Brent Lees (image supplied)
By managing application delivery infrastructure effectively within application delivery controllers (ADCs), businesses can experience time-to-market improvements, service agility and provide an enhanced user experience, according to Brent Lees, senior product manager of Riverbed Technology.
HumanIPO reported earlier this month on the benefits of transforming and optimising a data centre for “significant bottom line payback,” to which Lees said the data centre has moved from the IT department’s domain to a management issue.
“Application delivery controllers are now essential for business-critical applications, managing fast-changing transaction loads, and enhancing performance, resilience and security,” said Lees.
“However, many online applications change frequently to reflect customer requirements, and the increasing speed of change in application deployment means that traditional ADC architectures can hold back the pace of change.”
Lees said companies implementing private clouds are still faced with a number of technological and operational limitations. He said this is due to these companies’ “static legacy application delivery infrastructures”.
Lees referred to this as a bottleneck within cloud environments as well as virtualised data centres, which ultimately hampers the IT department’s management of application delivery services.
“Moving to an on-demand platform for application delivery ADC-as-a-service can transform an enterprise or cloud operator by providing the tools and technology to deploy and manage a dynamic and elastic application delivery infrastructure,” said Lees.
“From a management standpoint, ADC as a service delivers better ROI (return on investment) by aligning delivery costs with the a more usage-based business model, and helping any provider automatically provision, deploy, license, meter and manage their application inventory on-demand.”
Furthermore, Lees said data centres are becoming more cloud aware. He said “tremendous opportunities are unleashed at the application delivery layer” due to software-defined networks and virtualisation.
Applications are becoming more dynamic as they are being distributed more, virtualised and “pushed into the cloud.” Given this, Lees believes the old rules currently applicable to application delivery must be reconsidered.
Lees believes ADC as a service will be guided by a desire to streamline IT resources and will be driven by business priorities with “elasticity” enabling IT resources to scale up and down automatically as required.
“Applications undergo constant evolution, and there is a clear trend towards rapid development, with development teams and applications distributed processing across multiple locations. Application delivery solutions must similarly evolve to meet the requirements of large-scale distributed processing readily available in the cloud,” said Lees.
“Software ADCs are designed for virtualisation and cloud portability. Pure software solutions enable high-velocity application development, and enable a more flexible application delivery strategy. It’s the foundation of a true opex-centric resource model and one which IT managers should seriously consider to stay abreast of the ever changing landscape,” concluded Lees.
