BANGALORE, INDIA: For every problem that arises out of the dust left behind as new technologies and application deployment models emerge, a new solution is born. It is often the case that these solutions take the form of purpose-built hardware devices that focus on solving some particular problem associated with application delivery. WAN optimization, for example, was born from a need to improve the delivery of applications over low-speed, high-latency WAN links as opposed to high-speed, low-latency LAN links.

The Vision
An entire industry has grown up focused on improving user experience when accessing applications over very slow, bandwidth constrained connections. Similarly, application acceleration remains a focus of many of today's point solutions, with integrated caching and protocol-specific optimizations designed to improve the performance of ever-increasingly complex web applications.

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Making a difficult situation worse is the increase in diversity of clients. No longer is it simply a matter of supporting one browser or three, it is now necessary to understand and support a wide variety of user devices from phones to BlackBerries to game consoles. Today, virtually anything that can be networked will be, and not only will it likely be capable of accessing web applications but its users will almost certainly demand the ability to do so.

It became apparent years ago that the problems being solved all had one thing in common: applications. It also became apparent that if organizations continued to deploy point solutions to address every specific issue arising from new technology, deployment models, and applications that data centers would be heavily weighted with racks of solutions. These point solutions certainly solved the technical problems associated with delivering applications, but introduced complexity, rising costs, and additional management overhead that could not be recovered.

As we stand upon the precipice of yet another major shift in computing models and technology, it is increasingly important to note that our parachutes (budgets) are not nearly as full as they once were. Diving into new technology without the right safety net today, in a constrained economic environment, is certainly suicidal for any business.

The right safety net always has been, and continues to be, a unified and adaptable Application Delivery Network: a platform upon which application delivery-focused solutions can be deployed and managed without incurring additional costs that are often inversely proportional to the value realized from deploying each solution.

Unified
It is often the case that the term "unified" evokes the image of a "god box"; a single device capable of performing myriad functions in one appliance. This is not, however, how F5 has seen and continues to see the unified Application Delivery Controller.

Since the introduction of BIG-IP v9, F5 has been focused on unifying application delivery onto a single platform. This has not necessarily been for the purposes of allowing customers to deploy a "god box" with all application delivery functionality executing on that device, but for the purposes of providing a single platform on which all application delivery functionality can be deployed. The ability to deploy multiple solutions on the same platform—albeit likely on different hardware platforms—simplifies the administration of such solutions because the core platform is the same.

The concept of a unified application delivery platform is not dissimilar to that of an application server platform such as Java EE or .NET. Both platforms provide a common administrative and deployment framework that reduces the costs associated with management. This is because the underlying system is the same even though many different applications will be deployed on that platform, spanning many different hardware servers.