Those of you that know me know I love all things NetScaler, so when Citrix recently told me about a feature that sends packets across multiple paths in a ‘race’ to their destination, they had my undivided attention. Packet ‘racing’ sounded like my ultimate geek feature, and I wasn’t disappointed. My immediate vision was of…
We all know someone with a cluttered desktop I was at a cafe with my colleague recently, preparing and sorting out some documents to present at a partner meeting that followed and observed that his desktop was filled with PDF, Word and PowerPoint files. I reminded him that he could access the files from the cloud by…
Another of my favourite features is NetScaler Insight. Insight is a monitoring and analytics solution. The reason I’ve included it in this series is because it can be a significant benefit to a partner embarking on, or already hosting, a mobility platform including DaaS. The importance of networking is often underestimated by partners who aren’t…
Content Switching is Layer 7 Load Balancing. Content switching can be used to distribute traffic across multiple back-end servers based on host-headers, device type, language, cookie and layer 3-4 data. This feature can be very useful for multi-tenant solutions hosting web services including SharePoint or Exchange. A Content Switch is a virtual server that can…
Single Sign-On is fast becoming the norm due to consumption of services like ShareFile & Office 365. Personally, I think Single Sign-On is currently the coolest NetScaler feature; I like the idea of federated authentication and the end of having so many accounts and passwords. Additionally, you can federate in to your hosted services…
Company Office As users connect into the office remotely and out to external parties then there may be requirement to review and monitor external connectivity e.g. QoS on video connections and VOIP. Users want remote access to resources still located on office servers so security must also be reviewed. Users require access to files outside…
Global Server Load Balancing manages traffic across multiple network entry points or data centres. For example, GSLB would distribute traffic across two or more data centres (active-active) or initiate automated data centre failover in a DR scenario (active-passive). GSLB can also direct traffic based on geo-location information, providing the best user experience. For example, if…
Load Balancing is a simple but extremely effective way to distribute load and protect your services - and your customers’ services - from single points of failure. Over the years some rudimentary traffic distribution methods have been found wanting when something goes wrong and a relatively small investment is all that’s needed to obtain extensive…
Market Data and Trends While popular and entrenched in some data centers, proprietary UNIX implementations (AIX, HP-UX, Oracle Solaris) continue to lose market share. IDC predicts that Linux will be one of only two operating systems left standing. (The other is Microsoft Windows.) Red Hat commands a 62 percent and growing share of the paid…
Features Deep Dive - ICA Proxy & SmartAccess Before I go on, I want to be clear that these blogs are not intended to be the answer to your questions; they have been created to provide some context and guidance to help you make some informed decisions. Ultimately, what is important is how we…
