Application-centric IT is the new way: Citrix

MUMBAI, INDIA: An Interview with C. Ramanan, Director - Cloud Networking, India Subcontinent to understand the ADC terrain better specially from Citrix's own assessment and strategic plans here.

The ADC table is laden with a lot of appetite-triggers from multi-tenancy, downtime factors, workload management to resource provisioning and agile network infrastructures. Are products evolving at the pace of gaps and needs?

Web applications suffer issues like frequent disconnectivity and unavailability of infrastructures. That's where Netscaler from Citrix is devised for hundred per cent time factor. Latency problems pop up because of place and quality of bandwidth but application performance has to be delivered somehow. Netscaler for instance, strives best to improve web-application delivery.

Application side is fraught with shadow IT and DevOps alignment pressures while network side is catching up with new trends like SDN (Software Defined Networking). Are ADCs living up to the tough balance required?

It depends on the context we are talking about. For a web-based application for instance, Netscaler can take care of availability as well as security, performance with visibility features and more. Shadow IT or SDN, they are still in discussion stages and there are different ways at which different vendors are coming together to simplify IT infrastructures. Today IT has to do more with less.

Is the good old conflict or distance between network administrators and application administrators still there?

Our products only balance the two sides well. More so with the classic feature around visibility. This tool helps to resolve that and a lot of blame game can be ironed out between application guys and network guys. This tool gives you real-time analysis, recorded vision and helps to figure out where exactly does the problem lie - is it bandwidth, application or server-side issue? Once you can pinpoint the issue, it is easy to address it.

How is India as a market segment here from your portfolio's angle?

Customers are showing excitement around our products. Specially when they need something that can take care of scale-up, scale-in, scale-out - all sides. E-junk is a factor we take care of too. Our appliances are built with answers that customers need at various stages.

Our use cases are increasing. Alignments like the one between Cisco and Citrix strengthen our capabilities every day to bring new enhancements. Citrix's new way of IT is ACI or Application Centric Infrastructure where we look into decoupling of applications with infrastructure. Innovations like APIC or Application Policy Infrastructure Controller are worth watching out for. We see a huge growth in ADC space as most customer applications are either web-based or growing towards that and that's where Netscaler plays a role with apt features and business benefits.

Tell us more about the new move with Cisco?

In association with Cisco an upgrade of Citrix NetScaler has been announced, and this would be as a remote services blade for the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switch. This unique integration of NetScaler into the Nexus 7000 has been jointly developed between the two companies using the Cisco Remote Integrated Service Engine (RISE) technology. This would be powered by RISE technology, and the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series and Citrix NetScaler product line will integrate together to optimize the management of policy-based routing for application delivery and it would also cover capabilities like Plug and Play Set up, reduced downtime, ease of monitoring and integrated multi-tenancy support. I hope that this new upgrade of Netscaler will have significant impact for the Indian customers, especially in the BFSI, Government, ITeS segments which have large employee base.