However, that was then and this is now. Suddenly, we have budgets and business sees value in investing in a cost-center, like IT. The business is growing. More and more traffic is passing over the WAN and the profile has changed drastically. Voice traffic, ICA/RDP, backup needs, and just plain more data is increasing the load on the network. Plus, we have new offices opening in places where getting a static IP address is extremely expensive and not realistic.

The network was designed a decade ago and it is becoming time to remodel so we can continue to grow. The issue becomes how. Which change is going to provide the biggest bang for our buck?

We have the backing and we believe we have made some core infrastructure purchases that allows us to operate right now and grow into the future.

So… where do we go from here?

• Dynamic Routing Protocol: Static routes have been great as we use a hub-and-spoke model for the time being. However, as we expand into China and Europe, the networking design will need to change and routing will become more and more important. Something like EIGRP will probably be the best fit for us.
• Inter-office communications: Some offices have MPLS connections. Others do not… so, their communications travel all over the world to reach other offices. Being able to bring up VPN tunnels on demand to facilitate more point-to-point connectivity is going to be important. Hello DMVPN. Sure, I can create VPN configurations on each office router for other office routers, but that becomes increasingly difficult and monotonous as a new office comes onboard and the branch offices can only handle so many connections.
• Geographic routing blocks: Conceptually, just having geographic regions in the same IP addressing area makes for simpler routing. That means re-IPing a handful of offices to meet the needs.
• Regional hubs: Does it make sense to aggregate core services in a single location or create regional hubs and focus on higher performing hub-to-hub communications. I believe the answer is ‘Yes’!

All of this is really showing me a brief glimpse into the pains and considerations that really need to take place to create a more mature networking environment. Concepts like:

• Router hardware limitation (CPU availability, encryption offloading, etc…)
• Router limitations impact on network throughput
• Resiliency design
• Limitations and Advantages of various routing protocols
• Packets Per Second (versus they typical Mbps style measurement)
• plus much more!

Based on my research, this is the next logical step for us to move. I am sure there are 1 million other ways to go (always open to comments). But, as long as I try to be forward looking and pay more attention to the little details, we should be good to go!

Implementing the options from above sounds like a lot of fun. My inner geek is squee’ing with excitement. Hopefully, these projects will turn into reality and we can begin using a smarter, larger, and more robust network in the near future.

© Bill for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Growing Pains: Network Scaling And Maturation
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Branch Repeater is the rebranding of the old WANScaler product, which, in its simplest form was a WAN acceleration product. The new branch repeater is still a WAN accelerator at heart;  however Citrix have added some clever branch office features as well as some new features for XenApp customers. From a topology perspective, you basically place a larger repeater appliance in your data centre and additional smaller repeater appliances in your branch office.  I was actually surprised to learn that this is not the only option available; there is also a repeater software plug-in for use by remote users.  The diagram below shows the basic topology overview.

Branch Office Operations

One of the most interesting aspects of the new branch repeater product is the branch-in-a-box concept.  You can purchase your Citrix Branch Repeater with Windows 2008 or Windows 2003 R2 built in.  This allows you to use your appliance to deliver DHCP, DNS, WINS, AD, DFS as well as file and print services through the onboard hard-drive.  Support for Microsoft’s read only domain controller configuration adds to the package, allowing you to actively consider consolidating an entire branch office infrastructure into one appliance.  Now it sounds like an appliance failure could have devastating consequences for your branch office and you’d probably be right.  It was one of the questions I had for the Citrix Consultants at the iForum, they informed me that you can cluster two appliances together for HA resilience.  Increases cost of course, but what price do you put on availability?

Citrix XenApp features

Citrix have added some nice features to encourage those of us who already use XenApp as a branch office delivery mechanism. ICA is already a very efficient protocol and Citrix have attempted to build on that with HDX IntelliCache and HDX Broadcast technologies.  HDX IntelliCache allows local caching and de-duplication of ICA traffic across multiple ICA sessions, it also allows for the local staging of XenApp streamed applications if that’s a technology you utilise.  HDX Broadcast on the other hand is the technology which optimises and gives granular control over the network elements of ICA.  The list of individual features is quite extensive so I won’t reproduce it,  you can check it out over at Citrix’s website by clicking the links above.  The benefits of the branch repeater when used with XenApp probably depend on the number of XenApp users in a branch or your current use of the technology. A branch with a small number of users may not see a benefit that justifies the cost, however  I can see immediate benefit if a branch office was to require expansion. Use these appliances and you probably wouldn’t need to change your WAN Links.  That has to work on the cost front!

Repeater Plug-in for Citrix Receiver

I mentioned the Repeater software plug-in earlier as this was one of the features that caught my eye, primarily because we have a lot of travelling Citrix users and home based users.  This part of the product set claims to “overcome bandwidth and latency limitations on WiFi, broadband and 3G Connections” while also delivering that high definition experience (HDX).  This in itself interests me enough to explore further, but then I find it also allows you to provide central administration of end devices covering software distribution and configuration settings.  It works seamlessly with the Citrix Access Gateway product and other leading VPN’s to optimise traffic within secure tunnelled network connections.  All in all it sounds brilliant and potentially allows you to deliver improvements for users who work outside the branch office, something that is becoming more common every day.

Conclusion

I mentioned before that this is a WAN Accelerator product at heart, with nice new shiny add-ons to meet a number of customer requirements.  I’m genuinely excited by this product as I think it has a place in companies global infrastructures, especially with remote data centres and Citrix based branch offices becoming more common place.  I myself am going to find this hard to sell to my current employer, mainly due to some nasty issues we once had with another WAN Accelerator called Riverbed.  However that was a long time ago and maybe the industry has moved on since then, maybe it’s time to take a fresh look.  Cost is the one thing I’m not 100% sure about at this point in time, there are a number of different models and it would appear that costs range from $5,000 for the branch side appliances to $11,500 for the data centre side appliances.

If anyone is using the Citrix Branch Repeater appliance, we’d love to hear about your experience of it and possibly you could clarify the cost element for us all.

© Craig for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Citrix Branch Repeater – WAN Acceleration / Branch office in a box
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