NetScaler ADC is an application delivery controller.
N/A
Oracle Dyn Managed DNS
Score 8.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Oracle Dyn DNS (domain name system) is an infrastructure-as-a-service that is touted by Oracle Dyne as one of the highest performance global networks existent. It is available as a managed DNS with secondary DNS available for more reliable business continuity on higher service tiers.
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.
Oracle managed DNS becomes very heavy when there is an ample amount of DNS being managed. However, the DNS creation and updating takes very less time to propagate and is very easy to use. So, for an organization, where there is a modest amount of DNS to manage, it works very well and gives a splendid experience. So, considering the complexity of managing the DNS for an IT company Oracle Dyn managed DNS is the best option to opt.
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 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.
More responsive sales team to provide relevant QBRs to ensure proper and best practice use of the product/platform
Integration of the Dyn ECT Managed DNS with Dyn Domain Registration would be a nice feature as currently I have to manage two consoles and billing accounts.
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.
This is the only real gripe we have with Dyn; their web-UI can be remarkably painful to use. In the "simple" editor, DNS records are arranged in a kind of "node" view, where each record is a node and any records of the same name or longer (i.e. all records called "record.example.com" or "other.record.example.com") fall under it. This creates an odd sort of hierarchical view that's not really representative of the zone file. The "expert" editor doesn't have an actual delete button, just a checkbox. If you want to update conflicting record types (for example, replacing an A record with a CNAME) you have to check the box for the record being deleted, save changes, create the new record, save changes, and finally publish changes. Dyn uses a publish model for changes, where all changes you make are staged and can be reverted or published all at once. This is fine, except that the publish/revert dialog is in a different page. This is nice when you have many changes, but very annoying when you're changing just one or two records across multiple zones. These are relatively minor issues in an otherwise good platform; annoyances more than deal breakers.
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.
The support team at Dyn has always been very helpful and have tried to answer our questions to the best of their knowledge. We have never had any issues from support tickets and they are often resolved in a few hours
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.
We use both Oracle Dyn Managed DNS and Amazon Route 53. We like having our main DNS provider outside our cloud provider in case there's an issue with Amazon and we need to point things somewhere else temporarily. But for all the smaller stuff and internal stuff, we use Route 53 successfully.
For the law firm its being used for, it keeps their remote users working. For law firms, time is money, usually every 15 minutes lost can be a big deal to them.
Sometimes it has switched when its not supposed to, and causes downtime. No real way to inform users when the switch is happening, it would be great to have an email alert we can not only send to ourselves but a notification to primary and technical partners in the firm so they don't have to yell at us like something is broken, instead they are aware it had to change.
