Entrevista: Fernando Rodriguez & John Thorburn – Citrix Iberia
Este lunes, tuve el placer de entrevistar al señor Fernando Rodríguez, Contry Manager para Citrix Iberia y John Thorburn, System Engineer Manager para Citrix Iberia.
Los señores Fernando Rodríguez y John Thorbun, tuvieron la amabilidad y el gesto de atender al Blog de Virtualización en Español, por lo que desde aquí les doy las gracias y les felicito por la importancia de su mensaje durante la entrevista.
A continuación te adjunto un transcript resumido de la entrevista con los señores Rodríguez y Thorburn. Adicionalmente, puedes también ver la entrevista completa en formato audiovisual al final de este post.
Jose Maria Gonzalez: Thank you guys for taking the time to do this interview with me. Just to start off, could you introduce yourselves and give us a quick background on who you are, what are you doing in Citirx, and what is business like for Citrix?
John Thorburn: My name is John Thorburn, System Engineer Manager. I do a lot of the technical stuff of the bussiness here in Citrix Iberia and I have been working for Citrix 10 years now.
Fernando Rodríguez: My name is Fernando Rodríguez. I am the Country Manager for the EMEA region. I have been with Citrix almost 10 years now. Previous roles involved Marketing and Commercial positions.
JMG: The benefits of moving to a virtualized server infrastructure are long turn; how ready is the Citrix XenServer Virtualization solution for the enterprise?
JT: First of, Server Virtualization as a long tern benefit, I disagree slightly as there is an immediate benefit when you virtualized due to flexibility, cost saving … so there is long tern benefit but there is also immediate sort terns. XenServer has been many years now in the Market … If you take companies like Tesco or SAP, these are large Enterprise costumers that are running XenServer today so I think we are here. Maybe when we bought the company two years ago we were not ready deploying into the Enterprise, it was more medium and smaller companies but right now as of XenServer 5.0 we were on the way
FR: Based on the current economical situation, perhaps right now we can proof and show to the market that our technology is the best value preposition anyone can find in the market right now …. I think right now we’re are cheapest solutions in the market.
JMG: What were the strength and benefit of acquainting Xen by Citrix two years ago?
JT: there is an enormous air of technical partners that worked in Xen Open Source that we take advantage of. Also we work with them inside the Company. Fundamental on top of these, is Intel and AMD offering the chipset and the processors which is the main functionality that we take out for our server virtualization products. Also mayor manufactures like HP, Sun, Dell, etc we are working very hard with. The ecosystem is quite large because Xen came from the Open Source organization …Aslo with the Storage vendors. As you consolidate servers, storage subsystem behind are also a significant part of the infrastructure and we work quite hard with them, from Netapp, HP and etc…
FR: On the other hand, I’d like to put on the table that is important from my side. What would be the Citrix situation on the market without this technology?. Because probably everybody has to expend one minute to think that right now we are in this critical position in the market…
JMG: Can you explain to our readers what it means by the collaboration between Citrix and Microsoft to develop new solutions for Virtualization?
JT: The agreement with Microsoft is built on the agreement we have long turn so we work very hard with Microsoft since NT 3.51. So we got already the business and technical relationship both at the engineering level and we extended this into the Server virtualization. We have done this Citrix Essentials which is a value add of top of Citrix XenServer or on Microsoft Hyper-V. This is interesting because it allows customer that want to have level functionality like storage control, life management to be working with either XenServer or Hyper-V… We work at the engineer level with Microsoft because if you see the architecture of Hyper-V is very similar to XenServer so there is also duality in there. The main benefit to customers you would able to see is that they can pick and choose whether they can run the virtual machine on XenServer or Hyper-V …
FR: This show how Citrix has changed the rule of the market… We have a loop about the technology and yes is something that is base in Open Source but that is able to add some value on Microsoft technology and also it shows to the market some interoperability that can move from different vision and perspective to any customer. That’s never happened before. If you were in the Open Source Software before you won’t have to do nothing with Microsoft but now Citrix is changing the rules. You are able to move from Open Software to Microsoft and also to show to the market that the rules that used to be are different now…
JMG: I am a customer and I am about to virtualized my Data Center, over 100 Physical Servers, and I want to built the data center of the future … why would you recommend me to use XenServer from Citirx?
JT: First of all, it’s a great decision that you are going to virtualize Servers … I think the important thing to look at is what are my workload that I am going to virtualize. It is Linux Machines? It is Windows Machines … because that the basic of actual study that you are going to do when you virtualize your Data Center… but to answer more you question, I think that is more down to performance and cost. XenServer is a second generation hypervisor. It takes advantage of hardware extensions that are on Intel and ADM processors. This is not the case with our main competition. So in performance we are the leader … so that’s one of the reasons, performance. The other one is cost and XenServer is free. If I don’t need more functionality that is on my base XenServer product then that’s it… so cost and performance this is what it comes down to.
FR: I do agree with John but I would like to add at least a different matter. For me is support, how is going to support the solution. Ant the other one, if in the future I want to change of solution, is it going to be possible or not?. So these to matters are going to be another two points that are going to re-enforce our situation as a potential provider for these solutions because we are able to support our solution and also solutions based on Microsoft and also we are going to offer to everybody the possibility to «leave» our technology and go with other vendors in the future… To add something about performance, 95% of the installed based are 32bit technology … So everyone must thing how to migrate this technology onto 64bits…