Today at the Interop 2009 conference in Las Vegas, Citrix Systems, Inc. unveiled a groundbreaking new nCore™ technology that allows its high-end Citrix® NetScaler® appliances to deliver rich Web 2.0 applications and cloud services for up to 7x more users with no new hardware investments required. By upgrading their existing NetScaler appliances to the new nCore powered software, Citrix customers can quickly unlock all the power of the multi-core Intel® processors that power NetScaler® MPX™ hardware appliances, allowing them to run far more web acceleration and security functions in parallel. This flexible software-based approach to scalability stands in stark contrast to traditional networking vendors who rely on proprietary ASIC-based processors and custom networking hardware, making it difficult for them to keep pace with the rapid changes in today’s web and cloud computing architectures without “forklift” hardware upgrades.
Today’s interactive Web 2.0 applications and cloud-based web services incorporate a myriad of web protocols and rich content types that can rapidly expand bandwidth consumption, slow performance and introduce new security risks. Delivering these applications successfully places significant new demands on a company’s networking infrastructure that can be difficult to overcome without expensive hardware and bandwidth upgrades.
NetScaler nCore is a groundbreaking new technology engineered specifically to optimize next-generation web applications and services in software by leveraging the underlying capabilities of general purpose multi-core hardware. NetScaler MPX appliances powered by nCore are capable of processing multiple complex operations on each application workload in parallel, while maintaining multi-gigabit performance and exceptionally low application latencies to ensure the best user experience. Leveraging the ultra-fast packet engine in NetScaler across multiple CPU cores brings unmatched scalability and performance for optimizing a wide range of application delivery services and workloads.
“The past decade saw a mass migration to browser-based enterprise applications targeting business processes and user productivity as well as increasing adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs), Web 2.0 and now cloud computing models. These approaches tend to place increased demand on the infrastructure, because of 'chatty' and complex protocols,” said Mark Fabbi, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, Inc. “Without providing features to mitigate latency, to reduce round trips and bandwidth, and to strengthen security, these approaches almost always lead to disappointing performance for enterprise and external users.”
By unlocking the processing capacities available in multi-core hardware systems, organizations no longer have to invest in expensive and inflexible chassis-based systems to achieve high performance and massive scale. NetScaler MPX hardware appliances and the new NetScaler® VPX™ virtual appliances provide a highly integrated web application delivery solution for L4-7 load balancing, compression, caching, SSL offload, application security, SSL VPN and performance monitoring – simplifying web application delivery by offloading servers, improving user experience and consolidating multiple point products into a single appliance. As a result, customers using NetScaler can reduce capital expenditures, ease IT management demands and ensure a more resilient application infrastructure. NetScaler MPX systems powered by the new nCore technology move the needle even further, unleashing the processing and memory capacity of multi-core, 64-bit systems to address Web 2.0, cloud services, multi-tenancy and future web application delivery requirements.
“We are very excited to announce the addition of nCore technology to our NetScaler platform because it provides our customers far greater scalability and performance with no additional hardware investment. This technology gives us the right software architecture to extend our multi-year performance leadership, while enabling the flexibility to meet emerging web application delivery requirements,” said Klaus Oestermann, group vice president and general manager of the NetScaler Product Group.
Pricing and Availability
The new nCore technology is included as part of the NetScaler 9.1 software release, available for download on June 30, 2009 from www.citrix.com. NetScaler 9.1 and nCore are available at no additional charge to existing customers with a current maintenance contract. The new nCore technology currently applies only to the high-end NetScaler MPX 15000 and 17000 series appliances.