I currently work as the IT assistant vice president for a large bank with 15 years of extensive hands-on experience in network engineering, managed services, change management, and problem management.
I am currently researching Cisco SD-WAN and Citrix SD-WAN. What are the biggest differences between the two? Which would you recommend?
Thanks! I appreciate your help.
Cisco is a traditional networking play and has successfully transformed from pure hardware to now software defined products.
Many network engineers already use the product and makes a lot of sense for a company with Cisco history to go towards Cisco just like a company which uses citrix desktops will go for the Citrix ADC.
Therefore, configuration of Cisco, while not being difficult, is more "formatted" for Engineers who have used the solution and already have deep understanding of the protocols
As a relatively new comer, Citrix seems to have put more effort to make the implementation process easier in terms of GUI
Now, citrix has one fourth the market share of cisco and this is crucial in terms of competency - as it is 4 times easier to get Cisco competency
However, in terms of costs, I like Citrix Netscaler pooled licensing arrangement,
It is a flexible licensing framework whereby there is a common pool of license regardless whether the customer performs the deployment as a physical hardware, virtual device or even a containerized solution already use the product.
Therefore, Cisco has higher costs
As for used cases, I have seen NetScalers used for Load Balancing, for external users to internal services and resources like XenDesktop and XenApp
Finally, both Cisco and Citrix have resilient solutions and provide good support - also some dependency where you are located.
As for recommendation, it depends on your specific scenario in light of above points.