The new world of ADCs

Bill Ting

INDIA: The change in today’s IT landscape is a significant one and for many network administrators it is a struggle to keep up. The number of applications deployed and upgraded continues to upsurge, while data centre infrastructure continues to consolidate. Despite these changes, IT budgets are either remaining stagnant or are reduced year-on-year leaving IT professionals with the challenge of doing more with less. How can this help businesses improve application performance?

Getting more out of your IT budget

IT budgets are principally stationary. Recently, the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reported that a majority of the enterprises expected to reduce IT budgets year-over-year. As such, obtaining spending approval for modern data centre technologies to support an increase in applications can be a challenge; however, ESG also found that demonstrating a project’s strong ROI is the most effective way to get that approval. Inspite of the static budgets, enterprise organizations are looking increasingly more like service providers in the transition to modern environments.

With requirements for greater flexibility, agility and efficiency, IT delivers services to different business units in multi-tenant environments, leveraging cloud services when necessary. The ESG report indicated that the number of applications that IT organizations support will increase over the years in more than 84 percent of enterprise accounts, and the average enterprise should also expect to upgrade between 11 to 25 existing applications over the next year.

If application-focused technologies can reduce CAPEX and OPEX costs, deliver a short ROI and maintain the same or better SLA’s for application services, IT administrators will be in a better position to meet their applications demands while complying with a flat budget.

The role of the Application Delivery Controller

ADCaaS is beginning to gain momentum as enterprises move to virtual, cloud and software-defined data centers. ESG spoke with enterprise and service provider IT organizations, and found that new technologies are much needed in the ADC space. A software-based, cloud-ready, highly automated ADCaaS approach can enable organizations to demonstrate the necessary ROI while significantly improving business processes. The Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is one of the key technologies for application delivery infrastructure. These are used to scale, improve availability, secure and optimize applications. With ADCaaS, users can quickly spin the ADC up or down for a scalable, secure and elastic delivery of enterprise, cloud and e-commerce applications. It can also control and optimize end-user services by inspecting, transforming, prioritizing and distributing application traffic across environments, from physical and virtual data centers to public and hybrid clouds.

Taking the steps towards ADCaaS

As we face greater demands for applications, agility and flexibility,enterprises moving towards a modern data center environment should think through the following:

Provision faster– The time taken to deploy an application can be heavily impacted by the time required to provision the application delivery infrastructure. ADCaaS can typically reduce the amount of time to provision this infrastructure by an order of magnitude, resulting in the ability to spin up new services in about 30 to 60 seconds compared with those with legacy ADCs with the two to six hour range.

Rapidly move from test and development to production – Many legacy ADC users find that the test and development environment does not match the production environment, which means a longer transition time from test and development to production. ADCaaS users typically can easily support test and development with all the capabilities of the production environment and deliver those services more rapidly

Accelerate the time to value – Purchasing and deploying legacy ADCs can delay ROI by several months. , ADCaaS can be easier to use than legacy ADCs, which is useful for consolidated data centres that are large but need to remain agile. In some cases, even less-skilled staff can configure and provision services.

ADC is one of the key technologies for application delivery infrastructure

Rapidly scales the environment - ADCaaS environments eliminate the time-consuming steps required by the physical domain, and eliminate the need to purchase and wait for additional appliances when more capacity is needed.Scaling an environment back down also happens faster with a virtual appliance, which is particularly useful in test and development environments with constantly changing requirements.

Burst to the cloud – ADCaaS instances are easily deployed in IaaS environments, and many cloud providers either offer solutions by the hour/month or have ‘bring your own license’ (BYOL) options in place.Therefore, enterprises can significantly lower CAPEX and OPEX costs by moving to the cloud.

Technology allows businesses to work from anywhere and at any time, increasing agility and flexibility. Those that can turn distance and location into a competitive advantage, experiencing location-independent computing, will be able to offer the flexibility to host applications. As enterprises continue to move to the cloud, it is software-based technologies that will surpass traditional ADCs to support the demands of modern data centers. Ultimately, traditional ADCs will be unable to scale efficiently and aid the fast move to the cloud.

(Bill Ting is Market Evangelist, Riverbed Technology. The views expressed here are of the author and do not necessarily represent those of CyberMedia)