From bare metal to pay as you go: Citrix bares all

At its Synergy 2010 conference today, Citrix and its partners made several product announcements, but two are especially intriguing: A new pay-as-you-go pricing model for its NetScaler application acceleration appliance that's based on bandwidth usage and an option to run a "bare metal" implementation of McAfee's security software.

First the more central items: Citrix is shipping its new XenClient technology, a bare metal hypervisor (meaning it runs directly on the hardware with no OS or other software underneath) that supports offline operation for virtual desktop clients and that allows more than one virtual desktop to run on a single machine at the same time.

It also introduced a newer, faster version of its HDX desktop virtualization client software, dubbed “Nitro,” which it says is three times faster at tasks ranging from initial session startup to printing.

It launched Safe Zones, which creates encrypted directories to store corporate data used by a virtual desktop and which allow for the remote deletion of that data if a laptop or other machine hosting it is lost or stolen.

Even WYSE jumped in with the announcement of Xenith, a palm-sized “zero client” thin client PC preloaded with Citrix’s HDX desktop virtualization software. The diminutive unit includes two USB ports, audio jacks, and a Wi-Fi connectivity, judging by this photo shown at a pre-event briefing yesterday.

But the two announcements I found most interesting were the pay as you go NetScaler WAN optimization device and Citrix’s decision to allow McAfee antivirus software to run on the client’s bare metal,right alongside Citrix's hypervisor.

With the new pricing model, users pay for a NetScaler WAN bandwidth optimization appliance based on the bandwidth they use. Users can also buy “Burst Packs,” which temporarily increase bandwidth for 90 days.

Citrix senior vice president and chief marketing officer Wes Wasson said the new “pay as you go pricing” for the NetScaler WAN optimization device “brings the elasticity and scalability of the cloud environment into the data center.” From a business model perspective it’s really different though. Citrix’s cost to sell you the device is the same. It’s one box, in your data center, used only by your organization. It’s not installed in a shared tenancy configuration where Citrix can spread the cost across multiple users by charging everyone a use fee. Rather, you’re sold a bandwidth crippled device that can be unlocked in increments. Nonetheless, users may like the idea of paying less now and more later, as device utilization increases.

The decision to include “hypervisor-native detection capabilities into Citrix XenClient and Citrix XenServer” to me is an interesting one. Finally, just when Citrix has finally removed all vestiges of Windows operating system clutter out from under the hypervisor, here we go again, pushing stuff back in – in this case McAfee’s anti-virus software. Here's what it looks like from a software stack standpoint:

And of course if you have a WYSE thin client like the Xenith, you've also got their Zero Engine software floating around in there as well.

On the one hand, you can make the argument that the anti-virus engine needs to be there, in the down low, where no malware can get underneath it. But then again, anti-virus software is notoriously fickle, as anyone following the story of how a McAfee anti-virus signature update crashed many corporate Windows XP PCs knows by now. How much more fun would that be if a lockup like that took place at the hypervisor level?

Many software vendors could make the argument that they should be able to cut out the operating system middleman and run on the bare metal at the bottom of the stack. But there were good reasons why the operating system as arbiter was there in the first place.

So...what else will get stuffed back in? Is there more room at the bottom? Keep an eye out for future changes to this diagram.