Virtualization and application delivery controller

BANGALORE, INDIA: There is a lot going on in today’s data centre. And, there are several major trends creating challenges that IT managers must solve. Most prominent is virtualization, which aims to maximize application infrastructure to gain advantages in cost, security and ease-of-management.

These advantages are not free however, as IT managers must select application networking technologies with the flexibility to meet their particular requirements and support application delivery in variety of traditional and virtualized data centre environments.

A key component of the virtualization equation is the application delivery controller, which provides availability, acceleration and security for applications in a single integrated solution. In the traditional data centre, it was common practice to deploy ADCs in front of dedicated servers.

Today, however, dedicated servers are being replaced by virtualized servers; as a consequence, ADCs must be able to seamlessly perform their function within virtualized environments.

This means the ability to integrate with virtualization management systems in order to determine

not just the health of applications, but also the health of underlying hypervisors. It also means ADCs must be virtual management system aware, as resources are commonly redistributed to maximize utilization of compute resources.

In addition to seeking out the best combination of load balancing, SSL acceleration, compression, caching, traffic management and security features, it is equally important that IT make an evaluation of an ADC’s ability to support and operate within virtual environments.

Even organizations running dedicated servers today will understand that it will not be long before virtualization makes business sense. Therefore, any future investment in application infrastructure should support this important capability.

In fact, virtualization has already made an impact on the ADC itself. In addition to performing application delivery functions within virtualized environments, ADCs themselves have become virtualized. Modern ADCs are now available as software products capable of running on commodity hardware and a variety of common hypervisors.

As a result, IT has been given ultimate flexibility in deploying and supporting applications. ADCs may be spun up and spun down and relocated on the fly as needed to support applications and infrastructure services within private and public clouds or dynamically reallocated to maximize return on investment.

Also on the market are purpose built ADC appliances that have been virtualized in order to run multiple fully-separate ADC instances on a single high-performance system. Leveraging virtualized ADC appliances, enterprises and service providers gain the best of both worlds with a solution that minimizes space and power, provides purpose-built performance and allows the flexibility to support multiple applications or customers on a single system.

Whether you have gone virtual or not, in today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape it is expected that application delivery vendors offer ADC product lines that support virtual infrastructure and are available as dedicated appliances, as virtualized appliances and as software running on commodity hardware and hypervisors.

As virtualization evolves, it will be essential to select application delivery solutions that are evolving alongside in order to ensure the organization extracts the most from its investment in application infrastructure.