Case Study: Antwerp University Hospital achieves cost savings and simplified infrastructure with Citrix NetScaler

Antwerp University Hospital replaces seven F5 application delivery controllers with just two Citrix NetScaler appliances

Antwerp University Hospital (UZA), a Belgian medical center serving over 650,000 patients with 400 physicians and 3,000 employees, faced a costly, siloed load‑balancing environment made up of seven F5 ADCs. The legacy setup limited scalability, increased complexity for a lean 10‑person IT team, and forced UZA to consider additional hardware whenever new applications were deployed.

Working with Citrix partner Xylos, UZA replaced the seven F5 boxes with two Citrix NetScaler SDX appliances hosting five virtual instances (medical, internal, two Unified Gateway, and other services) and used NetScaler VPX for XenApp access. The consolidation cut costs (the NetScaler purchase equaled about one year of F5 support), reduced the data center footprint, let a single administrator manage load balancing, expanded capacity from ~12–15 to 40–50 applications, improved application visibility and maintenance scheduling, and provided a stable foundation for an upcoming EMR rollout.

Antwerp University Hospital

Sebastian Goethals

System Engineer and Project Manager