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

Leveraging Multi-tenancy in the ADC as a Way to the Cloud

Over the last few years, organizations have increasingly been shifting their data centers to a cloud-based model. This transition has been built upon virtualization, automation and orchestration of IT resources—mainly server, storage and switching infrastructure. The goal is to increase agility and reduce the costs of deploying and managing resources to support business applications.

As the transition to cloud-based data centers marches on, it is becoming apparent that organizations need to keep going after they virtualize their server, storage and switching infrastructures. To maximize device consolidation and increase flexibility and agility in deploying resources, other components instrumental to the security, performance and availability of the organization’s computing services need to take part in the transformation.

While increasing agility and reducing costs are worthwhile goals, there are additional concerns when it comes to supporting applications. In its report, “Cloud Service Strategies: North American Enterprise Survey, January 15, 2014,” Infonetics Research found that 79 percent of respondents want to improve application performance, 78 percent want to respond more quickly to business needs, 77 percent want to speed up application deployment and increase scalability, and 73 percent expect to reduce costs with cloud services.