Managing ADC Licenses in the Age of the Cloud
IT managers will occasionally reminisce about the good old days when all their applications were in one place – the data center. The IT manager knew where they were, how many there were and what they did (for the most part). But alas, those days are gone. The digital transformation coupled with the shift to cloud have put an end to this IT nirvana.
Applications are now everywhere and critical application services, such as ADCs, need to follow them wherever they go. ADCs are deployed on proprietary platforms of different sizes and hardware configurations, on virtualization solutions of varying hypervisors, on private cloud infrastructures and, of course, on public cloud platforms.
As if the technical aspects of supporting all these different deployment modes are not challenging enough, there is the additional complexity of managing their licenses and the risk of associated costs running out of control.
With most organizations deploying their applications in hybrid and multi-cloud topologies, enterprises find themselves running ADCs in a wide range of form-factors, sizes, locations, and feature sets, with each requiring its own license type. The ADC licenses a typical enterprise must manage have enough different flavors to put Ben & Jerry’s to shame.
[You may also like: From Survival to Security and Availability]
The Challenges
The challenge of managing ADC licenses lies in understanding how many instances of each flavor you have and how well they are utilized. Additionally, what happens when you need to transition an ADC from one form factor to another and thus its license type to a new one? Do you need to purchase a new license every time this happens? And what about the deprovisioned licenses? Are you able to reuse them for other application or do they go to license heaven, never to be seen again?
The bad news is that the high diversity of ADC form factors is not going to decline. The tipping point has been crossed and the only remedy in sight is to embrace the chaos. That, and to find a better licensing model.
The Good News
Imagine a world where the different ADC form factors, their underlying infrastructures, and their locations are irrelevant. Where all ADC instances are created equal and have the right to realize themselves however and wherever they choose. Where they could grow, relocate, and change form factors at will and without incurring any additional costs. Imagine your ADC spend could be predictable, transparent, and easily optimized.
The good news is that such a model already exists. Radware’s Global Elastic License (GEL) enables organizations to use a single license to cover any possible form factor. Be it on HW appliances or VAs, on-premise, private, or public cloud, production or dev. All GEL instances are equal and share the same license pool — and can be deployed wherever you need them to be. They can increase or decrease in size to match the changing needs of the applications they serve. They can be transitioned from any form factor or location to any other to support your application transitions easily and transparently. The capacity of any deprovisioned instance is returned to the pool to ensure no unused licenses are left floating around. Additionally, a central management console provides accurate real-time and historic reports showing exactly where each instance is deployed, how well it is utilized and how much of the pool license is still available for use.
All form factors, all sizes, all locations, all under one central management. Radware’s GEL – One license to rule them all.
