So I noticed the other day that Citrix and Equnix are teaming up in order to bring the cloud “closer” to the customers by leveraging SD-WAN technology from Citrix and connecting it directly with a Equinix Performance hub.
So why would this be an option? For instance customers who are leveraging Azure or maybe Office365 might consider the option to purchace Azure ExpressRoute for instance which delivers low-latency dedicated link directly to Microsoft’s datacenters, however this comes with a high-cost and is dedicated to one site, not all the other branch offices.
Now if we do not configure anything our connection to the major cloud providers will always have a way to reach them, but this might not be the most optimal route which adds more latency and can also combined with packet loss & jitter might provide a bad user experience if for instance our users are leveraging Office365.
Now NetScaler SD-WAN, comprises equipment located in central and branch offices and data centres that is able to make use of multiple network technologies. It can logically binds multiple MPLS, broadband and wireless network links into a single virtual WAN and then continuously measures and monitors each link for loss, latency, jitter and congestion and use the most optimal route depending on policies.
Equinix Cloud Exchange is a feature that can directly connects us to all the leading cloud service providers in the most markets around the globe, such as AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, and others. Since Cloud Exchange have direct fiber connections with most of the different cloud providers directly.
So with this partnership being able to integrate SD-WAN directly with a Equnix Performance hub, we will be able to leverage high-speed connections directly to the major cloud providers which provides us lower-latency combined with the SD-WAN enhancements to find the optimal route and load balance the connection without taking the cost of ExpressRoute and being able to add the differnet branch offices to the mix as well.