Thursday, June 4, 2015

Citrix NetScaler and Cisco ACI: How it all Works

It’s an exciting week ahead at Cisco Live in San Diego.

Citrix is pleased to be a key Cisco ACI ecosystem partner through the integration of the Citrix NetScaler ADC with the Cisco APIC controller.

There are several interesting technologies being leveraged to deliver this joint solution and I thought would be interesting to take a look at how it is implemented. Cisco APIC addresses the two main requirements for achieving the application centric data center vision:

Policy-based automation framework

•Policy-based service insertion technology

A policy-based automation framework enables the APIC to dynamically provision and configure resources according to application requirements.

As a result, core services such as firewalls and Layer 4 through 7 switches can be consumed by applications and made ready to use in a single automated step.

Being application-centric, the APIC allows the creation of application profiles, which define the Layer 4 through 7 services consumed by a given data center tenant application. As a key ADC partner in the ACI ecosystem, Citrix NetScaler provides L4-L7 services such as load balancing, application acceleration, and application security.

Cisco ACI and Citrix NetScaler ADC Solution


Figure 1. Cisco ACI and Citrix NetScaler ADC Solution

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Citrix and Cisco Deliver Application Agility and a Path to Software Defined Networks

Applications are the core of any business. To respond quickly to changing business requirements, IT organizations must be able to deploy applications rapidly across a broad range of physical and virtual infrastructure while ensuring performance, scalability, security and visibility.

But applications are only as agile as the infrastructures on which they run.
With traditional datacenter infrastructure, it can take weeks to make an application change. Cloud, mobility and virtualization trends further complicate the interplay between applications, network services and the underlying infrastructure. Achieving a truly agile, application-driven datacenter requires a flexible infrastructure that can respond dynamically to application needs, automatically provisioning and configuring the necessary resources independent of their location.

Citrix and Cisco Systems have worked to accelerate the transformation to new network service delivery models that provide greater business agility. They deliver a robust set of capabilities--from product integration and validated designs to new technologies--that provide immediate benefits to customers while streamlining the transition to software-defined networks (SDN) and application-centric infrastructure.