Citrix, A10 bolster application delivery gear

Two Web application acceleration vendors at Interop will announce new products and capabilities that provide more throughput for customers with higher and higher demand on their data centers.

Citrix is introducing a new family of its NetScaler devices, and A10 Networks is announcing that its AX accelerators can be stacked to provide higher capacity.

Citrix is announcing a faster family of NetScalers that boost the top speed of the products from 6G Byte/sec to more than 15G Byte/sec.

The company says that NetScaler MPX relies on multicore processors to boost throughput, which is becoming a concern as NetScaler devices load-balance and content-switch.. (Compare application acceleration products.) 

Turning on features such as Web application content caching, application firewall and SSL encryption can knock down throughput to something more than 10G Byte/sec, depending on the mix of features turned on, the company says.

NetScaler MPX comes in two models that will be generally available at the end of April, the MPX 15000 and MPX 17000. The two new MPX models have either four or eight processors, up from two or four processors in previous NetScaler boxes.

The company says the new hardware also reduces power consumption by 50% when compared with earlier models and measured in the cost per gigabyte of data per second.

For its part, A10 is announcing that up to eight of its AX devices can be tied together to load balance and provide more than 30Gbps of throughput. Four of the devices can handle more than 30Gbps of Layer 4 and Layer 7 traffic each, according to tests by the Tolly Group. A10 has no throughput results for eight devices that are load balanced because Tolly couldn’t generate enough throughput to tax them, A10 says.

In a clustered configuration, one AX is designated as the master device that distributes traffic among the rest. If one device fails, its predetermined pair takes over with about a second delay, the company says. A backup master AX is also designated in a cluster.

Clustering is a standard feature of the AX platform that will be available in the third quarter.