Citrix has announced new releases of XenApp and XenDesktop, extending its market and technology leadership in application and desktop virtualisation and in business-ready workspaces.

XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6 are application virtualisation products that allows users to connect to their corporate applications from a wide range of computer systems and mobile devices. They deliver a user experience with instant app access, and virtually eliminate the costs of ensuring storage performance, a statement said

The products are built on the third-generation ‘FlexCast Management Architecture’ (FMA), and are designed to be deployed in the cloud, on premise and in hybrid environments, it said.

The new releases, which will be available in September, provide features such as application pre-launch, session linger and anonymous logon. These features combine to deliver instant app access, which not only improves user experience, but also can be absolutely critical in industries such as healthcare, where doctors are able to increase their quality of care as a result.

The releases also provide new enhancements to the audio, video and graphics experience with new high-performance graphics acceleration using GPUs that provide high quality DirectX/2D rendering, an important requirement for engineers and designers, the statement said.

To enhance the user experience of Windows apps on mobile devices, Citrix is also releasing a new update to the HDX Mobile SDK. In a fraction of the time it takes to re-architect apps for mobile operating systems, developers can customise their Windows applications to be mobile-aware and provide features that enable GPS location awareness, picture and video capture, and screen rotation re-factoring, it said.

As new enhancements to Citrix provisioning services, a widely deployed single image management feature of XenApp and XenDesktop uses commodity servers and RAM to drop the IOPS load on storage by 99 percent. This elegantly solves the storage throughput performance problem without deploying Solid State Disks (SSDs) and high-end storage arrays.

For government agencies and security-minded organisations, XenApp and XenDesktop provide the only application and desktop virtualisation solution available that meets both Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliance and Common Criteria evaluation requirements. For US federal and state government agencies, FIPS compliance is a key requirement, while Common Criteria remains a global standard for security used officially in 19 countries and followed by others.

Security enhancements also have been made to enable granular policies over clipboard content filtering and directional control. This feature, inspired by customer requirements in the banking industry to help prevent credit card data hacking, gives IT control over whether end users can copy into – or out of – their virtual workspace. In addition, it provides content filtering so that potentially malicious data, perhaps embedded in Rich Text Format, cannot be pasted into the secured environment, said the statement.

XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6 Platinum editions include the full power of Citrix AppDNA application migration technology which is absolutely vital today when customers are dealing with the end-of-life for Windows XP and pending end-of-life for Windows Server 2003. With AppDNA, IT can reduce the time and cost of migrating applications and platforms by as much as 90 percent, it said.

In addition, the new Citrix Connector 7.5 for System Center Configuration Manager—developed in close partnership with Microsoft—enables administrators to use Configuration Manager to define and manage user access to virtual applications and desktops powered by Citrix.

Citrix also released a new reference architecture for deploying XenApp and XenDesktop on Microsoft Azure, complete with sizing and costing data. Published and optimised in collaboration with Microsoft engineers, the reference architecture materialises the Citrix Workspace Services vision on Azure that was first unveiled at Citrix Syneenargy in May 2014, the statement said. – TradeArabia News Service