SDN Focus Shifts to Network Services

Brad Casemore is Research Director for IDC’s Datacenter Networks practice and is a featured guest blogger.

Cloud computing requires a datacenter network and corresponding network services that are more flexible and responsive than traditional datacenter network architectures. Responding to that need, software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a means of realizing network virtualization and network programmability, while also ensuring that the network can deliver the virtualized network and security services that are essential to the provision of scalable multi-tenant services.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs): The Last Physical Hurdle to the Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC)

Effectively a next generation load balancer, enterprises are deploying Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) to front-end their mission critical applications. The enterprise ADC market is mature with well established players and solutions. Yet when moving applications to the cloud – it’s a completely different playground. The business need is to support a new application life cycle—one that allows the business to scale across hybrid cloud environment.

In this post I will explore an application life cycle use case across hybrid cloud, and how to properly deploy an ADC in the cloud to support the application life cycle.

How Cloud Ready Are You? Download Radware’s Alteon VA Blueprint Directly from the VMWare Cloud Application Marketplace

Anyone intimately connected to the world of server virtualization and cloud computing is no stranger to the name VMware. From an early stage, Radware and VMware have been strategic partners, delivering comprehensive and cost-effective virtual ADC solutions for enterprises and carriers operating in the cloud. Today, with the release of VMware’s Application Director 5.0, the two companies are offering an integrated virtual ADC solution that helps customers simplify and automate the management of their Software-defined-Datacenters (SDDC). Radware’s Alteon VA with VMware’s provisioning solution VMware vFabric Application Director is now generally available for download on VMware’s Cloud Application Marketplace.

Cloud Load Balancing vs. Application Delivery Controllers Revisited

About a month ago, I wrote a post on cloud load balancing versus application delivery controllers. In that post, I explored the core differences between cloud-managed load balancing and self-managed commercial load balancing, using an application delivery controller virtual appliance running over cloud infrastructure. In part two of this series, I take a closer look at some of the themes laid out in my earlier post with an emphasis on the role application delivery controllers play in addressing the challenges associated with migrating legacy applications to a general purpose cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Load Balancing vs. Application Delivery Controllers – Time to Set the Record Straight

By now, we should all know that a load balancer is an integral part of the new cloud application stack. But while cloud vendors have been charging extra merely for offering more virtual servers, there are several key differences between a shared, cloud load balancer instance – offered by virtually all cloud providers (i.e. Amazon ELB, Rackspace CLB) and a cloud hosted, enterprise-grade application delivery controller (ADC). It’s time to set the record straight.