Citrix Acquires Sanbolic
Published on 12 Jan 2015 · Filed in News · 233 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)I just saw the news that Citrix has acquired Sanbolic, a storage virtualization company that I’ve written about before. (TechCrunch also has a quick write-up as well.) Early this year, Sanbolic announced their storage virtualization product, completing a pivot from offering a Windows-only solution (file system and volume manager) to a multi-platform solution that encompasses multiple storage tiers, multiple operating systems, and multiple hypervisors.
It will be interesting to see how this acquisition affects the virtualization industry. With the exception of a few major players running open source Xen, Citrix has thus far been unsuccessful (to my knowledge, correct me if I’m wrong) in making any significant inroads with XenServer (either commercial or open source). KVM seems to be the open source hypervisor of choice while VMware’s vSphere continues to dominate (for now) the commercial market—leaving XenServer with leftovers. The same can be said for CloudStack, which—with a few exceptions—is losing to OpenStack on the open source side and VMware’s offerings on the commercial side.
So the big question becomes, “Will the Sanbolic acquisition change things?” Will the addition of a storage virtualization solution that supports multiple operating systems and multiple hypervisors give Citrix an edge that will allow it to gain the lead in the server virtualization or cloud computing markets? The pundits and experts—categories which do not include people like me—will make their predictions, but only time will tell for sure.