Mobile boom creates network speed bumps

Riverbed allows a business to load the software on all mobile devices and automatically allocate a smaller pool of licences according to the users that initiate mobile sessions first. Once a device is turned off it sends the licence back to the pool. On average, a business usually buys licences for half the number of its employees, Raper says.

“If you’re at home or in a hotel you can get the same experience over a VPN connection. It’s very convenient for those who want to jobshare or work from home or at a customer site.”

A hidden hurdle in the rush to mobile is security. Maintaining a secure network can place a huge strain on resources if a data centre is not set up to handle the extra connections required.

Mid-sized and enterprise companies are buying dedicated hardware to handle the volume of SSL transactions generated by large numbers of VPN connections by mobile devices such as iPads.

Citrix has been selling its Network Cloud Gateway to handle VPN connectivity to ensure the data centre can support users wanting to access their virtual desktops and corporate email.

“What they’ve realised now is that they can’t have a single point of failure,” Hackney says.

A bridge over virtualised servers While mobile users are causing headaches for networks now, cloud computing will raise further issues, whether private, hybrid or public. For example, how are you supposed to optimise a network for an application running in a virtual 

machine in a third-party data centre? Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is becoming a popular replacement for in-house servers as a way to reduce hardware and management costs. However, handing over responsibility for running the application can make it harder to guarantee its delivery and performance on the networking side. Citrix claims it was the first vendor to virtualise its WAN acceleration appliance which can be deployed into an IaaS scenario. Citrix’s NetScaler Cloud Bridge performs two roles; it works to overcome the effects of latency and also creates a bridge between an on-premise server and an IaaS virtual machine.

This allows a company to shift an application during times of heavy demand to an IaaS service where it can draw on greater resources. While vendors such as VMware can perform similar operations, Hackney claims Citrix’s solution doesn’t require a workload to be rebuilt and optimised for a virtual environment beforehand.