Executive Summary | Citrix Branch Repeater

 

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New Application and Desktop Delivery Strategies: Virtualize and Accelerate to Increase Productivity and Reduce Costs Citrix Branch Repeater Executive Summary

 

Introduction For many years, organizations had relatively few branch office workers, tele-workers and day extenders, to whom IT delivered applications using specialized remote access solutions. Today organizations conduct global business with a distributed workforce, driving the need for IT leaders to re-think their strategy for delivering applications to branch and mobile users. In developing an effective strategy, IT faces seemingly competing demands: deliver the best user experience and application performance, improve security and compliance, and reduce costs of application delivery. Citrix® Branch RepeaterTM, part of the Citrix Delivery Center, helps address these competing demands by securely accelerating applications while dramatically reducing the costs of application delivery over a WAN to branch and mobile users.

Accelerate applications for increased productivity Enterprises expect the same productivity from all employees, irrespective of location. To achieve expected productivity levels, branch and mobile employees require fast application response times –nearly the same as the headquarters user experience. Many who tried simply upgrading network bandwidth have not achieved the desired user experience and application performance. Others who tried WAN optimization solutions without designing a holistic end-to-end application delivery infrastructure failed to realize the full potential cost savings and performance benefits. Branch Repeater is a vital component of the delivery network between the datacenter and branch and mobile users, providing LAN-like performance across any type of WAN link while allowing IT to dramatically reduce bandwidth and branch IT expenses. Branch and mobile users immediately experience dramatically faster application performance as they complete their daily work tasks - in most cases saving thirty to sixty minutes per day due to accelerated applications. Whether at the office, on the road or working from home, users always get a high-definition application experience.

Proven results Branch, remote and mobile users traditionally suffer with slow downloads, inadequate application responsiveness and corresponding losses in productivity. Branch Repeater enables users to access their applications and data over the WAN at LAN-like speeds. Sample acceleration results for branch workers are as follows:

   

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Two performance reports titled Turbocharge applications to your branch offices and Turbocharge application delivery to your remote and mobile workers studied the benefits of Branch Repeater for branch and mobile users. With Branch Repeater:

• XenApp applications response time is 2 to 6 times faster • Downloading or uploading files to Windows file shares is 20 to 30 times faster • Downloading from SharePoint document libraries is 30 to 50 times faster • Sending and receiving e-mail attachments is 25 to 50 times faster.

Save bandwidth and dollars Branch Repeater not only accelerates application delivery and enhances user productivity, it also drives dramatic WAN bandwidth savings. Branch Repeater significantly increases WAN throughput, freeing up bandwidth and allowing IT to support more users and more applications on existing connections. Additionally, mobile users using a 3G pay-as-you-go wireless plan transmit smaller amounts of data and get the job done quicker, which translates into real cost savings.

Increase IT satisfaction Branch Repeater dramatically improves user satisfaction and productivity. Gone are the days of slow application performance, applications appearing “broken,” and users blaming IT for problems caused by the WAN. Virtual teams escape the pitfalls of longer project cycles, team frustration, and inefficient paces of work. Branch Repeater delivers the high-definition experience that all users have come to expect and deserve, significantly increasing IT satisfaction.

Branch Repeater also improves the satisfaction and performance of the IT organization: Users generate fewer help desk calls; and branch offices are brought online faster and with lower costs because no bandwidth upgrades are required.

Focus on what counts Organization are now required to do more with less, an approach that is here to stay – driving them to continuously seek ways to increase productivity and user satisfaction while reducing the cost of application delivery and network/WAN upgrades.

Consider this: When attaching a remote document to an e-mail, Microsoft Outlook is unresponsive until it has transferred the entire file over the WAN. On a 3G broadband connection, attaching a 7 MB PowerPoint presentation renders that user’s e-mail unusable and leaves the employee idling for over 8 minutes. The same procedure takes less than 45 seconds when the Repeater Plug-in is used. It is easy to see how these time savings quickly add up throughout the day – making organizations more efficient and productive while reducing network costs.

To learn more about how your organization will benefit from Branch Repeater, visit www.citrix.com/branchrepeater