By samdizzy

Rackspace Hosting took center stage at the 2011 Citrix Summit in San Francisco on Monday and released the Rackspace Hosted Virtual Desktop Platform. Rackspace says the platform is compatible with Citrix desktop virtualization solutions such as Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp.

The Rackspace Hosting Virtual Desktop is a way for both Rackspace Hosting and Citrix Systems to take Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solutions into the cloud and to make the solutions mobile, simpler and more flexible, Rackspace claims. Users can access their virtual desktops and application from PCs, smartphones and tablets. The overall goal is to help business end-users increase productivity. Rackspace Hosted Virtual Desktop also carries NetApp for storage capabilities. NetApp lets users provision thousands of virtual desktops through storage cloning.

The announcement comes after Gartner, Inc. released a study saying 70 million desktops would be virtualized by 2014. Rackspace Hosting and Citrix Systems are looking to get ahead of the curve by combining Citrix’s on-demand applications model with Rackspace’s data center, remote management tools and 24x7x365 live support.

Clients have the option of launching the solution as a managed, cloud or RackConnect (hybrid) service model.

Why Citrix?

There are a couple of reasons why Citrix is the right partner for Rackspace when it comes to delivering the Rackspace Hosted Virtual Desktop Platform. One is that Citrix has roughly 9,000 VAR’s that will now resell Rackspace’s platform through this partnership. The second, according to Vice President of Enterprise Solutions for Rackspace Odus Wittenberg, is that Rackspace can utilize Citrix’s “software and application solutions, which is what they (Citrix) do best.” Customers can sign up for a 30-day free trial of the Rackspace Hosted Virtual Desktop Platform.