has been building out an SDDC platform based on the CloudStack platform.

Michailov says the one thing that differentiates Citrix is how unified its SDDC strategy is. The same framework, for example, can be used to manage virtual machines in the cloud as well as virtual desktops on the client.

Going forward, Michailov says the challenge is going to be extending the SDDC concept out across hybrid cloud computing scenarios. To accomplish that goal, IT organizations will need a software-defined approach to storage that can span data regardless of what server, virtual machine or external storage system that data happens to be stored on.

Michailov says it’s apparent that all this convergence will drive an evolution of how IT is managed across the enterprise. There will still be a stack of IT services that will need to be managed, but job functions surrounding those stacks of services will change as the overall IT environment becomes more programmable, says Michailov.

In the meantime, Michailov says organizations are clearly moving in the direction of being able to manage IT at levels of scale that were previously unprecedented. But before any of that can happen, IT organizations will still need to find a way to deploy converged storage systems that are clearly going to be accessed by multiple types of applications running on any number of types of computing platforms.

Of course, the forces of inertia inside most IT organizations are exceedingly powerful, which means at this point the biggest barrier to SDDC adoption inside the enterprise may not actually be the technology itself, but rather decades-old manual processes that IT professionals may find hard to relinquish if they perceive SDDC as a threat to their ongoing employment.