Citrix Synergy 2010 notes (part 2)

Citrix Synergy (Part 2)

Last week I addressed some of the new software announcements that came out at the 2010 Citrix Synergy. At its core, Citrix has always been a software company. What many people in Corporate Data Centers do not realize is the Citrix is a pretty big player in Networking hardware. They keep to the niche of Application Delivery Controllers, and do it quite well.

Citrix had always had some Access Gateway products to support secure access to its core product, XenApp (previously known as Presentation Server, Metaframe, and WinFrame. In 2005 they acquire a company called Netscaler, and began marketing hardware appliances. Under the hood, these appear to be off-the-shelf Supermicro 1U servers with a Citrix logo slapped on. Depending on the flavor, they could serve as SSL Gateways, accelerators specific to the core Citrix protocol (ICA / HDX) or the Swiss-army-knife approach taken by the product now known as NetScaler.

Citrix has always had a penchant for changing product names every couple of years, so trying to figure out the difference between a WanScaler and Branch Repeater can be a challenge. Without going into a complicated history, I will concentrate on the product of most interest to Cloud folks, which would be the NetScaler.

When I referred to the NetScaler as a “Swiss-army-knife” I wasn’t kidding. This box takes the place of at least five or more appliances from the likes of F5, Juniper and Cisco. They are favorites among big players like Google and Yahoo, where simplify is essential in maintain a huge, scalable architecture. A single-vendor solution can also eliminate finger-pointing when bugs crop up. Features are added as one selects among Standard, Enterprise and Platinum editions.
Specifically designed for Web-based applications, Netscaler does global load balancing, security, SSL and TCP/IP offload, compression, content caching and just about anything else a SaaS provider might want in a box. There are multiple flavors of the hardware Appliance (MPX) depending primarily on the volume of connections you need to handle. The really big news at Synergy was surrounding the VPX (Virtual Appliance) versions. Naturally, they can be downloaded in XenServer-importable format (with Hyper-V and VMware ESX versions promised.)

The Virtual versions are pretty well limited (some might say crippled) in a few ways. In addition to the limited number of concurrent connections handled, the code on the Virtual Appliance is down-rev from the hardware (which now has a feature called “N-Core”.) The hardware versions can take advantage of newer multi-core processors. Citrix and Intel have gotten VERY cozy recently and the Intel 5600 series was specifically targeted for this development.

Citrix is putting out the bait with a free downloadable Express edition of the virtual appliance (or a 90-day evaluation version of Platinum.) The freebie should be just fine for test-and-dev environments, but could probably handle a smaller “Private” Cloud just fine. The “Pay as you grow” strategy assumes that once you get going and are happy with the results, there will be plenty of “upsell pipelines” building. Also, getting XenServer in the door as a “Trojan Horse” to support the platform may prove the hypervisor’s capabilities in shops that are otherwise VMware-only. Significant improvements in I/O on Intel chipsets make XenServer a lean-and-mean platform for functions like this, with network requests being handled by hardware-assist functions directly. This is what is required for bare-metal network speeds on a virtual platform.

If you are a SaaS provider, you owe it to yourself and your customers to at least kick this technology around. You can probably save some money in the long run (over purchasing multiple single-function boxes) and the price of entry is hard to beat.