As IT staffs continue their focus on developing corporate standards their branch-office infrastructures, another option has emerged for the delivery and optimization of applications.

Citrix announced its Branch Repeater, developed with Microsoft, at the Citrix Synergy event in Houston last week. The high-level goals of the product are to improve the performance of applications at the branch office, and to offload the amount of traffic required to travel over the WAN.

It sounds similar to optimization products from Blue Coat, Cisco, Juniper, or Riverbed. Although the Citrix Branch Repeater may come out of the same portion of the IT budget, it approaches the goals differently.

The product, physically located in the branch offices, stages applications streamed from Citrix XenApp (its virtualization product). After installing the Citrix App Receiver and Desktop Receiver on their desktops or laptops, branch users access their applications from the local Branch Repeater, rather than receiving them over the WAN. This improves performance and reduces the load on the WAN. (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products)

The Branch Repeater also integrates Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) to enable Web content caching. And, it combines Citrix’s WANScaler optimization technology to increase available bandwidth and reduce latency by compressing traffic and using other optimization techniques.

Organizations are discussing (and debating) whether to store their applications and infrastructure in the data center, in the branch offices, or a bit of both. When an IT staff decides to keep applications, functions, and infrastructure in the branch, they typically want to consolidate as many functions as possible in a single device. One interesting feature of the Branch Repeater is that it consolidates file/print serving, authentication, DHCP, and DNS, into a single device - reducing the number of servers to manage at the branch.

For the growing number of companies using or considering virtualized desktops, this product is worth considering. It’s priced competitively ($5,500 to $11,500, depending on the WAN connection), consolidates numerous functions in a single box, and improves overall performance to branch users - a growing concern among the IT staff and business-unit leaders.

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