The Schwartz
Cloud Reportby Jeffrey Schwartz, Executive Editor
Blog archive
Rackspace Launches Hosted Desktops
Rackspace Hosting is making a push into offering virtual hosted desktops.
The company last week announced it is working with Citrix and the company's joint partners to deliver virtual desktops to users on PCs as well as phones and tablets. Citing Gartner, Rackspace predicted 70 million users will have virtual desktops by 2014.
"We feel like it's the right timing. We are seeing a convergence of the proliferation of mobile devices and cloud computing, coming together as a good infrastructure to host virtual desktop solutions," said Chris Zagorski, Rackspace director of enterprise product development.
Zagorski explained that by leveraging the elasticity of Rackspace's RackConnect cloud servers, customers can use them to create Xen farms and scale up and scale down in minutes. It will work with Citrix's XenDesktop and XenApp solutions.
Joint Citrix and Rackspace channel partners will provide customized solutions, he said. Rackspace has also partnered with NetApp to provide higher-speed storage and with Akamai and Riverbed to provide accelerated connectivity.
End-user pricing can range anywhere from approximately $25 to $50-plus per seat per month, depending on configuration, according to Zagorski.
For those wanting more turnkey offerings, Rackspace also has partnered with Desktone, which offers an alternative to the Citrix offering. "The Desktone solution is much more turnkey in terms of the pricing as well as the control panel that they provide for customers to be able to add users," Zagorski said.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 30, 2011