Citrix unveils carrier-grade Cloud technology
The NetScaler MPX 25000 series, for communications service providers, features Citrix TriScale technology and the industry's highest performance-to-price ratio, the company claims.
NetScaler is a two rack-unit, 160 gigabit-per-second appliance that enables operators to scale mobile S/Gi-LAN data plane capacity to 3.5 terabits-per-second while preserving earlier capacity investments.
As operators shift towards Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), the new series of controllers can enable that transition by converting to a multi-tenant platform, supporting dozens of virtual Application Delivery Controller (ADC) instances.
The new appliances solve the challenges of cost-prohibitive capacity scaling, underutilised application delivery investments and the absence of physical-to-virtual application delivery alternatives.
The new product will help mobile network operators find ways to support mass scale at a dramatically lower cost per unit of capacity, while ensuring the ability to evolve different elements of their network at different rates.
By using merchant silicon rather than the custom applications specific integrated circuits common to competing ADC products, NetScaler benefits from a steeper processor price-performance curve, one that translates directly to a performance-to-price ratio advantage.
This approach, combined with the NetScaler software-defined architecture provides operators with the flexibility to migrate from physical to virtual appliances on the same platform.
Whether implemented in this fashion or deployed as new, the NetScaler virtual instances offer identical functionality to the appliances. According to a company statement, the carrier-grade series has a 1.5 times higher performance-to-price ratio than competing chassis-based products and a three times higher performance-to-price ratio than competing appliance-based products
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Heavy Reading, principal analyst, Gabriel Brown, said mobile operators wanted to adopt Cloud-scale technologies to bring high-volume datacentre economics to their networks.
"A low cost-of-production, in combination with dynamic control of network resources through software, will make it easier and faster to pursue new commercial opportunities."
Citrix, vice president and general manager, networking, Cloud and service provider platform group, Klaus Oestermann, said the NFV-driven discontinuity in the mobile industry was challenging operators to re-architect and rethink their delivery networks.
"Drawing on our experience from deployments in more than 140 mobile networks and in the world's largest public clouds, Citrix continues to deliver the technology innovation to help mobile operators transform their networks," he said.
"This is made possible by NetScaler - the industry's only fully software-defined ADC."
He said, as mobile operators started to transition the S/Gi-LAN to this new approach, they've highlighted the need to scale their networks now while significantly bending the cost curve.
"With the new NetScaler MPX 25000 platform, we've taken everything we know about cloud-scale economics and put it into an appliance that dramatically lowers the price/performance bar for ADCs in the mobile network," he said.
It will be generally available March 16, 2015.
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