In the Part 1 of this blog series, we discussed the five objectives for business continuity, why they are important, and how you need to consider them all to ensure success. As a reminder, those objectives were:
- Ensure workforce productivity, application availability and end user experience
- Scale IT infrastructure during unforeseen demand
- Respond faster to restore the application performance
- Maintain visibility and control
- Remain secure and compliant always
We also looked at how you can use Citrix ADC to maintain workforce productivity, as well as to ensure application availability and the ever-important user experience.
In this post, we will look at our second objective and consider how Citrix ADC can enable you to scale your IT infrastructure to meet sudden, unforeseen increases in demand
Scaling to Meet Demand Is a Necessity
During unforeseen events, application demand can fluctuate wildly and stress infrastructure, affecting your employees’ experience and having an impact on your ability to transact with customers.
It is an absolute necessity to scale your services with demand to ensure productivity and maintain application experience. After all, if you can’t scale your IT, you can’t scale your business.
With Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM), your IT and business can scale easily. Citrix ADC enables you to easily add more application resources and will manage the load among them. It also makes it easier to shift workloads to new environments to meet demand, like expanding into the public cloud. Flexible licensing enables you to shift the associated application delivery infrastructure with the workloads to ensure effective deliver of your applications to your expanded audience and guarantee a great user experience. Of course, scaling requires control, and Citrix ADM provides proactive, real-time monitoring to manage the expansion.
On-Demand Scaling Made Easy
When it comes to scaling to meet traffic demands, Citrix ADC clustering is industry leading. An individual Citrix ADC is scalable through pay-as-you-grow licensing to handle up to 200 Gbps of traffic, but you can cluster up to 32 devices together to process a staggering 6.4 Tbps of throughput capacity. You can cluster across the entire portfolio, from the highest throughput hardware to the smallest virtual (VPX) devices, so you can use this feature across the range of form factors to suit your business’ needs.
Another important capability for Citrix ADC scale is autoscale, which enables you to scale resources automatically in the cloud to meet new demand.
- Back-end autoscale — Scaling application resources in the cloud is easily done with public cloud autoscale services. Citrix ADC integrates with these features so that when more servers are added to an application, they are automatically added to the application load balancing group. This removes the manual reconfiguration process and enables you to meet demand easily
- Front-end autoscale — Similarly, when demand exceeds the capacity of individual ADC instances, you need to add more. With Citrix ADC in the cloud, when loads are above predefined thresholds, Citrix ADM will automatically provision, license, and configure new Citrix ADC VPX instances to the cluster. This ensures you always have the right resources for your applications. That is very useful in the cloud, where overprovisioning has an associated cost!
On-Demand Licensing
When demand increases you must ensure that your ADC is licensed to handle the load or you risk dropping user connections. This is especially true when you need to expand into new environments like public clouds. You need flexible licensing that lets you move capacity where it’s needed. Citrix has two features that help you license to meet your on-demand scaling needs:
- Burst licensing – Citrix ADC burst licensing allows you to automatically burst capacity by 25 percent to manage transient peaks in demand. You only pay for the period you exceed your normal capacity with no surprise costs.
- Pooled capacity — Citrix’s pooled capacity enables flexible migration of ADC capacity where it’s needed. During unforeseen events you can increase the capacity of individual ADCs or provision new ADC instances as you move workloads to the cloud or between clouds. With pooled capacity licensing, this is as simple as clicking on a license and allocating it to an ADC instance where you need it.
Know Your Demand in Real Time
Before you scale capacity, you must recognize the need. That means you need visibility of demand in real time. Citrix ADM’s intuitive dashboards provide information about your Citrix ADC fleet in a single place. View ADC system resources — CPU, RAM usage, data transfer, and more — for all your ADCs, across your entire multi-cloud environment. Citrix ADM’s application dashboard offers a complete picture of application usage. You can see how many requests are made to each application and monitor connections, throughput, and the total volume of data sent. Citrix ADM will even track your SSL certificate expiration — a common cause of application failures — and alert administrators ahead of time so you can be sure your traffic always flows in a secure manner.
Additionally, the new machine learning-based predictive analytics in Citrix ADM tracks the resource demand and can predict future requirements. With this feature, you can understand your scaling needs in advance and plan accordingly.
It’s All About Scaling Fast
Scaling on demand is an important aspect of handling unexpected surges, and it must factor highly in your considerations for business continuity because you can react fast. Similarly, a holistic view of your infrastructure and applications enables you to see your requirements in real time so you know what, and when, to scale. Tracking and analyzing your demand enables you to be more predictive, which makes the unforeseen foreseen and gives you more control. But speed is definitely of the essence when trying to keep your business going in the face of adversity.
The next blog in the series will look at why it is important to be able to respond quickly to unforeseen events to restore normal operations. We will examine how the operational consistency that Citrix ADC brings can help you to shift workloads to other environments quickly and how automation can help you stay ahead of issues and ensure your application performance does not drop.
