The Art of Efficient ADC Administration – Develop Once, Apply Multiple Times

It’s no secret application delivery controller (ADC) services are often perceived as complex to master and administer. Although they may use the latest ADC device, many ADC deployments only use basic layer 4 load balancing. It can be challenging to find an ADC champion who can really take advantage of the most advanced capabilities of an application delivery solution and maximize its business benefits.

A Better Way to Deploy Applications in Today’s Data Centers (Part 1)

Today, organizations need to support all types of end users that access services and applications in the data center. This means longer and more complicated application deployments on the ADC.

To successfully deploy an application on the ADC, one needs a lot of specific knowledge about the application. For example, you need to know what health checks to do, what should be synched to the backup device, acceleration enhancements and more. The applications require a significant testing phase and there are many parameters on the ADC that need to be monitored in the day-to-day operations.

Key Trends Impacting the Next-Gen Data Center – Part 2

In the first part of my blog series, I shed light on the key trends that impact the next-generation data center including consolidation, virtualization, connectivity, convergence and green IT. In this part, it’s time to discuss what are the best-of-breed solutions to address these trends in the most cost-effective way. I chose to start with data center consolidation and virtualization not only because I believe they’re the prominent ones – but also since they go hand in hand together. So here we go:

ADC Consolidation: Handle with Care

Similar to server consolidation, application delivery controller (ADC) consolidation can provide significant benefits to the data center. These benefits include higher utilization of existing ADC infrastructure, reduced ADC hardware costs and significant savings of operational costs such as power consumption, rack space and annual service costs.

However, ADC consolidation presents significant challenges and risks that must be addressed before initiating an ADC consolidation project.  

How to Save Money with a Weak Economy: The Application Delivery Solution Angle

The recent events in the global economy caused me to think again on how application delivery controllers (ADC) can help IT organizations save money.

First, ADCs are designed to reduce some of the tasks from the Applications servers. Tasks such as SSL encryption and decryption can be done on the ADC using dedicated hardware accelerators, or caching of web traffic can be stored on the ADC rather than on the application servers or even simply compressing the traffic to reduce the bandwidth consumption.