Citrix powers “always-on” branch workspaces

Citrix has launched the CloudBridge Virtual WAN Edition, which reduces the cost of delivering applications, documents and IT services to branch offices by up to 80 percent, while ensuring nearly 100 percent application availability. The new CloudBridge Virtual WAN solution provides businesses with the flexibility to employ multiple cost-effective WAN technologies, offering the ability to scale WAN bandwidth at dramatically lower cost than traditional approaches. The solution also ensures the best possible user experience by securely sending mission-critical, delay-sensitive data over the highest performing path. The new CloudBridge Virtual WAN solution extends the CloudBridge platform and its integration with the company’s HDX and application acceleration technologies, to offer the most cost effective and highest performance solutions for securely delivering mobile workspaces with the applications, documents and IT services people need to work better in remote and branch offices.

To meet the demands of the evolving workplace, enterprises are constantly sharing business-critical information with employees, customers and partners through applications that are bandwidth-intensive. Interactive graphics-laden applications, increased use of HD video streaming, and VoIP consume greater network capacity year after year. Scaling WAN bandwidth is expensive for enterprises, as they have traditionally relied on costly MPLS services to avoid disruption to business and maintain the usability of mission critical applications.

To address this challenge, the new CloudBridge Virtual WAN solution allows enterprises to create a virtualised WAN by bonding multiple network services such as MPLS, broadband, mobile and satellite internet together to maximise WAN capacity and reliability. CloudBridge Virtual WAN constantly assesses the performance of paths within the virtualised WAN to instantaneously and automatically adapt to changing network conditions. This ensures constant connectivity of mission-critical applications without human intervention or complex routing table reconfigurations. Additional benefits of CloudBridge Virtual WAN include providing enterprises the ability to:

Dramatically lower costs for expanding capacity – allows enterprises to augment MPLS with cost-effective broadband services in order to expand capacity for the delivery of high-priority application traffic, video and VOIP, while increasing reliability over a standalone MPLS-based WAN.
Deliver superior user experience through improved quality for all application types – offers enterprises better mobile workspace user experience and high quality for voice or video over IP services. The experience is enabled through CloudBridge Virtual WAN appliances that continuously measure and monitor the latency, jitter and packet loss of every WAN connection and dynamically make path decisions using best quality paths.
Convert backup links to active– many enterprises already have back-up links in place today but are not able to utilise them until a failure occurs. CloudBridge Virtual WAN enables enterprises to easily and seamlessly pool active and back-up link capacity, therefore eliminating wasted bandwidth.
Ensure availability of high-priority applications – When one or more WAN services are impaired, CloudBridge Virtual WAN provides a failover system to ensure adequate bandwidth on the best-performing remaining paths is used to deliver business-critical applications.
Easily manage and monitor WAN performance – presents enterprises with a simple, end-to-end management system that provides visibility into the WAN and all of the application delivery from the cloud, data centre or branch, through CloudBridge Virtual WAN Center.
Securely connect cloud to branch – enables enterprises to combine data centre and cloud application delivery through the use of advanced encryption between CloudBridge devices on customer premises or in the cloud when using the Internet.