Looking at the virtualization space today, it is evident that more and more companies are migrating towards higher ratios and levels of server virtualization. According to research published by Gartner on March 2010 - at the end of 2009, only 18% of enterprise data center workloads that could be virtualized had been virtualized; the number is expected to grow to more than 50% by the close of 2012.
Adding to this, the move towards data center virtualization which has been strongly pushed by the data center network vendors such as Cisco and Juniper, it is evident that much of the data center infrastructure is slowly but surely becoming virtualized.
However, this "rush" to virtualization is not occurring in all layers of the data center, one such layer which has been lagging behind in becoming truly virtualized, is the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) layer. While this might seem a small issue in the data center macro level, it is quite the opposite.
By leaving the ADC layer in its old architecture, i.e. not virtualized but rather physical, data center IT managers are creating a hybrid network environment in which the physical ADC layer is not aligned with applications running on the virtualized server environment for which it provides application delivery services.
This lack of alignment is caused by the fact that while the server virtualization layer is highly dynamic and agile, meaning application virtual machines (VMs) can "move" around the data center (or even between data centers), the ADC layer is physical and static and thus, cannot "follow" the applications.
To resolve this issue, there is a clear need to also virtualize the application delivery layer, in order for it to fit the highly virtualized data center. Moving forward, we will most likely see more and more virtualization technologies such as virtual appliances or ADC hypervisors being applied on the application delivery infrastructure.
By virtualizing the application delivery layer, IT managers will be able to:
- Enable real ADC virtualization, resulting in a significant reduction of capital and operating expenses - of not only the server layer but also the ADC layer;
- Fully benefit from virtualization agility across the application delivery layer; and
- Gain a simpler path to true data center virtualization.
To summarize, as server and data center virtualization picks up pace in terms of adoption and implementation, so will other layers in the data center have to be virtualized. It is up to the IT managers to choose an application delivery vendor which will be able to cater to their evolving data center requirements.