[windows2000] On Wanscaler and WAAS and Wah Wah Wah.
- From: "Jim Kenzig http://ThinHelp.com" <jkenzig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, windows2000@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:16:49 -0700 (PDT)
Citrix's recent acquisition of OrbitalData, chronicaled and announced at:
http://www.citrix.com/english/ne/clp/article.asp?contentID=37272
creates a sense of excitement for me. This device is beyond the scope of
what Citrix has been doing in the appliance world. Now everything they do is
about "application delivery" I attended a seminar on the device at the
Microsoft offices here in Cleveland yesterday and the one thing that stuck in
my mind is the device optimizes CIFS. CIFS or common interchange file system,
is Microsofts shot at improving SMB. (See wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cifs)
Let me tell you why I think this is cool technology and how it can save your
organization some money. The wanscaler is a synchronous solution in that you
need a box at your data center and at each of your remote branches that you
want to use it at.
We have come up with all of these cool ways to try and speed up delivery of
mandatory profiles but this box could potentially be the end all be all to
resolve the issues once and for. You see CIFS are file traffic on a windows
network. What if you could in effect copy the profile or data only once down
to a box like this and all subsequent requests were delivered locally at the
site instead of across the lan.
The box has some intelligence built into it that stores the files, and will
only download changes on subsequent requests. In a thin client environment
this could reap some benefits if you are using a roaming mandatory profile for
the clients to log into the network in order to authenticate and run the citrix
client. In a standard windows environment that uses mandatory profiles where
masses of people come in the morning at the same time and logon at the same
time, this could dramatically improve the speed of logins. Anyways that is
where I saw a benefit for us because all of workstations login with the same
user name and get a dumb desktop that has a browser and citrix client. Pipes
get flooded in the morning and again in the afternoon when second shift starts
logging on. Simply caching the profile could free up a lot of bw for us.
They mention CIFS but aren't selling the device saying it will speed up
logins. At least not yet. The box claims to be transparent...they are not
kidding! I have yet to actually see a picture of the Citrix version of it. I
am hoping at iForum. It also was claimed you can get OC3 performance from your
DS3! I was promised an onsite demo at the seminar I attended. Mark Templeton
if you are listening I want the first one out of the box! (after all we were
the first customer on CPS 4, implementing it the day it was released) WAH.
That being said I would be remiss if I did not point out that Cisco just
released a similar product (or at least news releases about a similar
product..seems also that this one is transparent when trying to find an actual
picture) called WAAS. Which stands for Wide area application services.
Apparently these are cards that you can plug right in to the Cisco routers that
do the same thing. So I guess I have to eat my words of a few weeks ago where
I said that Citrix is hardly a competitor to Cisco. The two companies now have
a competitive technological device. However l think that the Citrix box may be
a hard sell in an all Cisco shop though. Plugging a card into an existing
router or switch is a whole lot easier than trying to find more rack space at
the head end and branches.
Either way it is a win win for us consumers and the Baby Bells better take
note of this technology and embrace it as part of their package. It makes a
whole lot of sense to by a couple of devices to increase bandwidth instead of
purchasing additional bandwidth with reoccuring fees.
Now if we could just get past that transparent issue and I could get my hands
on them.... WAH : )
Jim Kenzig
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Services
Provision Networks VIP
CEO The Kenzig Group
http://www.kenzig.com
Blog: http://www.techblink.com
Terminal Services Downloads: http://www.thinhelp.com
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