| Citrix Readies Laptop Optimization And Mulls Traffic Shaping |
| Saturday, 19 August 2006 by Michel Roth | |||
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The Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based company recently rounded out its portfolio of app delivery products with the $52m purchase of Orbital Data Corp, a privately-held developer of technology for optimizing "large file transfers over any protocol on a WAN link," said Greg Smith, director of product marketing for Citrix. The Orbital technology was developed originally for branch office environments and is symmetrical, i.e. it requires devices both at head office (i.e. at the head end of the WAN link) and out in the branch. Its initial claim to fame, and what it made its name on, was its approach to TCP flow control, which differs from competitors like Peribit (now part of Juniper) and Swan Labs (now F5). Above and beyond its TCP flow control prowess, San Mateo, California-based Orbital had been filling out its offering in the months prior to acquisition, adding first the ability to optimize CIFS, the remote file access protocol for Windows environments, and, most recently, multi-level TCP compression. The entire Orbital product set is to be renamed as the WANScaler portfolio, associating with the Layer-7 app acceleration Citrix acquired last year when it bought NetScaler, whose products are eponymous, and the laptop client, which was provisionally known as Orbital Edge, is now to be called the WANScaler Client. It recently went into beta, and, said Smith, is equally applicable on a wireless link as a wired one, since the data will still be going over TCP/IP. Beyond that, he cited further improvements to Citrix thin client optimization as a result of the Orbital acquisition and, down the road, improvements to the kind of QoS WANScaler can offer, for both Citrix and non-Citrix environments. On the Citrix thin client front specifically, Smith said Orbital had already been optimizing Presentation Server comms before it was bought, "and in fact one of the reasons we chose them was because they performed better than other competitors in Citrix environments." He explained, however, that the proprietary protocol that underpins the Presentation Server, called ICA, "has virtual channels between client and server for different functions, so our deeper understanding of the protocol means even better optimization." Smith said Citrix expects to have made some decisions as to how it will do traffic shaping, as well as the other platforms it will want to support with the WANScaler Client, within the next couple of months. Read the entire article here.
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