With the Asia Pacific region being the fastest growing segment of their business, Citrix announced this week the opening of a new internal datacenter in Singapore, consolidating previous regional datacenters in Bangalore and Australia. The datacenter has been operational for the last four months and supports 1400 dedicated virtualized desktops, double the number previous supported by the two datacenters this facility has replaced, with plans to grow to support for 2500 virtualized desktops.
Citrix started the planning for the new facility and additional VDI support in January of 2012, with the user migration happening in mid-November. While this sounds like an exceptionally long time for a new datacenter facility on the relatively small scale of this internal Citrix operation there are a number of factors to take into account.
The first is that Citrix set a goal of effectively making the transition to the new facility invisible to their end users. In this they were successful; users logged out on Friday afternoon, and when they returned to work on Monday morning and logged in, they were now running their virtualized desktops from the new datacenter facility, in a completely different country, on new hardware with new network routing. If the process was as seamless as Citrix claims, that alone could merit the extended careful planning and deployment prior to the migration.
The second factor is that this is the first stage in a worldwide, three-year plan to consolidate and update their worldwide internal operations datacenters. The Singapore facility is the model for the future internal datacenter facilities, with their design expected to mirror the successfully deployed Singapore facility.
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