via ITWire.com
One of the promises of cloud computing has been that organisations should be able to easily move workloads between in-house equipment and that operated by public cloud providers, for example to handle peak loads, or simply to keep in-house processing to a minimum. That vision moved a step closer to reality with the announcement of NetScaler Cloud Bridge by Citrix.
Citrix NetScaler Cloud Bridge is designed to connect enterprise data centres to public clouds, making them appear to be an extension of the data centre. It will be released next month as a VPX virtual appliance and as an MPX physical appliance, and in versions supporting 10Mbps, 200Mbps and 500Mbps throughput.
It will also be included with NetScaler Platinum Edition on the NetScaler SDX, MPX or VPX appliance platforms.
Cloud Bridge works at Layer 2, making the cloud services appear to be part of the network. By supporting multiple clouds, it avoids lock-in.
The product brings to bear multiple technologies, including traffic management, tunnels (for security), and network acceleration techniques (including caching) that reduce latency and optimise the bandwidth of the network connection between enterprise and cloud.
It also opens the possibility of keeping sensitive data such as directories (as in Active Directory) and files and databases inside the data centre, while computation is performed in the cloud. Company officials demonstrated such a split environment, showing SugarCRM running in Rackspace's public cloud yet accessing data stored in Citrix's data centre.
Furthermore, Cloud Bridge can be run in a mix and match manner, for example as a hardware appliance in the corporate data centre and as a virtual appliance in the cloud
ìThe promise of the enterprise cloud hinges on enabling infinite capacity delivered both from internal and external resources," said Klaus Oestermann, group vice president and general manager of Citrix's networking and cloud product group .
"We talk with many of our enterprise customers who want to adopt cloud computing, but are hesitant to do so for fear of comprising their customers' data. It is a valid fear as we have seen play out over and over again in the news as tech and retail companies experience security breaches. NetScaler Cloud Bridge is a ground-breaking new product that truly alleviates these concerns by creating a secure, network transparent and optimised technology for moving entire workloads to the cloud, or moving the compute while retaining data in the enterprise premise to meet compliance needs. The simplicity and security of this product is truly going to drive cloud computing over the next year."