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| New Citrix NetScaler 8.0 Released Citrix Systems has announced the newest version of its NetScaler product line. This newest release enables companies to keep pace with growing application complexity and rapidly rising user expectations by making it easier to set precise policies to match any application and user scenario. With significant new capabilities such as easy graphical policy configuration, full transaction-level application intelligence, integrated SSL VPN and web application firewall, as well as built-in end user experience monitoring, Citrix NetScaler 8.0 redefines the state-of-the-art in application delivery, making it far easier and more cost effective to deliver web-based applications to any user, on any device, in any location. With the emergence of new technology trends such as Web 2.0, enterprise mash-ups and services oriented architectures, enterprise application environments are growing increasingly diverse and complex. At the same time, the growing popularity of highly interactive consumer web environments such as MySpace, You Tube and Google are dramatically resetting user expectations for what an enterprise web application experience should be like. With an estimated 75 percent of all Internet users going through a Citrix NetScaler system on any given day, Citrix has long been the leader in application delivery infrastructure for the world's most demanding consumer web applications. The new NetScaler 8.0 release brings much of that experience to the world of enterprise web applications, giving IT administrators unprecedented ability to improve the experience of corporate application users. To achieve these goals, the new NetScaler 8.0 release offers two significant areas of innovation. First, it sets a new standard in controlling application and user specific policies with its AppExpert Policy Framework and makes those policies far easier to configure with its AppExpert Visual Policy Builder. Second, it tightly integrates adjacent Citrix infrastructure technologies that are frequently deployed along the line-of-sight between web applications and users, becoming the first application delivery controller on the market to offer fully integrated SSL VPN for intelligent application access security, web application firewall for application and data protection, and end user experience monitoring to measure application performance from the perspective of the end user. Each of these newly integrated capabilities plugs into the AppExpert Policy Framework giving administrators unprecedented control over the entire web application delivery process. These new capabilities make Citrix NetScaler 8.0 the most strategic infrastructure for delivering any web application to any user in any location. Highlights include: - AppExpert Policy Framework: As applications become increasingly complex, applying the best acceleration, security and availability policies requires far deeper transaction-level intelligence than most application delivery controllers are capable of providing. This problem gets worse in a Web 2.0 world where many of the important details of a transaction are often wrapped inside web services or expressed deep inside the application payload where most networking systems have no visibility. NetScaler's new AppExpert Policy Framework solves these problems by allowing administrators and developers to set policy for any NetScaler feature based on bi-directional visibility into the entire application stream, including the full application transaction, AJAX payload or XML message body. As a result, NetScaler administrators can now easily set policies that customize optimization settings for specific applications and automatically set higher levels of service or more stringent security inspections based on the dollar value or urgency of a user-initiated transaction. Unlike alternative products that have visibility only into basic header-level content, this powerful new capability allows NetScaler to apply the best delivery policy for each specific application and user scenario. - AppExpert Visual Policy Builder: Creating AppExpert rules is easy with the new AppExpert Visual Policy Builder. This new tool uses graphical drop down menus and human-readable policy options, making it easy for administrators to configure specific policies for virtually any application or user scenario. Since AppExpert rules are internally validated within the AppExpert Policy Framework before being applied, administrators are automatically protected from creating policies that inadvertently disrupt traffic or conflict with other rules. AppExpert rules are also fully supported by Citrix and do not require network administrators to learn complex scripting languages to define application delivery polices. - AppExpert Developer APIs: While the AppExpert Visual Policy Builder represents a breakthrough in ease-of-use, developers occasionally need more programmatic ways to invoke policies as well. For these scenarios, AppExpert also provides powerful application programming interfaces that use industry-standard web services description language. Using AppExpert APIs, external applications and systems can automatically modify any NetScaler system setting and any AppExpert policy. - Built-in End User Experience Monitoring: With this release, NetScaler becomes the first web application delivery system on the market to give network administrators visibility into the actual experience of application users. Powered by the new Citrix EdgeSight for NetScaler technology, this fully integrated capability provides transparent performance monitoring of web applications, including fine-grained monitoring of specific web pages and individual application transactions. By providing administrators with both real-time monitoring and historical reporting of the end-user experience, NetScaler 8.0 makes it easy for IT administrators to support service level targets and enable more precise capacity planning decisions. - Integrated Web Application Security: The NetScaler 8.0 release raises the bar for web application security by seamlessly integrating the Citrix Application Firewall as a built-in NetScaler feature. This functionality gives NetScaler customers state-of-the-art protection from application threats that bypass traditional security measures, and eliminates the need to deploy separate devices for application protection. Integrating this functionality directly into the AppExpert Policy Framework allows customers to easily configure security features in the same way they build other application delivery policies. In addition to blocking damaging application-layer attacks, NetScaler's newly integrated application firewall capabilities also assist businesses in complying with regulatory mandates such as the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard. - Integrated SSL VPN for Secure Application Access: In another industry first, NetScaler 8.0 makes secure access to applications easier by tightly integrating Citrix Access Gateway, Enterprise Edition as an optional NetScaler functional module. Access Gateway gives users a common way to securely access all their applications from any location, whether they are being delivered by NetScaler or not. This capability features the innovative Citrix SmartAccess technology that automatically responds to each user scenario with the appropriate level of application access, including control of actions such as print, save and edit. - Improved Ease-of-Use: In addition to making policy configuration easier through the new AppExpert Visual Policy Builder, NetScaler 8.0 also incorporates a wide range of usability improvements across all functional areas of the product. Enhancements include new system configuration wizards, a new management dashboard and broader support of enterprise systems management solutions through the addition of SNMP v3. - Enhanced Optimization and Scalability: As with each new release, NetScaler 8.0 also incorporates numerous optimization and scalability enhancements that extend Citrix's leadership in comprehensive web application write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Networking News :: home page |