Citrix has announced the availability of the NetScaler MPX 25000 series, a carrier-grade application delivery controller (ADC) for communications service providers featuring Citrix TriScale technology and the industry’s highest performance-to-price ratio. The next-generation NetScaler is a two rack-unit (2RU) 160 gigabit-per-second appliance that enables operators to scale mobile S/Gi-LAN data plane capacity to 3.5 terabits-per-second while preserving earlier capacity investments. As operators shift towards NFV, the NetScaler MPX 25000 series can enable that transition by converting to a multi-tenant platform supporting dozens of virtual ADC instances. The new appliances solve the challenges of cost-prohibitive capacity scaling, underutilized application delivery investments and the absence of physical-to-virtual application delivery alternatives.

To ensure future success, mobile network operators must find ways to support mass scale at a dramatically lower cost per unit of capacity, while ensuring the ability to evolve different elements of their network at different rates. These cloud-scale efficiencies and economics are built into the NetScaler MPX 25000 series. By using merchant silicon rather than the custom ASICs common to competing ADC products, NetScaler benefits from a steeper processor price-performance curve, one that translates directly to a performance-to-price ratio advantage. This approach, combined with the NetScaler software-defined architecture, provides operators with the flexibility to migrate from physical to virtual appliances on the same platform. Whether implemented in this fashion or deployed as new, the NetScaler virtual instances offer identical functionality to the NetScaler MPX 25000 appliances.

Cloud-Scale Economics Enable New Price-Performance Standard

As the industry’s leading ADC for public and telco clouds, which require tens of thousands of servers, NetScaler has been designed to ensure cost-effective deployment at scale.

The carrier-grade NetScaler MPX 25000 series has a:

• 1.5X higher performance-to-price ratio than competing chassis-based products
• 3X higher performance-to-price ratio than competing appliance-based products

Additional benefits of the NetScaler MPX 25000 for communication service providers include providing the ability to:

• Scale mobile S/Gi-LAN services – Enables operators to scale any network use case, including optimization and gateway load balancing, CGNAT and traffic-steering in the data plane; and LTE DNS, SMPP, SIP, and Diameter load-balancing in the control plane.
• Consolidate multiple use cases on a single platform – Allows operators to reduce use case-specific deployments that add complexity and inefficiency to the S/Gi-LAN environment. The most impactful consolidated scenario is that of carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) and data-plane load balancing and, optionally, traffic steering.
• Minimize stranded investments – Helps operators protect their network infrastructure investment through Citrix TriScale® scale-out clustering, which enables multiple appliances to be treated as a single logical and functional unit. As operators look to minimize up-front investment and scale capacity with new hardware, they can continue to make use of the original hardware.
• Bridge the NFV gap – Helps operators protect and transition their network infrastructure to multi-tenant appliances supporting up to eighty virtual ADC instances with Citrix TriScale scale-in multi-tenancy. 

Availability

 

Citrix NetScaler MPX 25000 will be generally available March 16, 2015.