Last week I attended the Distributor Conference for RES Software, one of the multitude of Citrix/VMWare eco-system vendors. If you haven't heard about RES, you should really take a look - it's one of the software makers that doesn't get half the respect it deserves. And I don't say that just because COMPUTERLINKS works with them as a distributor, but because I know what a great product they offer.
RES are a Dutch company based in the south of the Netherlands, not too far from Eindhoven. They actually have an enormous feature list but only (currently) two products: Powerfuse and Wisdom. Oddly, the huge list of capabilities represents as much of a challenge as it does an opportunity. Whilst a particular feature may prove a deal-clincher for one company, it may be totally irrelevant for the next. On the other hand, with the software capable of solving so many problems, it is highly unlikely there won't be one killer feature in there for everyone, thus pretty much any company that uses IT is a potential target.
In the same way as Citrix XenDesktop releases the operating system from its dependence on the device (as XenApp does with applications), Powerfuse essentially gives the "user workspace" independence from the operating system. By a workspace, RES mean all the personal settings that a user has, everything from the background picture of their kids to mapped drives and printers and email signatures. This is a very powerful ideology, particularly with the advent of virtual desktops, or VDI, and, as such, it is no surprise that RES count VMWare just about as important a partner as Citrix. Having said that, RES doesn't actually care how you deliver/deploy/install your apps, it works for every way.
Personally, I believe Citrix should have bought RES rather than the Sepago technology they did acquire to solve the problem of roaming profiles, they would have got an awful lot more functionality in RES. Brian Madden counts user workspace management as one of the 5 things he thinks need to happen before VDI can really take off. I have no idea why they didn't buy them, but then I am not privy to that sort of information. I can only presume they would've been too expensive, I would be surprised if the reason had had anything to do with the actual product.
The 2nd product, Wisdom, is a runbook automation product that relieves administrators of many painful and laborious tasks, such as setting up new user accounts, automating provisioning of resources, turning off devices overnight etc. Some of the techies here at COMPUTERLINKS worked out you could save the cost of Wisdom licenses in 6-9 months, just by turning off a few PCs at night and saving the energy they sap. Software that pays for itself in 9 months on one single feature is pretty good in anyone's book.
To be honest, some of what RES offers can be done in other ways, for example with group policies and Active Directory, however the simplicity of RES, added to the sheer amount of functionalities available, are certainly the major buying factors. Security is another one. A good example might be giving a user (doctor perhaps) a specific USB key (by registering the serial number of the USB to that person) and only allowing access to the system when the key is plugged into the device. As I say: possible with other products of course, but there really aren't any other vendors out there who can do so much for so little money.
RES is not without its challenges, not least in terms of awareness. Many have simply not heard of them. AppSense is RES' main competitor, particularly in their home market of the UK, however RES do offer one big advantage for British resellers and distributors and that is that, somewhat refreshingly, they refuse to take end user deals direct. AppSense are famous, or perhaps infamous, within the channel for betraying their partners when they feel like it.
I can't do RES any real justice on a short blog, except to recommend a trial. See for yourself. As regular readers will know, my blogs are fiercely independent and I wouldn't laud a product so openly if I didn't genuinely believe it myself.
Wednesday 26 November 2008
Wednesday 5 November 2008
It's a NetScaler Jim, but not as we know it
I think it's fair to say the NetScaler product line has never really been regarded by most as an integral part of the Citrix portfolio. Or at least the technology behind it is not typically something you would associate with Citrix. The buyers are different, the established Citrix channel partners don't always have the networking background required for it and Citrix's arch-rivals in this space, F5, do not compete on anything else that Citrix do. Citrix bought NetScaler a few years ago as a result of the great name it had made for itself powering most of the top portals on the web (Google, Amazon, MSN, Betfair and so on). Citrix rarely hesitate to remind you that 75% of Internet users go through a NetScaler box on any given day. However, the considerable success in the dot-com arena has not been replicated on the corporate side and F5 have had the finance sector, in particular, pretty much sewn up. Until recently that is. Such things as Microsoft Sharepoint and other vendors basing their future innovations very much around web-based front ends are pushing NetScaler's talents further into the limelight. NetScaler revenues from corporates are, for the first time ever, now superceding the dot-com results. Citrix's latest initiative is to build on recent customer successes in accelerating XenApp farms and, by convincing some of the more archetypal Citrix partners to take it on, try and fold this hitherto apparently undesirable stepchild into the Citrix family bosom.
The approach is to be two-fold. NetScaler is essentially a load balancer but has a huge array of more advanced capabilities such as offloading SSL traffic, application firewalling (from the purchase of Teros), multiplexing TCP connections, SSL VPN, caching and compression, to mention but a few. Often, a customer will buy NetScaler for just one or two of these capabilities but end up using more and more of them once the box is in and they become familiar with it.
XenApp is a domineering software, both in the sense that it is resource hungry as well as being a mission-critical, infrastructure-level software so load balancing is critical to performance. XenApp has a much more refined system of assigning users logging in to servers than Microsoft's default "round-robin" system, however it becomes problematic when you need to take things further and introduce fail-over data centres or more advanced DR capabilities for example. Global server load balancing and pro-active, on-the-fly content switching play a large part in enabling a more fault-tolerant, disaster-proof infrastructure, not to mention performance enhancements for the users. NetScaler can also improve XenApp farm performance considerably by relieving the servers of a lot of the XML brokering required to render applications and, of course, accelerating Web Interface, which a lot of companies now use instead of Program Neighborhood (sic).
This is, perhaps strangely, a relatively untapped market for Citrix but one with lots of potential and, crucially, one in which F5 are always going to be on the back foot. Citrix have optimised NetScaler for use with XenApp and competitors naturally aren't going to be able to compete. It is common knowledge that Citrix have over 200,000 customers. For non-disclosure reasons, I can't say how many of those currently employ NetScaler to do what I have outlined in this article, but we were told the figure at Summit last week and it is low.
The second factor that should help align NetScaler more closely with the general Citrix message is the dynamic data centre scenario that has been talked about for a while now. I wrote an article a few months ago about "green IT" (which I published on this blog in September) where I talked about how, in a perfect world, the use of servers (or even whole data centres) could be, or perhaps even should be, aligned more precisely to actual consumption requirements. Basically, I was advocating turning on boxes when they're needed and switching the things off when they're not. NetScaler could play a vital role in this.
The GSLB option does what you'd expect. In the event of a data centre fall-out, all traffic is re-routed elsewhere with no need for any DNS changes. Not only that, it also provides pro-active optimisation of traffic so users get the best service possible, regardless of where they are in the world. Add into the mix the other things NetScaler excels at - policy-based access control, SSL VPN, app firewalling (PCI DSS anyone?) etc. - and NetScaler arguably becomes not just integral, but actually the lynchpin of the truly dynamic data centre. Which is something of an improvement on being an unwanted stepchild.
And finally, we must remember the latest IT buzzword on everyone's lips: "cloud computing". Citrix announced at VMWorld that they now not only have the Citrix Delivery Center (sic) but also C3 - Citrix Cloud Center. This is an amalgamation of XenServer, WANScaler, Workflow Studio and, of course, NetScaler, designed specifically for this new wave of computing that many expect to overtake current architectures relatively quickly. (But cloud computing is a whole topic in its own right and, as such, shall be reserved for a future blog where I hope to also include some reflections on the recent tie-up with Akamai as I believe this could be crucial.)
Will all this help to sell more NetScalers? Almost certainly. I've not even talked about:
1) the fact that Citrix have developed configuration wizards to ease NetScaler deployments,
2) how easy it can be to convince an Access Gateway customer to upgrade to a NetScaler,
3) the imminent release of v9.0 where we can expect specific application integration and
4) that training programs are going online and will cost about 20% of what they used to.
There's a whole lot more to NetScaler than initially meets the eye, it's just a question of whether resellers (and customers) will see it.
The approach is to be two-fold. NetScaler is essentially a load balancer but has a huge array of more advanced capabilities such as offloading SSL traffic, application firewalling (from the purchase of Teros), multiplexing TCP connections, SSL VPN, caching and compression, to mention but a few. Often, a customer will buy NetScaler for just one or two of these capabilities but end up using more and more of them once the box is in and they become familiar with it.
XenApp is a domineering software, both in the sense that it is resource hungry as well as being a mission-critical, infrastructure-level software so load balancing is critical to performance. XenApp has a much more refined system of assigning users logging in to servers than Microsoft's default "round-robin" system, however it becomes problematic when you need to take things further and introduce fail-over data centres or more advanced DR capabilities for example. Global server load balancing and pro-active, on-the-fly content switching play a large part in enabling a more fault-tolerant, disaster-proof infrastructure, not to mention performance enhancements for the users. NetScaler can also improve XenApp farm performance considerably by relieving the servers of a lot of the XML brokering required to render applications and, of course, accelerating Web Interface, which a lot of companies now use instead of Program Neighborhood (sic).
This is, perhaps strangely, a relatively untapped market for Citrix but one with lots of potential and, crucially, one in which F5 are always going to be on the back foot. Citrix have optimised NetScaler for use with XenApp and competitors naturally aren't going to be able to compete. It is common knowledge that Citrix have over 200,000 customers. For non-disclosure reasons, I can't say how many of those currently employ NetScaler to do what I have outlined in this article, but we were told the figure at Summit last week and it is low.
The second factor that should help align NetScaler more closely with the general Citrix message is the dynamic data centre scenario that has been talked about for a while now. I wrote an article a few months ago about "green IT" (which I published on this blog in September) where I talked about how, in a perfect world, the use of servers (or even whole data centres) could be, or perhaps even should be, aligned more precisely to actual consumption requirements. Basically, I was advocating turning on boxes when they're needed and switching the things off when they're not. NetScaler could play a vital role in this.
The GSLB option does what you'd expect. In the event of a data centre fall-out, all traffic is re-routed elsewhere with no need for any DNS changes. Not only that, it also provides pro-active optimisation of traffic so users get the best service possible, regardless of where they are in the world. Add into the mix the other things NetScaler excels at - policy-based access control, SSL VPN, app firewalling (PCI DSS anyone?) etc. - and NetScaler arguably becomes not just integral, but actually the lynchpin of the truly dynamic data centre. Which is something of an improvement on being an unwanted stepchild.
And finally, we must remember the latest IT buzzword on everyone's lips: "cloud computing". Citrix announced at VMWorld that they now not only have the Citrix Delivery Center (sic) but also C3 - Citrix Cloud Center. This is an amalgamation of XenServer, WANScaler, Workflow Studio and, of course, NetScaler, designed specifically for this new wave of computing that many expect to overtake current architectures relatively quickly. (But cloud computing is a whole topic in its own right and, as such, shall be reserved for a future blog where I hope to also include some reflections on the recent tie-up with Akamai as I believe this could be crucial.)
Will all this help to sell more NetScalers? Almost certainly. I've not even talked about:
1) the fact that Citrix have developed configuration wizards to ease NetScaler deployments,
2) how easy it can be to convince an Access Gateway customer to upgrade to a NetScaler,
3) the imminent release of v9.0 where we can expect specific application integration and
4) that training programs are going online and will cost about 20% of what they used to.
There's a whole lot more to NetScaler than initially meets the eye, it's just a question of whether resellers (and customers) will see it.
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