Citrix launches NetScaler 9.1

It simplifies application delivery using a single-function device.

Citrix Systems unveiled the technology at the Interop 2009 conference in Las Vegas.

"We are very excited to announce the addition of nCore technology to our NetScaler platform because it provides our customers far greater scalability and performance with no additional hardware investment," said Klaus Oestermann, group vice president and general manager NetScaler Product Group.

"This technology gives us the right software architecture to extend our multi-year performance leadership, while enabling the flexibility to meet emerging web application delivery requirements."

By upgrading their existing NetScaler appliances to the nCore software, Ccustomers can unlock all the power of the multi-core Intel processors that power NetScaler MPX hardware appliances, to run more web acceleration and security functions in parallel.

Oestermann said the software stands in stark contrast to traditional networking vendors who rely on proprietary ASIC-based processors and custom networking hardware, making it difficult for them to keep pace with the changes in today's web and cloud computing architectures without "forklift" hardware upgrades.

"The past decade saw a mass migration to browser-based enterprise applications targeting business processes and user productivity as well as increasing adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs), Web 2.0 and now cloud computing models," said Mark Fabbi, VP and analyst at Gartner.

"These approaches tend to place increased demand on the infrastructure, because of "chatty" and complex protocols.

"Without providing features to mitigate latency, to reduce round trips and bandwidth, and to strengthen security, these approaches almost always lead to disappointing performance for enterprise and external users," he added.

nCore technology included as part of the NetScaler 9.1 software is available for download on June 30, 2009 from www.citrix.com.