Radware Introduces a New Virtualization Solution as Part of its Business-Smart Data Center Strategy


MAHWAH, N.J. September 15, 2008 02:00 PM

New VirtualDirector™ offers automatic resource optimization for next generation data centers

Radware (NASDAQ: RDWR), the leading provider of integrated application delivery solutions for business-smart networking, today announced its new optimization solution for the virtualized environment, VirtualDirector™, as part of a larger initiative – Radware’s Business-Smart Data Center strategy – designed to ensure the alignment of key business drivers for the next generation data center.

Reducing costs, increasing productivity and enhancing business agility are considered to be the key business drivers of data centers. Radware has continually introduced industry-leading solutions specific to the data center, based on ten years of experience as a key player in the application delivery space. The company’s approach is unique as it offers customers a range of innovative capabilities essential to facilitating these business drivers all while being fully integrated into the existing infrastructure. These capabilities are inclusive of: “pay-as-you-grow” procurement models, state-of-the art on demand platforms, real-time behavioral security and the alignment of network behavior based on business events.

Next-generation data centers are being influenced by new IT trends such as consolidation, SOA, convergence, and virtualization, which present new IT complexities. These complexities are introducing additional obstacles to the successful achievement of data center business drivers. Therefore, companies are looking for solutions that offer the best way to resolve these challenges. This is the core of Radware’s Business-Smart Data Center strategy – providing its customers with tailor-made application infrastructure solutions for next generation data centers to help them overcome IT complexities and ensure cost effective procurement and full investment protection.

As part of its Business-Smart Data Center strategy, Radware is combining its application delivery expertise with virtualization capabilities, to launch VirtualDirector, a new solution for real-time optimization of data center resources. This launch is the first in a series of announcements that will be made over the next 18 months.

Introducing VirtualDirector

VirtualDirector is an innovative optimization solution for the virtualized data center - providing adaptive and dynamic allocation of resources based on business events, to guarantee SLAs and improving response time of applications. VirtualDirector aligns data center operations with business policies by dynamically allocating resources on demand to automatically serve customer’s best needs for SLAs in a virtualized environment, a key area of investment for companies today. In addition, to save costs, VirtualDirector optimizes the use of data center resources to further generate energy and cooling savings.

According to Cameron Haight, Research VP – IT Operations, Gartner, Inc., “Virtualization challenges many of the traditional tenets of IT infrastructure, and this has ramifications on its management. Managing VM sprawl, optimizing performance (and energy consumption) while continuing at the same time to reduce administrative complexity will increasingly be critical. Moving forward, we see automation and task orchestration as two of the key technology areas that will be employed to address these issues.”

Ilan Kinreich, COO Radware explained, “At Radware, we are addressing the needs for our customers to improve QoE and ensure SLAs while keeping costs down in virtualized environments.” He continued, “VirtualDirector provides the means with which to address these issues and reduce the risks involved in the migration towards these environments automatically and in real-time to best optimize applications.”

Key advantages obtained from deploying Radware’s new VirtualDirector in a hybrid or fully virtualized environment include:

  • Improved Quality of Experience (QoE): By using VirtualDirector, enterprises can automate the task of optimizing their data center to maintain service level agreements (SLAs) and improve the QoE for end users. VirtualDirector’s advanced policy engine automatically acts, without human intervention, to optimize each application performance and preserve SLAs. To facilitate initial integration, VirtualDirector can also work in an advisory mode; where it provides guidance on what actions should be taken to best optimize application performance and preserve the SLA.

  • Dynamic allocation of resources in real-time: At any time, VirtualDirector guarantees that the resources available to each application are aligned with actual business needs. VirtualDirector is capable of learning the dynamic priority of applications based on tracking the business event data of each end user transaction. VirtualDirector can trigger actions that can optimize, in real-time, computing and network resource allocation according to the dynamic priority of the application(s).

  • Alignment of Network Behavior: By leveraging its tight integration with Radware`s leading application delivery solution, AppDirector, VirtualDirector aligns network behavior from server farm definition to network bandwidth and application priority to the business requirements. Thus, VirtualDirector provides alignment of data center resources to the required SLA optimizing resources, saving costs and improving productivity and business agility.

  • Accurately Estimate and Control VM Deployment: When moving to a virtualized environment resources are shared, adding another virtual machine is easier than ever and tracking the exact capacity that each application requires is becoming a challenge. By monitoring QoE of virtualized applications, and dynamically allocating and removing VMs from service while preserving good QoE, VirtualDirector ensures the amount of active VMs in a virtualized data center is the exact amount required to satisfy SLAs and QoE. Along time this enables for better capacity planning and optimized number of VMs.

  • Reduced risk: positioned outside of the virtual environment and independent of any virtualized constraints, VirtualDirector optimizes the management of virtualized servers to alleviate transition concerns. This ensures that companies maintain defined SLAs before/after the migration by monitoring mission critical applications from an objective view. By taking actions automatically, in real-time to optimize the QoE of mission critical applications and by sending alerts on any QoE degradation, VirtualDirector thus, helps companies reduce the risk involved in migrating mission critical applications to the virtual environment. It can also be deployed in advisory mode to help understand the impact of virtualization migration.

Moving forward and with the arrival of more cloud-based services, VirtualDirector’s tight integration with Radware`s ADC solution provides a comprehensive set of features that enable companies to optimize all of their virtualized datacenters, globally. In cases where the local resources cannot provide the desired QoE for specific applications, the solution redirects the traffic of the specific applications to a cloud based service provider or to a secondary data center. By redirecting traffic to a remote location, local resources are freed to serve the rest of the applications while remote resources are utilized, as needed, to add capacity and support the desired QoE.

“Today, Radware’s products and solutions are paramount to our success in providing geographically-dispersed cloud computing,” highlighted Jonathan Erwin, EVP of CloudNine Sales and Marketing, Hosting.com. “In the near future, Radware’s Virtual Director will allow CloudNine clients to scale without human intervention, experience unprecedented levels of service, and utilize global capacity on demand functionality,” he concluded..

VirtualDirector, integrated with VMware® VirtualCenter, is available now for ordering. Pricing is available upon request.

About Radware

Radware (NASDAQ:RDWR), the global leader in integrated application delivery solutions, assures the full availability, maximum performance, and complete security of business-critical applications for more than 5,000 enterprises and carriers worldwide. With APSolute™, Radware's comprehensive and award-winning suite of intelligent front-end, access, and security products, companies in every industry can drive business productivity, improve profitability, and reduce IT operating and infrastructure costs by making their networks "business smart." For more information, please visit www.radware.com.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, general business conditions in the Application Switching or Network Security industry, changes in demand for Application Switching or Network Security products, the timing and amount or cancellation of orders and other risks detailed from time to time in Radware's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Radware's Form 20-F.

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