As many companies are making the investment in Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop they want a fast, reliable and secure solution. In this article, we will focus on WAN optimization and performance using the Citrix CloudBridge technologies.
Citrix CloudBridge is a unified platform used to accelerate applications across public and private networks, increasing performance and user experience. CloudBridge offers ICA protocol acceleration, QoS, optimization and security for XenApp and XenDesktop. This is an optimal solution for remote or branch offices that have WAN performance issues. CloudBridge offers extensive monitoring and reporting features, which help IT staff to performance tune any Citrix environment.
Citrix CloudBridge Features
- HDX WAN optimization. Optimize Citrix ICA protocol traffic for remote offices, allowing up to four times the user capacity for remote branch offices. This will allow for the best and most optimal user experience possible.
- Application acceleration. Accelerate any TCP based application including e-mail, SSL, FTP, CAD ERP, CRP, data backups and storage replication. Application acceleration is not limited to tuning the ICA protocol.
- Storage replication acceleration. You can schedule and replicate storage in the background without impacting critical traffic. This helps to meet BCDR requirements by meeting and exceeding RPO and RTO targets.
- Video caching. CloudBridge will help reduce bandwidth consumption by caching video content from internal and external sources such as YouTube and Vimeo.
- Monitoring and reporting. The Citrix Command Center console gives you the ability to monitor and report on bandwidth utilization and performance. This helps to assure that you are providing the best user experience possible.
While most customers have optimal network bandwidth and performance without CloudBridge, there are often cases where some remote locations do not perform as well as others due to poor infrastructure and limited service offerings. This is where CloudBridge can be introduced to solve the problem. CloudBridge also helps reduce cost in environments that do not have issues by allowing for maximum user density, and providing up to four times the user density than without WAN optimization.
This is one of many areas where Citrix differentiates themselves by offering a significant ability to optimize and tune performance. Being the only application and desktop vendor that has hardware and software appliances for accessing, load balancing and optimizing the native protocols, Citrix offers a very complete portfolio.