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Technology Stocks : Citrix Systems (CTXS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dinesh who wrote (8090)	5/18/2000 7:05:00 AM
From: MikeM54321	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9068

Dinesh- I don't quite follow your comments about scalability. I thought we were talking 100 users vs 1,000. ICA doing the 100, while a Java/HTML web-based approach offers thousands. Are your comments more concerned with the very detail level problems encountered with the Java/HTLM web-based approach when many thousands of users access the server/server farm? You still agree ICA is limited to hundreds, while the web-based approach is limited to thousands, right? ______________________ Heeren, Dinesh, and Thread- On a totally different subject, while jotting down my comments, I'm starting to wonder how the ramp-up of Virtual Private Networks(VPN) will effect ICA or the HTML thin-client model? The ability for Service Providers(SP) to soon be able to turn on VPNs for companies at will, seems like would effect the whole thin-client world dramatically. IMO, seems like it would be a positive. More for CTXS than the web-based model. If either of you, or anyone else has any thoughts about VPNs and the thin-client world, they would be appreciated. Thanks. -MikeM(From Florida)

To: Dinesh who wrote (8090)	5/18/2000 11:26:00 PM
From: Heeren Pathak	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9068

Dinesh, Actually, your ex[erience with SSL mode is EXACTLY the problem Citrix faces and why it has scalibility issues. In SSL mode, the server MUST maintain shared context with the client. The reason for this is that SSL version 3 closed a security loophole that allow proxy servers to redirect traffic. While that feature would be nice for distributing load, it have obviously security holes that really needed to be fixed. To overcome the SSL issues, you are starting to see SSL gateways that handle a large number of SSL connections and convert them to normal HTTP connections that can be distributed over a number of servers. This approach should scale more since the encryption / decryption work is being done in hardware on a dedicated box. Citrix has a similar issue. Once a session has started, the application and the ICA client must maintain a shared context. This context limits the scalibility of the overall system. Unfortunately, Citrix has a tougher issue if they want to improve scalibitily. Citrix's big selling point is that any app can be run without doing anything special to the app. To make the app scalible, it would have to be a context-free app and that is not going to happen. Thus, there isn't going to be a simple solution to improve scalibility. The other issue you bring up about scalibility is more of a caching issue. One way to increase scalibility is to widely distribute information into localized caches. The success of any caching scheme lies in its ability to maintain a high hit rate and cache coherency. The hit rate is pretty easy to achieve. However, cache coherency is quite a challenge and tends to be where cache design most often fail. Heeren