Dell Teases Citrix Synergy Crowd with Streak Demo

During a 50-minute appearance in which he mostly answered questions from IDC Chief Analyst Frank Gens and from audience members, Dell extolled the virtues of Citrix's virtualization know-how and his company's longtime partnerships with Microsoft and Intel.

Dell cited the example of Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet, Ill., as an example of how his company and Citrix teamed up to solve a nagging data center problem: application silos everywhere, with doctors and nurses wasting a great deal of time walking to different locations in the building to use different applications.

"They had been interacting with 200 or more terminals, thin clients, PCs, kind of spread all out. And they had to remember—if you can believe this—which workstation had which application," Dell said. "This was kind of a puzzle. Not an ideal environment, when you're trying to save lives and improve patient outcomes."

Doctors were wasting up to 60 minutes a day, "time that could have been used to care for patients more effectively," Dell said. "So Dell and Citrix virtualized their system, and now the applications follow the caregivers around."

The ability to roam an enterprise such as a hospital and quickly authenticate users is the key, Dell said.

"Here comes the desktop environment, all the apps are available, and when you walk away, that session closes," Dell said. "You also have complete HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] compliance. Now this customer believes that this has saved the hospital 20,000 hours a year, which obviously goes to better care and better outcomes for patients.

"So virtualization really is changing our lives, from the device to the data center, to this ubiquitous access, to the control it provides, to security."

One of the biggest challenges in desktop virtualization is the high cost of consolidated storage, Dell said.

"But now with virtualized IP SANs, iSCSI storage—like that provided by our EqualLogic offering—we're driving totally new efficiencies for virtualized desktops," he said.

Dell said the new generation of EqualLogic storage arrays will include auto-tiering and loading-balancing capabilities that can work across both HDD and solid-state storage.

"What this allows you to do is get much better scalability for virtual desktops," Dell said. "This means that on an array, instead of getting 100 or 150 virtual desktops, you can have 300 to 450 virtual desktops—and that's on just one array."

Citrix Synergy concludes May 14.