The stereotypical data center sprawling with underutilized physical servers is in the midst of a dramatic transformation--one that the consolidation and virtualization of data center components is driving in the pursuit of creating more cost-effective, power-friendly spaces that exhaust less real estate but result in increased efficiency. This first phase of this evolution has centered on server virtualization, and most companies have engaged in at least some form of it. The ultimate goal, however, is the consolidation/virtualization of the entire data center. If your company has yet to join this revolution, it’s pretty much a given it will--if it wants to remain relevant, that is.
Although the transformation is undeniably underway, what’s remained constant is that data centers continue to house invaluable mission-critical applications that a company’s customers and employees depend on. Whether the application in question allows a customer to perform banking transactions at any hour of day or grants an employee access to database, email, VoIP, CRM, or streaming media resources, there’s a reason such applications are dubbed “mission-critical.” If they fail, the customer’s dissatisfaction goes up and the employee’s productivity goes down. In both cases, “downtime” rears its ugly head.
For more than a decade, Radware has developed hardware- and software-based application delivery products that ensure downtime doesn’t show its face. Beyond providing customers the assurance that the business-critical applications running on their physical and virtual servers remain accessible 24/7, Radware’s application delivery solutions ensure that those applications perform at the utmost level and remain secure from countless DoS, network-intrusion, and other Internet attacks. On Sept. 27, Radware will provide companies the means to consolidate and virtualize the ADCs sitting in front of their mission-critical applications when it launches the first product from its new line of application delivery virtualization solutions.
The ABCs Of An ADC
Server virtualization is in full swing, with some experts declaring the movement has actually entered the data center mainstream. Ronen Kenig, Radware product marketing manager, says that in addition to most of the enterprises and carriers that Radware works with being actively engaged in server virtualization, numbers indicate that 99% of Fortune 1000 companies are using some form of server virtualization. The benefits of doing so are plentiful, including needing to purchase less hardware, receiving better utilization from hardware already on hand, realizing associated power- and real-estate-related savings, and experiencing increased device-management efficiency. It only makes sense that if server virtualization can return such benefits, companies can expect the same from consolidating/virtualizing components across the entire data center, including network devices, storage, and ADCs. Where ADCs are concerned, Kenig says that up to now, the basic approach was for companies to put dozens of ADC de-vices in front of servers handling specific mission-critical applications in a siloed architecture.
Originally, ADCs essentially acted as product load balancers, distributing Web traffic among servers, for example. Over time, they took compression, caching, SSL offloading, TCP management, and other resource-demanding responsibilities off of servers to lessen the processing burden. Now, as companies move toward consolidating data center components, the notion of having hundreds of ADCs operational is impractical. The answer is application delivery virtualization, which Radware’s Sept. 27 product launch provides.
Challenges Met
Enterprises, carriers, and cloud computing and hosting providers operating virtual data centers face numerous challenges in converting their ADC services, computing resources, and virtualization services into an integrated, scalable virtualized application delivery environment. Radware’s application delivery virtualization solution addresses these challenges. In addition to realizing significant reductions in ADC capital and operating expenses and the increased flexibility and agility that the full virtualization of the application delivery level affords, companies can expect Radware’s new solution to meet application SLA requirements, provide predictable performance data related to virtualized ADCs, reduce risks associated with physical-to-virtualization migrations, and provide support for operating and migrating hybrid server environments.
The approach Radware took in designing its new application delivery virtualization solutions accounts for the fact that the ADC is a critical network device, and if it fails, the entire service of the application it sits in front of will also fail. The approach also takes into account the dynamic nature of a virtualized data center in which so many parts are at work and changes continually occur, including new virtual machines being provisioned and deprovisioned, which the ADC must be aligned with.
Radware’s approach also shortens the time required to deploy new applications and services; makes the operation and management of assigning physical resources (CPU, memory, and network and acceleration resources) a centralized, automatic affair; and guarantees that the SLA for each ADC service remains intact. Equally as important, Radware’s new solutions create a virtualized ADC infrastructure that guarantees the privacy that separate ADC devices provided remains unchanged.
Keeping Pace
Statistics suggest that chances are your company has already dipped its toes in the data center virtualization pool, most likely in some form of server virtualization. Ultimately, most companies will consolidate and virtualize the entire data center and consolidate the number of data centers they operate. Integral to that will be virtualizing the company’s application delivery devices.
Despite the considerable promise virtualization holds, however, each IT initiative brings its own headaches and complexities. The new application delivery virtualization solutions that Radware is launching Sept. 27 (see www.radware.com/wereserious for more information) promise to keep those headaches at bay by meeting all the requirements in-herent to introducing application delivery controller virtualization into the company’s infrastructure.