Managing Applications Across Multiple Data Centers: A Case Study


This multinational healthcare company is an industry-leading pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturer that supplies devices, instruments and reagents for clinical testing laboratories. Their products and services are sold in over 100 countries and regions and they have over 30 subsidiaries. Their business is organized into four divisions: bioscience, diagnostic, hospital and bio supplies.

Challenges

Over the past year, the healthcare company began migrating from their existing premise-based service to environments that would provide additional capabilities to better manage mission-critical applications.

One of their biggest challenges is administering and managing a huge volume of applications. Due to the nature of their business, each application is required to have both a production and a test/lab environment, thereby doubling the number of virtual ADC instances.

[You may also like: Distribute Application Workloads Across Multiple Clouds & Data Centers]

To simplify application maintenance and minimize downtime, the company opted to create a virtual ADC (vADC) instance for every application so that maintenance on one application would not require downtime to other applications. This solution ensured SLA per application and was cost effective. At the time, Radware’s high density of vADCs per appliance was the perfect solution.

When the COVID-19 pandemic happened, the company’s business requirements changed. Each data center has varying application capacity requirements depending upon the number of applications and capacity per application. Although a solution using appliances with higher vADC density was considered, it was not cost effective when application delivery services were migrated across on-premise and private cloud environments.

[You may also like: 4 Reasons Why Application Delivery is Critical to DevOps]

Solution

Radware suggested transitioning to a new vADC deployment model based on Radware’s Global Elastic License (GEL) model. GEL enables a company to create multiple vADC instances with varying capacities from a single ADC license and deploy and relocate these instances to any data center location. Radware also recommended an upgrade of their physical ADC appliances to support the new GEL model. This enabled the healthcare company to keep their existing application configuration but provided the flexibility of moving vADCs and application capacity between data centers whenever they needed.

Ultimately, the healthcare customer decided to transition to completely virtualized, private cloud environments and use GEL solely with virtual appliances on general purpose servers.

[You may also like: 5 Ways ADCs Simplify Applications’ Transition to the Cloud]

Benefits

The upgrade to GEL has provided a smooth transition to their new virtual platform using the same Alteon technology, thereby avoiding a forklift upgrade. Additionally, the healthcare company can now allocate application delivery services across any data center and scale individual instances on-demand, allowing them to optimize configurations, and thus, save/reduce infrastructure costs. In the past, the healthcare company would have to purchase new hardware to deploy new applications, thereby delaying deployment. GEL has provided the ability to deploy new applications quickly and more efficiently.

Moving forward, the company is considering migrating certain applications to public cloud environments. GEL will enable them to transition application delivery services from their private data centers to these public environments, thereby further reducing infrastructure costs. In addition, they’re considering implementing Radware AppWall WAF as a replacement for a legacy firewall solution. AppWall would offer direct integration with Alteon and also provide additional best-of-breed functionality, including bot management and API security.

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