Load Balancers

cjthedj45

Hi

I have heard that Cisco are going to discontinue the ACE load balancers they do. Does anyone know if this is true? And can anyone recommend any good alternative load balancers?

Thanks

networkjutsu

I don't think Cisco made an official announcement that they'll kill it. According to this post by Greg Ferro (@etherealmind), Cisco says it is not dead yet.

F5s and Netscalers are pretty popular. I've seen Coyote Point too but don't know if that's any good.

Zartanasaurus

Cisco is supposed to be entering a partnership with Citrix to provide Netscaler solutions last I read.

Iristheangel

I'm sitting next to a Cisco rep right now and asked him this question. This is his response: "It's not official yet but it's the long-term goal to remove them from production. Since we have such a large customer base, they aren't cutting off support for it but since we've developed a new partnership with Netscaler, we aren't going to continue with the line"

Zartanasaurus

Translation: After we learn what we need to learn from Citrix, we'll make load balancers again or buy them out.

vanquish23

We use F5's in our data center.

QHalo

We have Barracuda's here.

it_consultant

Depending on your application array networks has a pretty good selection. You could also just build 2 red hat boxes...

chrisone

We use old foundry LBs and are looking to upgrade to F5. We had F5 come out to our HQ and show us what they can do , I was left with my mouth open and very impressed. Cant wait to get them into the company.

Cisco never really made it that big in LB in my opinion. Sad cause i had to study a lot of it during my CCDP studies.

QHalo

F5's are pretty awesome. If we didn't have Barracuda's already we'd definitely be using them.

cjthedj45

Hello everyone thanks for the great responses. I will check out netscalers, f5 and Barracudas then. We have quite a few Cisco ACE load Balancers here if the support stays in place then I suppose it could not be to bad. If however Cisco form a relationship with Netscalers then Im sure there focus will be on this and we may need to replace the ACE's as they will just become legacy.

ajs1976

Some Citrix blog entries on the partnership with Cisco.

C-I-S-C-O, C-I-S-C-O, C-I-S-C-O and Cisco was the name-o…… | Citrix Blogs

Citrix Marketing Concierge: Three Powerful Reasons Cisco Recommends NetScaler. | Citrix Blogs

Cisco and Citrix: Delivering the Next Generation of ADCs to You! | Citrix Blogs

Trade up to NetScaler. Recommended by Cisco. Powered by Citrix. Now in Citrix Marketing Concierge. | Citrix Blogs

astorrs

F5 has a special trade-in offer going on for ACE customers as well: http://interact.f5.com/rs/f5/images/Cisco%20Trade-in%20Program%20Guide.pdf