Citrix Systems is talking up Xen, claiming that more than 10 per cent of global Fortune 500 companies have downloaded and activated its XenServer virtualisation platform for production use in the last four months.
Product activations among large enterprises increased significantly after the release of XenServer 5.5 in June, according to Citrix.
More than 150,000 people have downloaded XenServer from “from hundreds of download sites in over 50 countries”.
Group vice president and general manager of Citrix’s XenServer product group, N. Louis Shipley, said many industry observers assumed a free XenServer product would not have much appeal outside of mid-sized enterprises and large scale cloud providers.
“While XenServer has clearly been very popular in those traditionally strong segments, our traction within the global Fortune 500 is growing much faster than most expected,” Shipley said.
“XenServer already has a strong presence in this base as a part of existing Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp deployments, but the number of large enterprises putting it into production purely for server virtualisation in the last few weeks has been nothing short of amazing.”
Shipley said at the rate the deployments are growing, XenServer is going to “take a lot of folks by surprise”.