Akamai offers the Ion application delivery controller suite to automatically supply performance optimization to websites and mobile or web applications.
N/A
NetScaler ADC
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
NetScaler ADC is an application delivery controller.
Akamai Ion is excellent if you have the staff to manage the configurations and understand how best to leverage its benefits amidst ongoing Dev work without getting in their way. You'll have to communicate consistently on what the CDN does and does not do as well as drive knowledge sharing sessions on expected behavior or unexpected behavior to help reduce unnecessary troubleshooting from your IT and Dev teams when tickets/issues arise.
Akamai Ion is best suited for well equipped and well informed IT or Marketing teams that can leverage the delivery benefits of caching and offload. Doing so will increase customer satisfaction, reduce bounce rates, improve conversion rates as well as drive more time on site.
Citrix Netscaler can be a powerful network appliance for environments that are fully committed and open to utilizing a network appliance that isn't made by a traditional network vendor. Administrator user experience has improved over the years and will continue to improve with the flexibility of virtual and physical appliances available for medium and large enterprises.
Flexibility. NetScaler assumes its admins know a bit about networking and in-depth details surrounding the applications they are configuring access for/to. This being so, the range of configuration options is very broad allowing various versions' combinations of protocol patterns, expressions, rules etc., all to the benefit of the admin.
Granularity. Having such a broad range of configuration options available, while still allowing simple options to be configured simply. The GUI is well-stylized and navigation has a good flow.
Ease of control. For load-balancing of simple services right out of the box, NetScaler makes it pretty easy, compared to the range of options available in the surrounding GUI and under the hood.
The learning curve on using a CDN is steep and requires class time. The initial onboarding and integration with the business' DevOps teams should be a bit closer relationship.
Global vs. Regional management can be a bit challenging if your account is centralized overseas, and you want a local time-zone account manager on your time.
The documentation could use an overhaul with specific examples related to the command line as well as GUI. Explanations in the documentation would also be helpful.
Being able to have more than just one routing table would allow the ability to leverage security.
Improve on the specifics I mentioned previously and could be a 10/10 product. It is also a confusingly branded product that I have supported in two large enterprises where IT departments are unsure if the product belongs to the Citrix remote access support team or the Network infrastructure support team (it should be the later) and typically under utilized.
Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.
We chose Citrix ADC over Kemp and F5 due to additional integrations with various products such as Citrix/Horizon/Monitoring tools. We additionally chose ADC due to better ease of use and ability to have the appliances be virtual or physical, with the configuration being a simple migration of code which provided flexibility to be able to do a hybrid environment with ease.
