Meet the Engineering Team at Citrix NetScaler
We had some great vendor presentations at Networking Field Day 11 and in the face of some pretty stiff competition, Citrix won my inaugural Best surprise
award, which I have just invented.
Citrix NetScaler
It’s not that the Citrix NetScaler Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is a particularly unique product; after all, I could as easily implement load balancing with the open source HAProxy, and there are impressive ADC hardware vendors in the commercial space, including the ubiquitously expensive F5 Networks and disruptive challenger A10 Networks. What grabbed my interest me however were the performance statistics of the NetScaler appliances, and specifically the process through which the performance was achieved by the Citrix engineering team.
Intel DPDK
If I might side track for a moment, at Networking Field Day 10, Intel discussed their DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) designed to optimize soft-switched packet performance on their CPUs. Intel had noted that the performance of Open vSwitch (OVS) was nowhere near the native ability of the CPU, and consequently they invested time analyzing in scary detail exactly how packets flowed in order to find out where the bottlenecks were, and to see whether those could be eliminated or optimized in Continue reading