China Rockets to the Cloud – Don’t leave your ADCs on the Ground

Last week I had a business trip to China, visiting our customers and new prospects. Our business in China is growing fast and one of the drivers for this growth is cloud initiatives. It seems to me that in China everyone is talking about the cloud, busy building data centers for the cloud or planning how to move their business to the cloud. I have no doubt that with government investment of US $154 Billion (as announced recently), China is on its way to become one of the world’s cloud hubs.

So cloud is a cool and hot topic, but are we there yet with the technology? When we examine the existing traditional application delivery controller (ADC) deployment models, it is clear that these models can not fit into a cloud environment. Current ADCs are not mobile enough, cannot be provisioned fast enough and do not provide the agility required for the cloud. On the one hand, cloud service providers are trying to offer their customers private, isolated environments and on the other hand they wish to provide it on a shared infrastructure. In order to achieve this, cloud providers are utilizing virtualization technologies to create virtual application silos, i.e. private, isolated environment that includes all the network and application layers that are required to serve an application. The ADC is a critical component in those virtual application silos, and in ensuring the application availability and performance. Therefore, the ADC must provide a solution that can fit into the virtual silos, while preserving the application privacy and isolated environment on the one hand, and utilizing shared resources on the other hand.

Only a fully virtualized ADC solution that run multiple virtual ADC instances, where each instance is private and isolated, can meet the requirements of the virtual application silos. The virtual ADC instances, in their nature, are capable to meet the agility, mobility and fast provisioning requirements of a cloud environment.

China wants to move to the cloud and the ADC should be prepared to support this technology shift.

Ronen