Citrix Netscaler version 9.2 released

April 28, 2010
Thomas Poppelgaard
Netscaler

Today, at Interop – Las Vegas, Citrix announced the release of NetScaler 9.2. It’s available for download on MyCitrix.com for all customers with a valid maintenance agreement. You’ll definitely want to check out all the cool new features that make NetScaler 9.2 the most cloud-ready application network platform for virtual datacenters. NetScaler 9.2 transforms infrastructure into a shared service, delivering cloud-scale performance and unmatched entity scaling for consolidation, supports easy management of app infrastructure, accelerates Web 2.0 and multimedia in the cloud and brings enterprise SLAs and security to the cloud. With over 75 new features, NetScaler 9.2 transforms the economics of app delivery and makes virtual datacenters a reality for both enterprises and service providers. Key new capabilities in NetScaler 9.2 include:

Deliver Cloud Economics and Scale

NetScaler provides unmatched performance, scalability, consolidation and flexibility. New NetScaler MPX solutions deliver the industry’s first 50 Gbps appliance in an energy and space efficient 2U form factor and introduce unparalleled elasticity into the physical network with “Pay-as-You-Grow” – allowing customers to scale from 20 Gbps, 35Gbps and 50Gbps on the same physical appliance without the need for expensive forklift upgrades.

In addition, to support the rapid global adoption of IPv6 while simultaneously becoming the consolidation backbone for very large Service Providers, IPv6 performance and NetScaler’s capacity to support cloud-scale configurations has increased dramatically with NetScaler 9.2. IPv6 performance increases by 50% while IPv6-IPv6 HTTP requests per second increase by 4X, enabling organizations to standardize on IPv6 for better scale, quality and performance. NetScaler’s capacity to support thousands of tenants and their associated configuration services, entities and applications has increased by 2X-7X driving network consolidation and economies of scale and simplifying management.

Drive Next Generation Multi-Tenancy

Shared services is a key attribute of a virtualized datacenter. New Network Aware Policies and Policy-Based Routing features enable an application aware multi-tenant network by segmenting traffic by vLAN or other L2-L4 parameters. Additionally, new NetScaler AppExpert Template and Visualizer features simplify management, migration, monitoring and synchronization of application delivery policies. Specifically, templates from existing configurations can be created for easy import/export into test and dev environments by abstracting management complexity and allowing creation of environment specific configurations.

AppExpert Network Visualizer provides a completely new way to look at how NetScaler is connected to your network. This is a graphical and fully interactive view of your network. You can configure network components like interfaces and vLANs by clicking on them directly from the configuration map. It’s also possible to add channels, view properties of configured network-related entities, and pull down statistics and counters for a particular interface or vLAN.

Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB), by it’s nature, has several layers of configuration in the feature. Once you start adding a few sites and remote services, the configuration can start to become a little involved. The GSLB Visualiser is the perfect way to graphically represent your GSLB configuration. It will organize it intelligently by the domain names you are running on GSLB, and show you exactly which systems are up / down, and allow you to get statistics on each entity.

Bring Enterprise SLAs and Security to the Virtual Datacenter

New Active-Active capabilities provide greater high-availability and network utilization to ensure enterprise SLAs are met. In addition, new web services and XML security capabilities protect applications from attacks and help enterprises comply with security regulations. These include: cross-site request forgery protection, XML attachment checks, entity expansion attack protection, SOAP fault filtering, WSDL scanning protection and XPath injection protection.

To support the transition of various application workloads to off-premise cloud deployments while providing a seamless user experience, NetScaler 9.2 has various enhancements to its Global Load Balancing suite of features including spillover of user traffic which is a critical element to drive Cloud Burst scenarios.

Optimize delivery of Video, Web 2.0 and Multimedia

NetScaler 9.2 introduces 64-bit shared-memory caching. High-end NetScaler MPX platforms can provide up to 24GB of memory cache capacity, to cache large video files at the service provider edge, or to offload back end servers. Delivery of Web 2.0 applications are optimized with new Fast XML XPath support, which provides deep XML payload inspection and enables high-performance business logic routing.

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