Citrix Excalibur Tech Preview

Last October at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, the vendor decided to unveil Excalibur, which is the latest iteration of Project Avalon (and there's plenty more references to the fabled round table in case you were wondering).

Avalon is the project name for Citrix and their strategic repositioning of their solutions to fully embrace the cloud era.  Recently the has been working hard to integrate the disparate application and desktop delivery components into a more seamless framework.  The Excalibur Tech Preview is a major step towards this goal, and promises to provide users with a simpler way to deploy and manage a Citrix environment, while bringing in some rather nifty improvements as well.

Perhaps the most important change is how administrators publish applications and desktop workspaces.  With Excalibur, Citrix have introduced FlexCast 2.0, which is a single, unified management console that allows you to publish any combination of apps and desktops and deliver them to users with any delivery technology you wish to use. 

Another important new feature is the improvement in video performance - crucial for mobile workers and users needing high definition. Citrix are claiming that Excalibur brings the biggest advances in HDX Broadcast, HDX RealTime and HDX MediaStream yet seen, and will provide better streaming to low bandwidth users along with ten times better connection efficiency for smoother graphics and video play. There's also a measure of intelligent self-configurating for mobile users; Excalibur will check the spec of the device and adjust it's delivery to give the best viewing experience possible while minimizing bandwidth consumption.

Reporting is also improved via EdgeSight to give Admins realtime analysis of performance to spot issues quickly, while Windows platform support is extended to include all operating systems from Windows 2008 R2 to W8.

For anyone interested in looking further at the new developments coming from Citrix, contact us for an informal chat about your current environment and we'll give you an assessment of how Avalon is going to help you transform how you look at remote desktop technology in your organization.