NetScaler ADC vs. ScaleArc

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.

Incentivized

It is best suited for SaaS applications where uptime and availability are a priority to the business

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• ScaleArc does provide high availability and during failover it takes care of the master slave lag as well seamless switch between master and slave.
• ScaleArc also helps to reduce application traffic on MySQL database server by filtering frequently used commands like AUTOCOMMIT.
• ScaleArc provides a single interface for all application and database user management. This helps in strengthening security aspects of user management.

• 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.

Incentivized

• The fact that the analytics is included in the product; it really is hard to recommend this. However; I would recommend the analytics be a little more easier to use and more intuitive for drilling down to the source of the problem.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Outside of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 introducing the ability to route reads across the entire availability group; there is no other solution on the market that even comes close, and that's even if they exist.

Incentivized

• It has saved a tremendous amount of money and manpower by allowing for broad support without the need for a VPN.
• The security functions within Netscaler enabled our business to pass additional IT-based audits.
• Having a full Citrix stack from front to back makes our business look more professional both to our users and outsiders.

Incentivized

• Provided a single management interface for a complete MySQL farm in our company. It has helped particularly in managing high availability of MySQL databases thus overall improving the business website reliability. This in turn further enhances the confidence of our customers.