Cisco and Citrix RISE to the ADC Occasion

Citrix and Cisco recently announced “deep” integration between the Citrix NetScaler ADC and Cisco’s Nexus 7000 switching line.  In a nutshell, this functionality allows a Citrix Netscaler ADC to be treated as a remote linecard or module of a Nexus 7K switch, enabled via Cisco’s RISE technology.

This enables organizations to deploy ADC’s in their data center in a faster and simplified manner.  Nearly all the clients I speak to are looking for simplicity, speed and/or reduced costs in their data center.  Thus, this is a nice thing for Cisco/Citrix customers, especially those with Nexus 7Ks already deployed. 

Ever since Cisco exited the ADC market and signed-on Citrix as their official ADC partner, I’ve been wondering when (or if) “deep integration” was coming.  In fact, I was actually hoping for even more:  i.e., wouldn’t it be nice if there was a NetScaler Line-card you could install directly into the 7K chassis ? – That would certainly be even better for customers.  Hopefully, something like that that is in the works… It also begs the question if integration with other ADC vendors is in the works (Cisco has ties to other ADC vendors including F5, Radware, A10, KEMP and others)…

In any event, this is a good thing for Cisco, Citrix and ADC customers in general, as it eases ADC deployment which has always been tedious. Moving forward, this is a compelling differentiator for Nexus 7K customers making an ADC investment.  And for those looking to make an ADC investment, we have a nice collection of published research including this RFP template as well as the 2013 Magic Quadrant for ADCs…

Note:  I don’t typically blog about vendor product annoucements unless they are really disruptive because there are just too many (especially during Interop week).  However,  this annoucement is particularly blog-worthy for me since it spreads acrosss both the ADC and Data Center Networking markets.

Regards, Andrew