Let’s recall exactly how server virtualization started and what it’s all about:
In the late 90’s, a company named VMware developed hypervisor technology, and as much as it had immediate appeal, not too many people really understood it and only a select few believed there was a business value associated with the technology.
Over the past 2 years, Radware has offered virtualized ADC appliances with virtual ADC instances that can be used on hardware appliances or on general-purpose servers. During this time, we’ve noticed two schools of thought emerging on the all-important question of vADC density. The first, argues that vADC density is one of the key criteria to consider when evaluating a virtualized appliance. The second, however, claims that organizations will typically avoid utilizing density higher than 10-16 vADC on a single piece of hardware. In search of greater clarity, we went back after implementing hundreds of ADC consolidation and virtualization projects with thousands of vADCs to check and see if there were any identifiable trends in vADC density deployment.
It’s been hard to ignore all the talk around the datacenter industry since July 23rd when VMware announced their definitive agreement to acquire Nicira. Oracle followed VMware, recently announcing that it will acquire Xsigo. Overall, it seems like there are tectonic moves in the datacenter space – big vendors are stacking up. With these different acquisitions, VMware seems to be aiming at becoming the do-all virtualization software platform, and Oracle seems to be closing all the gaps in their product portfolio to offer a complete, business application optimized data center platform. Top that with the Cisco UCS idea (not new), adding Compute to their portfolio, which seems to be succeeding but still a major move in the way people buy datacenters, it truly shows how things are different than the way they used to be when HP and IBM were fighting head-to-head.
Everyone’s talking about these various next-gen data center trends – and there are so many buzz-words which makes it hard to follow. So I’ve decided to pick-up the glove, and in my next blog series I will try to explain the key trends that impact the next-generation data center, see what each trend means and finally discuss how they can be addressed in the most cost-effective way.
On April 11, IBM announced the availability of IBM PureSystems, a new family of integrated systems with built-in expertise to address complex business and operational tasks automatically with integration to tune systems for optimal performance and efficiency. I’m pleased to announce that Radware is playing a key a role in IBM’s new family of offerings as Radware’s Alteon VA™, an industry-leading application delivery controller (ADC) packaged as a virtual appliance, is optimized to run over IBM’s next generation platform called IBM PureFlex System.
Imagine you want to rollout a new business application in your organization? How long does it take? How many steps are there along the way?
If we think about it, rolling out a new application usually includes the following high-level steps:
A couple of weeks ago, during part of my European business travel to visit our customers, I had the privilege of being invited to speak at a seminar focused on next-generation data center needs & trends at Interxion in Vienna, Austria. While the outside temperature was almost zero, the seminar was one of the best (read: fun) I’ve ever attended.
But first, who’s Interxion? Interxion is a leading pan-European provider of hosting and colocation services – which means that their end-customers own and manage their servers/network equipment while Interxion takes care of the data center space, electricity, cooling and connectivity. They have huge, impressive operation operating 28 data centers in 11 countries and serving 12,000 customers (carriers, enterprises, content providers, mobile service providers and more).
Last week I had a business trip to China, visiting our customers and new prospects. Our business in China is growing fast and one of the drivers for this growth is cloud initiatives. It seems to me that in China everyone is talking about the cloud, busy building data centers for the cloud or planning how to move their business to the cloud. I have no doubt that with government investment of US $154 Billion (as announced recently), China is on its way to become one of the world’s cloud hubs.
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.
Have you ever wondered how much time and effort it takes you to configure your application delivery controller (ADC) whenever you need to provide application delivery services to a new rolled out application? You need to get the configuration correct, then do the pre-testing, then the actual production deployment…and this cycle happens even if you only added a new server to your application to support more users.
