Citrix 3 5 Acquisition Framehawk

Framehawk is a company that Citrix acquired in January 2014. The story is interesting because the protocol was originally developed by a few engineers from NASA, where they needed a way to communicate with the International Space Station under extreme conditions. The idea was to get high-performance display delivery on very poor networks — exactly what you find with 3G and 4G connections, or with remote sites that suffer from high latency.

Even in today's world, latencies around 300 milliseconds are still common at certain remote locations. The Framehawk protocol was reintegrated and made available on top of HDX. What is interesting about Framehawk is that it is built on UDP, whereas HDX/ICA is based on TCP. The question was whether Citrix would be able to integrate UDP into the existing stack.

What Framehawk brings to HDX

• Automatic detection of link conditions: HDX switches automatically between TCP and UDP transports depending on quality.
• Far better performance on high-latency networks (3G/4G, distant branches, remote sites).
• Improved screen optimization, including for smaller mobile screens.
• Improved touch and gesture responsiveness on mobile devices.

By combining the resilience of UDP with the optimization stack of ICA, HDX becomes able to deliver a usable experience even when the network is in poor shape, which extends XenApp and XenDesktop reach to many real-world mobile and remote scenarios. See you in the next video.