Netscaler has been assisting environments across all types of industry with application delivery, content switching and web server load balancing for several years and is a proven tool in those areas.  The recent edition of DataStream technology promises to move those proven benefits deeper into the datacenter.<!--more-->

From my personal experience with Netscaler appliances in the Healthcare industry it was proven as an extremely valuable tool to assist in the roll out of EMR systems by improving end user performance (always a tough task) and by reducing the load on the underlying web server delivery infrastructure.

A recent edition to the Netscaler tool belt could prove to be very welcome in many data centers that are constantly chasing better performance from SQL servers trying to keep up with the loads of highly transactional OLTP databases.  The new tool is Netscaler DataStream.  With DataStream Netscaler is now “SQL Aware” and can provide multiplexing, load balancing, content switching, security and automated failover for Microsoft SQL and Oracle MySQL.  Netscaler is now able to interpret “select”, “drop”, “insert”, “update” and other statements to split read and write operations while intelligently load balancing SQL servers while it is also reducing the number of connections on to those backend servers which frees up resources.

Here is a link to a <a href="http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/4478">CitrixTV</a> video blog showing some of the benefits..