In this post I’m looking at the messaging around NetScaler TriScale and more importantly if the marketing team at Citrix have just come up with a catchy tag line or if there’s any serious use cases…
As the name suggests, TriScale offers three methods of scaleability for organisations that have deployed NetScaler in to their infrastructure. There are a couple of caveats based around the type and specification of the original appliance so add a comment or drop me a mail if you need to find out the options for a specific requirement….
Scale Up – Capacity increase by licence key – applies to VPX, MPX & SDX appliances.
NetScaler data sheets show a range of 39 hardware appliances available at the time of writing, namely the MPX & SDX platforms. There are however only a handful of physical boxes produced by the vendor, the rest of the product choice being dictated by the licence key applied to the hardware. As an example, the popular MPX7500 1GB appliance is the exact same piece of tin used by the MPX9500 3GB appliance only with a different licence key applied.
If an organisation starts out with an MPX 7500 appliance they can therefor apply an upgrade licence key to increase the capacity of the device to and turn it in to the MPX9500 with 3x system throughput, in other words, scale the appliance up. If the increase in capacity is required on a permanent basis, no problem but some organisations find they have to seasonal peaks in traffic which they have to provision for. Classic example would be an eCommerce site that has steady traffic volumes throughout the year but massive spikes around the Christmas & New Year sales.
Historically, these organisations need to over provision their infrastructure to cope with peak volumes of visits but Citrix have boxed this off quite nicely with their 90 Burst licence. Apply a 90 day burst licence to an MPX7500 and for a touch under three months you have an MPX 9500 with 3GB worth of capacity to keep those virtual checkouts ringing. Best bit though is that on day 91 the appliance reverts back to a 1GB capacity MPX7500 – why’s that the best bit? Because an organisation can keep the costs down in low season and make hay while the sunshines. Take it a step further with the Cloud Bridge feature opening a back door from the data centre in to AWS or similar for additional compute power and ker-ching! Massively under utilised in the UK from my past experience- Al
For more on NetScaler Triscale have a look at Up, In and Out….Scale In & Up In & Out…..Scale Out
