Citrix Enhances High-Definition HDX Technology to Accelerate Virtual Desktop Adoption

Citrix announced enhancements to its market-leading HDX™ technology in Citrix® XenDesktop™ 4, delivering the best high-definition experience for every user, while utilizing 90 percent less bandwidth than competing solutions. The new HDX enhancements in XenDesktop 4 ensure the best possible user experience for multimedia content, real-time communication, USB peripherals and 3D graphics, regardless of the network or endpoint device. With added HDX Adaptive Orchestration capabilities for multimedia, XenDesktop 4 dynamically optimizes performance and bandwidth to fit each unique user scenario, delivering the best user experience at the lowest possible cost. In addition to the new HDX enhancements, XenDesktop 4 adds a broad range of new features that significantly enhance the flexibility and ROI of desktop virtualization, making it a mainstream reality for hundreds of millions of corporate desktops worldwide.

Delivering High-definition User Experience Requires More than a Protocol
The biggest challenge when optimizing user experience for virtual desktops is balancing performance with network bandwidth. Some technologies improve the responsiveness of the desktop, but use so much bandwidth that organizations would be forced to add expensive network infrastructure to scale beyond a few users. Other approaches conserve bandwidth, but result in an unacceptable lag in a host of problems that impact user experience, including poor responsiveness to mouse movements, slow screen refresh, out-of-sync audio and video, and distorted screen display.

The Citrix ICA® protocol has long been credited with enabling the centralization of applications for 100 million users worldwide without compromising user experience. When it comes to delivering today’s full range of virtual desktop technologies in an increasingly dynamic world, however, no single protocol can do the job. An enterprise-class virtual desktop solution must be able to deliver any type of content over any type of network, and be able to dynamically adjust as network conditions change. It must handle any type of device in any location, regardless of where the desktop is hosted. It must allow users to seamlessly switch between devices, networks and locations with no change in performance. And it must do all this intelligently, leveraging processing power and bandwidth in the most efficient way possible for each unique connection scenario.

Citrix HDX technology includes all the power of ICA, but goes well beyond the protocol level to handle today’s new realities. The new advanced optimizations in XenDesktop 4 include enhancements for Flash multimedia, webcams, voice-over-IP (VoIP), audio, 3D graphics and more. Purpose-built to optimize performance and bandwidth, the HDX technology enhancements in XenDesktop 4 represent an extensive set of solutions from the datacenter to the desktop that react to different applications, bandwidth and latency challenges, to ensure a high-definition user experience across any network, to any device.

• HDX MediaStream for Flash – Accelerates multimedia performance sending Flash content in its native compressed format to the user’s device and leveraging the local processing power for playback to provide truly local PC-like performance.
• HDX RealTime – Enhances real-time communications by enabling support for webcams and improving voice and music audio quality while still consuming minimal bandwidth.
• HDX Plug-n-Play – Enhances support for specialized keyboards (such as the Bloomberg keyboard) and dictation devices like the Philips Speechmike; Also provides users with flexibility to customize their multi-monitor configurations with special screen arrangements (such as U, L, T, reverse L and inverse T shapes) and different sizes, resolutions and orientations.
• HDX 3D (announced in Sept. 2009) – Extends desktop virtualization to advanced users of CAD/CAM and engineering applications, even over WAN connections. HDX 3D enables organizations to source talent on a global basis, rapidly provision those workers with high powered desktops and professional 3D applications, yet maintain centralized control over intellectual property.
• HDX IntelliCache – Optimizes performance and network utilization for multiple users by caching bandwidth intensive data and graphics throughout the infrastructure and transparently delivering them as needed from the most efficient location.

These technologies interact with each other through the use of HDX Adaptive Orchestration technology. This added adaptive orchestration technology intelligently assesses the capabilities of variables such as the user device, latency and network bandwidth to determine the optimal delivery method, and to decide whether client-side or server-side rendering will provide the best experience. Working together, these technologies help XenDesktop 4 deliver the highest performance while utilizing 90 percent less bandwidth – balancing the best performance with the best bandwidth utilization to deliver the best user experience of any virtual desktop solution.

A more detailed list of the technical features included in each of these HDX categories is available on the Citrix corporate website at www.citrix.com/hdx.

Availability
XenDesktop 4 with its new HDX enhancements will be generally available on November 16, 2009. More information about XenDesktop 4 can be found at www.citrix.com/xendesktop4.