Microsoft is teaming up with thin client supplier Citrix
to offer an alternative to Cisco products for optimising the
performance of branch office applications over a wide area
network.
The firms plan to knit together security, caching, data
compression, remote print and file management, and security in a
product designed to ease the deployment and management of branch
office infrastructure.
Microsoft and Citrix plan to release the Citrix-branded Branch
Office Box in the second half of 2007. The enterprise-class product
will combine Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 R2 and ISA (Internet
Security and Acceleration) Server with Citrix's Wanscaler
technology, which is designed to improve the speed of applications
running across a wide area network.
Joe Skorupa, research vice-president at analyst firm Gartner,
said the Microsoft/Citrix product represented the convergence of
networking, storage and servers.
However, Skorupa cautioned potential users that since the
Wanscaler product had yet to be deployed in a large site, questions
remained as to how the new combined product would scale.
"The Microsoft/Citrix partnership will face some challenges, and
the product delivery date is very aggressive. Wanscaler is unproven
beyond very small deployments, and it lacks features such as
bandwidth management, quality of service and voice over IP
optimisations," he said.
In addition to its tie-up with Citrix, Microsoft is working with
Nortel to build unified communications systems that can handle
e-mail, instant messaging, telephony and multimedia conferencing
over a single converged network.
Wan optimisation and converged networks are core product areas
for networking market leader Cisco. Its network optimisation
technologies offer features such as quality of service - a
specification that gives priority to certain categories of network
traffic such as voice over IP.
It also has a network optimisation division that sells the
datacentre-based AVS (Application Velocity System) appliances,
which provide Wan optimisiation.
Vote for your IT greats
Who have been the most influential people in IT in the past 40
years? The greatest organisations? The best hardware and software
technologies? As part of Computer Weekly’s 40th anniversary
celebrations, we are asking our readers who and what has really
made a difference?
Vote now at:
www.computerweekly.com/ITgreats