Moving to the cloud is not a sudden, but gradual process that happens in multiple stages. Enterprise customers looking to move to cloud-based infrastructure are being challenged by the investments they have made in their on-premises network infrastructure. These customers are looking for solutions that, over time, will help their transition to the cloud. These solutions offer both features, as well as licensing models that will help this transition.

One — and the only — solution, from the ADC perspective, is NetScaler Pooled Capacity.. 

What is Pooled Capacity?

Pooled Capacity is part of the TriScale2 feature that NetScaler offers. It is a 2.0 version of the TriScale feature that was launched in 2012, which provided the ability to “scale up,” “scale in,” and “scale out” without the need to perform forklift upgrades. TriScale2, launched in September 2016, added the concept of “scale across,” to which we refer as Pooled Capacity.

Pooled Capacity provides the ability to share NetScaler bandwidth capacity across all NetScaler form factors (single tenant hardware, multi-tenant hardware, virtual appliance, and container-based appliance) across any datacenter and/or cloud. This helps you to protect your investments in the datacenter and allows a cheaper and seamless transition to cloud infrastructure.

Problem Description

The IT organization of our customer serves internal business units to set up and manage their infrastructure.

  1. They have been a NetScaler customer, but were being pressured by their internal stakeholders (developers and application teams) to provide an infrastructure that is on-demand and can be turned up and down as needed.
  2. The IT organization was also looking to move to the cloud in the near future and was looking for ways wherein they can reuse some of the investment in their datacenter and move to cloud.
  3. The third requirement was about having an ability to “chargeback” to business units depending on the usage of the network infrastructure (ADC in this case).

Solution

NetScaler with Pooled Capacity was able to not only meet the customer key requirements, but also provided more value than the customer had expected. Below are some key value propositions NetScaler provided:

  1. NetScaler with Pooled Capacity separates the hardware or platform from the software license. This allows customers to purchase hardware, virtual or container-based appliances separately from the bandwidth and instance licenses. With this approach, IT team can now manage bandwidth and software instances using NetScaler MAS and can share the bandwidth across as needed. IT was able to bring up ADC appliances (VPX in this case) as required by internal business units. Once the work is complete, IT was able to tear down the appliance and allot the bandwidth to other NetScaler appliances or put it back in the pool as needed. This helps IT to avoid over-provisioning of bandwidth, and instances, thereby improving the cost as well as operational expenses.
  2. The IT team is looking to deploy a private cloud. With NetScaler and Pooled Capacity, IT team can move the existing bandwidth and instance licenses to the cloud. This way they avoided any sunk costs in the datacenter instances and will help their transition to cloud.
  3. IT teams across most of the companies are a cost center. With NetScaler and Pooled Capacity licenses, IT team at this customer was able to charge their internal customers (business units in this case) for their use of the ADC infrastructure and thus become a profit center. This also empowered IT to control any internal initiatives as relates to deploying and using application delivery infrastructure.
  4. The additional advantage that NetScaler with Pooled Capacity provided was the use of container-based appliances. With the instance and bandwidth licenses that this customer purchased, they are free to use these instance and bandwidth licenses for container-based appliances as well. This meant they could get the container-based appliances for no extra charge.

All of the licenses are managed by NetScaler MAS and it becomes a single pane of management of all the NetScaler licenses.

To see how it works, please watch our video demo:

To learn more about Pooled Capacity, read our eBook here.