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Citrix Subscription Advantage

June 26, 2014 9:00 am ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

Update 6/26/2014:
There was an interesting announcement at the recent Citrix Synergy conference that may indicate the future direction of Subscription Advantage. At that conference, Citrix announced a new product bundle called the “Citrix Workspace Suite,” which consists of XenDesktop Platinum Edition + XenMobile Enterprise Edition. It does not appear that Subscription Advantage, as we have known it for lo these many years, exists for this product. Instead, Citrix appears to have moved to a more traditional (in the software industry) Software Maintenance model that includes product upgrades and 7 x 24 telephone support.

The list price for the Workspace Suite is $450 per named user (there is no concurrent-use license model for this product), plus $99/user/year for Software Maintenance. Software Maintenance is mandatory for the first year (so the first year cost is actually $549/user, not $450…less whatever discount you can get on the license itself) and optional for subsequent years. But it appears that if you choose not to renew Software Maintenance, you will also lose your access to product upgrades, just as has been the case with Software Assurance.

***** End Update *****

I’ve noticed a pattern developing: It starts with a renewal notice, usually around 90-days before Subscription Advantage (SA) is set to expire. The reply email comes back within 48 hours: “What is Subscription Advantage?” I answer and then comes question #2: “Why do I need it?” So I think it’s time once again to shed some light on this mystical annual renewal.

Subscription Advantage IS NOT MAINTENANCE!

Subscription Advantage  IS NOT SUPPORT!

Subscription Advantage IS NOT A WARRANTY!

Ok, now that that is out of the way we can focus on what SA is because it is important that you know exactly what you are paying for. Citrix SA is annual license upgrade protection. The first year is included with your license purchase - after that, there’s an annual renewal cost. What does that mean? Well it means that you bought something that is not a set-it-and-forget-it item. Data centers grow and change all time and the tools used in that data center need to change as well. So as the Citrix products evolve (or change names) you as an owner of “upgrade protection” can take advantage of these upgrades, period.

(There is one exception: it is now possible to purchase a bundle of SA and Citrix telephone support for XenApp. We covered this in an earlier blog post.)

The good news is that Citrix SA doesn’t cost as much as traditional “Software Maintenance” from companies that bundle some kind of telephone support with their upgrade protection. The general rule of SA is that it costs about 11% - 13% per year of the cost of the license. In our experience, traditional Software Maintenance that includes support will typically run you 18% - 20% per year for 5 x 8 support, and 25%+ per year for 7 x 24 support.

However, if you have not renewed your SA and wish to upgrade you will need to pay a reinstatement fee or just buy new licenses. Which option is best for you will depend on how long it’s been since you renewed SA. If your SA has been expired for more than a year, it’s going to be pretty expensive to try to get it reinstated.

Citrix upgrades its products often! So what if I have my own Citrix expert on staff and don’t plan on upgrading for 5-6 years anyway? Well, as we all know, life is what happens while you’re making other plans. What about the rest of your data center? Do you not plan to upgrade that in the next 5-6 years either? In many cases old versions of Citrix products will not be compatible with new technology releases. E.g., Citrix just released XenApp 6, which is specifically designed for Windows Server 2008 R2. Earlier versions of XenApp are not compatible with 2008 R2.

Also, Citrix frequently releases “Feature Packs” for older product versions that add functionality (within the technological constraints of the older platform). If your SA is current, you can take advantage of the new features. If not, you…can’t.

Finally, no software company can afford to indefinitely support every product version that they’ve ever released. Everything has a lifecycle. For example, Presentation Server v4.0 hit the “End of Life” point at the end of 2009. That means there is no support available for the product other than the information you may be able to dig out of the Citrix on-line Knowledge Base. Furthermore, all the downloads have been removed, so you have no way to access any security patches, service packs, hotfixes, etc. This is obviously not a good situation for your production environment - so if you’re still running Presentation Server v4.0, you should be working toward upgrading your environment as soon as you possibly can.

Bottom Line: I recommend SA renewal to everyone who buys Citrix licenses. As the person who handles all the renewal notices for our customers, I have, time and time again, seen people try to save a dollar this year but end up spending more then necessary next year. Plus it is just a headache to realize that you need to upgrade - perhaps to solve a problem that (naturally) surfaced after hours or on a weekend - but can’t get the upgrade because your subscription has expired. So, when you get that email notice from me, just remember: I’m really trying to make your life easier by insuring that you’re upgrade rights are protected!

Posted in: Citrix, General, Licensing ⋅ Tagged: , ,

High Availability vs. Fault Tolerance

May 20, 2011 12:39 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

Many times, terms like “High Availability” and “Fault Tolerance” get thrown around as though they were the same thing. In fact, the term “fault tolerant” can mean different things to different people - and much like the terms “portal,” or “cloud,” it’s important to be clear about exactly what someone means by the term “fault tolerant.”

As part of our continuing efforts to guide you through the jargon jungle, we would like to discuss redundancy, fault tolerance, failover, and high availability, and we’d like to add one more term: continuous availability.

Our friends at Marathon Technologies shared the following graphic, which shows how IDC classifies the levels of availability:

Graphic of Availability Levels

The Availability Pyramid



Redundancy is simply a way of saying that you are duplicating critical components in an attempt to eliminate single points of failure. Multiple power supplies, hot-plug disk drive arrays, multi-pathing with additional switches, and even duplicate servers are all part of building redundant systems.

Unfortunately, there are some failures, particularly if we’re talking about server hardware, that can take a system down regardless of how much you’ve tried to make it redundant. You can build a server with redundant hot-plug power supplies and redundant hot-plug disk drives, and still have the system go down if the motherboard fails - not likely, but still possible. And if it does happen, the server is down. That’s why IDC classifies this as “Availability Level 1″ (“AL1″ on the graphic)…just one level above no protection at all.

The next step up is some kind of failover solution. If a server experiences a catastrophic failure, the work loads are “failed over” to a system that is capable of supporting those workloads. Depending on those work loads, and what kind of fail-over solution you have, that process can take anywhere from minutes to hours. If you’re at “AL2,” and you’ve replicated your data using, say, SAN replication or some kind of server-to-server replication, it could take a considerable amount of time to actually get things running again. If your servers are virtualized, with multiple virtualization hosts running against a shared storage repository, you may be able to configure your virtualization infrastructure to automatically restart a critical workload on a surviving host if the host it was running on experiences a catastrophic failure - meaning that your critical system is back up and on-line in the amount of time it takes the system to reboot - typically 5 to 10 minutes.

If you’re using clustering technology, your cluster may be able to fail over in a matter of seconds (“AL3″ on the graphic). Microsoft server clustering is a classic example of this. Of course, it means that your application has to be cluster-aware, you have to be running Windows Enterprise Edition, and you may have to purchase multiple licenses for your application as well. And managing a cluster is not trivial, particularly when you’ve fixed whatever failed and it’s time to unwind all the stuff that happened when you failed over. And your application was still unavailable during whatever interval of time was required for the cluster to detect the failure and complete the failover process.

You could argue that a fail over of 5 minutes or less equals a highly available system, and indeed there are probably many cases where you wouldn’t need anything better than that. But it is not truly fault tolerant. It’s probably not good enough if you are, say, running a security application that’s controlling the smart-card access to secured areas in an airport, or a video surveillance system that sufficiently critical that you can’t afford to have a 5-minute gap in your video record, or a process control system where a five minute halt means you’ve lost the integrity of your work in process and potentially have to discard thousands of dollars worth of raw material and lose thousands more in lost productivity while you clean out your assembly line and restart it.

That brings us to the concept of continuous availability. This is the highest level of availability, and what we consider to be true fault tolerance. Instead of simply failing workloads over, this level allows for continuous processing without disruption of access to those workloads. Since there is no disruption in service there is no data loss, no loss of productivity and no waiting for your systems to restart your workloads.

So all this leads to the question of what your business needs.

Do you have applications that are critical to your organization? If those applications go down how long could you afford to be without access to them? If those applications go down how much data can you afford to lose? 5 minutes? An hour? And, most importantly, what does it cost you if that application is unavailable for a period of time? Do you know, or can you calculate it?

This is another way to ask what the requirements are for your “RTO” (“Recovery Time Objective” - i.e., how long, when a system goes down, do you have before you must be back up) and “RPO” (“Recovery Point Objective” - i.e., when you do get the system back up, how much data it is OK to have lost in the process). We’ve discussed these concepts in previous posts. These are questions that only you can answer, and the answers are significantly different depending on your business model. If you’re a small business, and your accounting server goes down, and all it means is that you have to wait until tomorrow to enter today’s transactions, it’s a far different situation from a major bank that is processing millions of dollars in credit card transactions.

If you can satisfy your business needs by deploying one of the lower levels of availability, great! Just don’t settle for an AL1 or even an AL3 solution if what your business truly demands is continuous availability.

Posted in: Backup and Recovery, Best Practices, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, High Availability ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

BC, DR, BIA - What does it mean???

February 22, 2011 6:42 pm ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

Most companies instinctively know that they need to be prepared for an event that will compromise business operations, but it’s often difficult to know where to begin.  We hear a lot of acronyms: “BC” (Business Continuity), “DR” (Disaster Recovery), “BIA” (Business Impact Analysis), “RA” (Risk Assessment), but not a lot of guidance on exactly what those things are, or how to figure out what is right for any particular business.

Many companies we meet with today are not really sure what components to implement or what to prioritize.  So what is the default reaction?  “Back up my Servers!  Just get the stuff off-site and I will be OK.”   Unfortunately, this can leave you with a false sense of security.  So let’s stop and take a moment to understand these acronyms that are tossed out at us.

BIA (Business Impact Analysis)
BIA is a process through which a business will gain an understanding from a financial perspective how and what to recover once a disruptive business event occurs.   This is one of the more critical steps and should be done early on as it directly impacts  BC and DR. If you’re not sure how to get started, get out a blank sheet of paper, and start listing everything you can think of that could possibly disrupt your business. Once you have your list, rank each item on a scale of 1 - 3 on how likely it is to happen, and how severely it would impact your business if it did. This will give you some idea of what you need to worry about first (the items that were ranked #1 in both categories). Congratulations! You just performed a Risk Assessment!

Now, before we go much farther, you need to think about two more acronyms: “RTO” and “RPO.” RTO is the “Recovery Time Objective.” If one of those disruptive events occurs, how much time can pass before you have to be up and running again? An hour? A half day? A couple of days? It depends on your business, doesn’t it? I can’t tell you what’s right for you - only you can decide. RPO is the “Recovery Point Objective.” Once you’re back up, how much data is it OK to have lost in the recovery process? If you have to roll back to last night’s backup, is that OK? How about last Friday’s backup? Of course, if you’re Bank of America and you’re processing millions of dollars worth of credit card transactions, the answer to both RTO and RPO is “zero!” You can’t afford to be down at all, nor can you afford to lose any data in the recovery process. But, once again, most of our businesses don’t need quite that level of protection. Just be aware that the closer to zero you need those numbers to be, the more complex and expensive the solution is going to be!

BC (Business Continuity)
Business Continuity planning is the process through which a business develops a specific plan to assure survivability in the event of a disruptive business event: fire, earthquake, terrorist events, etc.  Ideally, that plan should encompass everything on the list you created - but if that’s too daunting, start with a plan that addresses the top-ranked items. Then revise the plan as time and resources allow to include items that were, say, ranked #1 in one category and #2 in the other, and so forth. Your plan should detail specifically how you are going to meet the RTO and RPO you decided on earlier.

And don’t forget the human factor. You can put together a great plan for how you’re going to replicate data off to another site where you can have critical systems up and running within a couple of hours of your primary facility turning into a smoking hole in the ground. But where are your employees going to report for work? Where will key management team members convene to deal with the crisis and its aftermath? How are they going to get there if transportation systems are disrupted, and how will they communicate if telephone lines are jammed?

DR (Disaster Recovery)
Disaster recovery is the process or action a business takes to bring the business back to a basic functioning entity after a disruptive business event. Note that BC and DR are complementary: BC addresses how you’re going to continue to operate in the face of a disruptive event; DR addresses how you get back to normal operation again.

Most small business think of disasters as events that are not likely to affect them.  Their concept of “disaster” is that of a rare act of God or a terrorist attack.  But in reality, there are many other things that would qualify as a “disruptive business event:” fire, long term power loss, network security breach, swine flu pandemic, and in the case of one of my clients, a fire in the power vault of a building that crippled the building for three days.  It is imperative to not overlook some of the simpler events that can stop us from conducting our business.

Finally, it is important to actually budget some money for these activities. Don’t try to justify this with a classic Return on Investment calculation, because you can’t. Something bad may never happen to your business…or it could happen tomorrow. If it never happens, then the only return you’ll get on your investment is peace of mind (or regulatory compliance, if you’re in a business that is required to have these plans in place). Instead, think of the expense the way you think of an insurance premium, because, just like an insurance premium, it’s money you’re paying to protect against a possible future loss.

Posted in: Backup and Recovery, Best Practices, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, High Availability ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Hosted Exchange - Putting Your Email In the Cloud

February 16, 2011 3:48 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

These days, it seems everybody is talking about “cloud computing,” even if they don’t completely understand what it is. If you’re among those who are wondering what the “cloud” is all about and what it can do for you, maybe you should investigate moving your email to the cloud. You’ll find that there are several hosted Exchange providers (including ourselves) who would be very happy to help you do it.

Why switch to hosted Exchange?  Well,  it is fair to say that for most SMBs, email has become a predominant tool in our arsenal of communications.  The need for fast, efficient, and cost effective collaboration, as well as integration with our corporate environment and mobile devices, has become the baseline of operations - an absolute requirement for our workplace today.

So why not just get an Exchange Server or Small Business Server?  You can, but managing that environment may not be the best use of your resources.  Here are a few things to consider:

Low and Predictable Costs:
Hosted Exchange has become a low cost enterprise service without the enterprise price tag. If you own the server and have it deployed on your own premise, it now becomes your responsibility to prepare for a disruptive business event: fire, earthquake, flood, and in the Puget Sound Area, a dusting of snow. And it isn’t just an event in your own office space that you have to worry about:

  • A few years ago, there was a fire in a cable vault in downtown Seattle that caused some nearby businesses to lose connectivity for as long as four days.
  • Last year, wildfires in Eastern Washington interrupted power to the facility of one of our customers, and the recovery from the event was delayed because their employees were not allowed to cross the fire line to get to the facility.
  • If you are in a building that’s shared with other tenants, a fire or police action in a part of the building that’s unrelated to your own office space could still block access to the building and prevent your employees from getting to work.
  • Finally, even though it may be a cliche, you’re still at the mercy of a backhoe-in-the-parking-lot event

The sheer cost of trying to protect yourself against all of these possibilities can be daunting, and many business would rather spend their cash on things that generate revenue instead.

Depending on features and needs, hosted Exchange plans can be as low as $5 per month per user - although to get the features most users want, you’re probably looking at $10 or so - and if you choose your hosting provider carefully, you’ll find that they have already made the required investments for high availability. Plus you’ll always have the latest version available to you without having to pay for hardware or software upgrades.

Simplified Administration:
For many small businesses, part of the turn-off of going to SBS or a full blown Exchange server is the technical competency and cost associated with managing and maintaining the environment.  While there are some advantages to having your own deployed environment, most customers I talk to today would rather not have to deal with the extra costs of administering backups and managing server licensing (and periodic upgrade costs), hardware refresh, security, etc.  With a good hosted exchange provider, you will enjoy all the benefits of an enterprise environment, with a simple management console.

UP TIME:
Quality hosted Exchange providers will provide an SLA (“Service Level Agreement”) and up time guarantees - and they have the manpower and infrastructure in place to assure up time for their hundreds and thousands of users.

For deployed Exchange, you’ll need to invest in a robust server environment, power protection (e.g., an Uninterruptible Power Supply, or UPS, that can keep your server running long enough for a graceful shutdown - and maybe even a generator if you can’t afford to wait until your local utility restores power), data backup and recovery hardware and software, and the time required to test your backups.  (Important side note here: If you never do a test restore, you only think you have your data backed up. Far too often, the first time users find out that they have a problem is when they have a data loss and find that they are unable to successfully restore from their backup.) The cost/benefit ratio for a small business is simply not in favor of deployed.

Simple Deployment:
Properly setting up and configuring an Exchange environment and not leaving any security holes can be a daunting task for the non-IT Professional.  Most SMBs will need to hire someone like us to set up and manage the environment, and, although we love it when you hire us, and although the total cost of hiring us may be less than it would cost you to try to do it yourself (especially if something goes wrong), it is still a cost.

With a hosted environment, there is no complicated hardware and software setup.  In some cases, hosting providers have created a tool that you execute locally on your PC that will even configure the Outlook client for you.

A few questions to ask yourself:

  • Do we have the staff and technical competency to deploy and maintain our own Exchange environment?
  • What is the opportunity cost/gain by deploying our own?
  • What are the costs of upgrades/migration in a normal life-cycle refresh?
  • Is there a specific business driver that requires us to deploy?
  • What are the additional costs we will incur?  (Security, archiving, competency, patch management, encryption, licensing, etc.)

This is not to say that some businesses won’t benefit from a deployed environment, but for many - and perhaps most - businesses, hosted Exchange will provide a strong reliable service that will enable you to effectively communicate while having the peace of mind that your stuff is secure and available from any location where you have Internet access. Even if the ultimate bad thing happens and your office is reduced to a smoking crater, your people can still get to their email if they have Internet access at home or at the coffee shop down the street. If you’re as dependent on email as most of us are, there’s a definite value in that.

Posted in: Application Hosting, Business Continuity, Cloud Computing, Computer Basics, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, Microsoft ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

What is Storage Virtualization? (Part 1 of 2)

August 27, 2010 3:48 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

This is the first of two videos addressing virtual storage and its benefits. There are a number of storage solutions out there on the market but we have chosen to focus on DataCore of the purposes of this video. DataCore is an iSCSI SAN solution and you can learn more about their products here.

In part one, we address thin provisioning and virtual volumes. Watching this video will help you understand part 2 of “What is Storage Virtualization” where we talk about how multipathing relates to virtual volumes and contributes to a highly available SAN solution.

Posted in: DataCore, High Availability, Storage, Virtualization ⋅ Tagged: , , ,