Can Software Save Your Network?
The supply chain shortages that have hit the networking chip market have made this a very interesting time. These shortages have affected most manufacturers that produce specialty networking hardware.
In my role overseeing the Citrix ADC platform, I work closely with the team that handles semiconductor suppliers. I have seen firsthand the significant “supply crunch” challenges other vendors are experiencing because of chip shortages and delivery delays.
While Citrix ADC has faced challenges, the impact has been minimal because our technology’s underlying design doesn’t depend on ASICs, FPGAs, or other specialty hardware components. It’s agnostic to the underlying server hardware, and Citrix ADC uses the same code base on all form factors — hardware (MPX or SDX), BLX (runs on Linux), CPX (runs on Kubernetes), or VPX (runs as a virtual machine on hypervisors).
Citrix ADC’s patented nCore technology underpins the design and is engineered to optimize web apps and services in software by leveraging the capabilities of general-purpose, multi-core CPUs. When running Citrix ADC VPX on general servers, nCore delivers excellent performance. Not only does it leverage all CPU cores allocated to it, with the addition of each core, there’s a linear increase in performance. You can read more about that Citrix ADC’s performance in this report from the Tolly Group.
In addition, Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) service provides a single platform that enables you to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot all your Citrix ADCs from a single unified dashboard, regardless of their location. Citrix ADM provides all the capabilities required to quickly set up, deploy, and manage app delivery, along with rich analytics capability to give you visibility into app health, performance, and security.
Citrix ADC also offers flexible Pooled Capacity licensing, a licensing framework made up of a common throughput and instance pool hosted on Citrix ADM service. You can allocate capacity from that pool to where it is needed most, whether it’s to on-prem ADC instances or to VPXs in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. Many customers use this functionality to enhance their disaster recovery procedures and to facilitate cost effective migration. This gives flexibility to customers that have experienced hardware shortages due to supply chain issues and enables customers — whether they’re on prem or in the cloud — to adapt and react to shortages quickly.
Citrix cannot completely avoid supply shortages, but we can minimize the impact. We constantly monitor supply chain issues and are confident our software-driven, hardware-agnostic approach will help us minimize the impact of the shortages so we can help you deliver the security, performance, and availability your organization needs.
