VSM: Why did Radware decide to develop VADI? Was there a specific opportunity you saw in the market for this?
IK: Radware decided to develop VADI since new data center architectures have emerged based on virtualization and consolidation of the infrastructure. This is a very significant trend with a clear impact on the way application delivery controllers are deployed. Therefore Radware looked at both architectural aspects as well as cost savings requirements - which are the business driver behind this change - and designed an application delivery architecture to address both technical and business requirements of the new data center – namely to enable full business agility that is aligned to a virtual data center while accomplishing cost savings targets.
VSM: How does this play into Radware’s overall product and company strategy?
IK: This fits very well into Radware’s product/solution and company strategy which is to create a Business Smart data center using Radware Business Smart Network. As part of this strategy we offer solutions for each major IT initiative in the enterprise data center including consolidation, virtualization, cloud sourcing, security, convergence, etc. Obviously data center consolidation and virtualization are the driving forces behind the latest data center architecture changes and addressing these changes with Radware’s VADI is a natural evolution of our overall Business Smart Data Center.
VSM: Please explain VADI’s key components.
IK: Radware VADI consists of 4 components:
- Virtual ADC instances (vADCs) – a fully featured virtualized ADC
- computing resources - including 3 form factors – dedicated ADC hardware, ADC-VX – an ADC hypervisor enabling to run multiple vADCs on a dedicated ADC hardware, and a soft ADC running as a virtual appliance on a general purpose sever hardware.
- Integration to the virtualized data center orchestration and provisioning systems through a set of APIs and plug-ins
- Additional VADI services such as provisioning, decommissioning and ADC migration.
VSM: Do other vendors have similar offerings? How does this differ?
IK: Radware’s VADI differs from other vendors in several aspects – we are the first to offer 3 application delivery form factors mentioned above – where most other vendors offer 1 or 2 form factors –a dedicated ADC and a soft ADC. Additionally, Radware’s VADI acts as a bridge between form factors through a set of virtualization services allowing to look at them as a unified and integrated Application Delivery virtualization Infrastructure.
And the last major difference is that our VADI offering is designed for our existing hardware in the data center - our OnDemand Switches and existing server hardware. Therefore, all of the components are based on software upgrades or On demand license upgrades for our customers – which means that any investment made in our OnDemand switches is fully protected.
VSM: When will VADI be available and is its pricing structure?
IK: The first component of VADI, Radware ADC-VX, is available now. Additional components will be introduced over the next 12 months, every quarter. Pricing of ADC-VX is by the number of vADC instances. We offer our customer ADC-VX hypervisor and 2 vADC instances free of charge.