Dallas, Texas - (The Hosting News) - September 16, 2008 - On-demand hosting services and virtual data center provider for the small to medium enterprise (SME), SoftLayer, will use and offer the new Citrix Cloud Center (C3) solution from Citrix Systems, Inc.

Nathan Day, Chief Technology Officer at Softlayer remarked, "Partnering with Citrix was an easy decision. It's clear they are listening to enterprises and cloud service providers - these solutions meet and exceed the needs of this rapidly-evolving IT segment. The flexibility and scalability of Citrix XenServer allows us to deliver advanced virtualization today. And the full Citrix C3 solution will allow us to deliver the cloud computing of tomorrow."

As a key part of SoftLayer's cloud computing strategy, the implementation of Citrix C3 will leverage SoftLayer's leading automation capabilities and further the company's vision for utilizing virtualization to transform the data center industry. The first component of the Citrix C3 product family adopted by SoftLayer will be Citrix XenServer Cloud Edition.

The Citrix C3 product family provides a complete set of service delivery infrastructure building blocks for cloud computing. Citrix's already successful Citrix Delivery Center product family is used by more than 215,000 enterprises and 99 percent of the Fortune 500 worldwide to transform corporate data centers into dynamic "delivery centers," providing applications and desktops as a cloud-like service to their end users. The new Citrix C3 product family extends those same capabilities to cloud providers.

Its dynamic reference architecture combines the power of each individual product to create a secure, highly available, unified service delivery infrastructure.

Citrix XenServer, a key component of both Citrix Delivery Center and Citrix C3, is a powerful, open, easy-to-use server virtualization solution that allows customers to create truly virtual data center environments. XenServer is powered by the popular Xen hypervisor - which operates directly on top of a physical server's bare metal hardware and enables multiple virtual servers to be created and operated on the single physical machine. XenServer includes an industry-leading, easy-to-use management console that can provision and manage any number of physical and virtual machines across a distributed data center environment. These advanced capabilities provide unprecedented opportunities for:

Increased agility and cost effectiveness through server consolidation - with less physical infrastructure, XenServer decreases capital expenditures.

• Simplified deployment and integration - by provisioning machines directly on top of the physical hardware, XenServer does not require a single, dedicated-host operating system.

• Higher security and reliability - through virtual firewalls and multiple data backup options, XenServer offers a best-in-class solution for running mission critical operations.

• Increased storage and clustering scalability - with simplified and accelerated deployment of virtual machines, XenServer lets administrators add or eliminate servers practically at will.

AJ Jennings, Vice President of business development at Citrix Systems remarked, "Virtualization and cloud-based delivery infrastructures are changing what data centers are literally made of. We're proud to be driving the leading-edge of this revolution and to be partnering with SoftLayer. Their vision for using virtualization to create truly on-demand data center services reflects our own, and their ability to technically execute their ideas is second to none. They are who we had in mind when we created these products."

Headquartered in Plano, Texas, SoftLayer provides next-generation web hosting and on-demand datacenter services on a global basis from facilities located in Dallas, TX and Seattle, WA. Utilizing proprietary management tools coupled with the industry's first network-within-a-network topology, the company delivers unprecedented power and control to securely manage IT environments while providing unparalleled scalability.

To learn more about SoftLayer, please visit: www.softlayer.com.

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