It's well suited. Like I said, it provides us, it provides the clients and the business environments throughout an Internal Revenue Service. The network visibility needed for them to provide their application and the use of their applications throughout the Internal Revenue Service and the enterprise, as far as IRS.
Citrix NetScaler is suited to any environment where hardware load-balancing, application delivery or SSL offloading is a requirement. It's a product that can be used to manipulate traffic flows in a multitude of different ways and its only limit is the protocol, application and imagination of the administrator. It's not a product that includes helpful wizards to guide the admin through each process gracefully. While it is a fairly intuitive product to use, it's not for someone who is not initiated into the ways of networking and network protocols and communication. Nor is this a product that would lend itself solely for the usage of single usage scenarios where small traffic flows would be expected (although if desired the VPX product would probably suffice in that specific scenario depending on the environment)
I'd like to see better reporting capabilities on the decision-making process for DNS resolutions. Currently there are plenty of log messages for that, but I'd like to see tighter integration into the GUI.
It could be an improvement to better discriminate features intended for AA vs LDNS functionality within the GUI.
We use this heavily and it is one of the best products out there for this type of use case. We already have LTMs and to leverage GTM on top of that is just a piece of cake. Everything is so well integrated its amazing
I gave the NetScaler a 7 here because the system once configured and deployed is very easy to use. However, if you did not deploy the system and do not have the fundamental background knowledge then you will have trouble using the product in general. Overall it is a great product and service but does typically require professional services to be deployed.
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.
As I mentioned, the GSLB capability, being able to do intelligent DNS by having access to monitor specific endpoints associated to my current BIG-IP infrastructure, I believe that brings a huge value, then combine fast responses and security.
Netscaler has more features than F5 BIG-IP APM product and easier to manage with friendlier user interface for network admins. It was more cost efficient as well and if you have a Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environment, it is more compatible with those products as well. Our annual maintenance cost is lower as well.
