Our Next-Generation ADC Rocks! (or so our customers say…)
Several weeks ago I returned from a business trip to Europe, in which I met with customers and new prospects from the UK and Czech Republic. Meeting with both carrier and enterprise customers, it was interesting to learn that many data centers are being re-architectured and some are even completely redesigned. Driving these changes are the introduction of new services and applications, standardization on new enterprise data center technologies (federation of network segments, new acceleration techniques, etc.) and core mobile data technologies (Diameter network adoption, as well as LTE and VoLTE in their plans) – together with the overall need to have more cost-effective data center operations and better cost structure.
The trend that stood out the most is that many organizations today seek to move into a “private cloud” model, offering other departments in their organizations computing, storage and networking services. If only very-large enterprises had this thought process so far, today mid-sized ones want to follow such approaches as well, as it allows them to keep their operations in more focus and more control. And for all of them, the application delivery controller (ADC) is perceived as a critical network element that must guarantee their services/applications high SLA. Also, some were already involved in virtualization projects, while to others virtualization sounded like something they would like to discuss “some other day” – which I completely understood after hearing the amount of new projects they are trying to manage concurrently :-).
I introduced our “separate vADC per application” approach, delivered by our ADC-VX™ technology, discussing the fact that it allows to manage several dozens, to hundreds, of applications in the most simple manner in our industry. So even if customers don’t need to consolidate several physical ADC units, the fact that a separate, fully-isolated ADC service can be provisioned in minutes to support new application roll-out – proved to provide important business value to these customers. When combined with our new AppShape™ technology, which enables management of each ADC service from an application viewpoint, the value proposition really rang the bell to the majority of these customers. So I was quite pleased to receive this positive feedback. Especially, one of our carrier customers who use mobile data optimization services (like video streaming, caching, etc.) found the ability to support even higher vADC density (up to 480 vADCs with the Alteon 10000) very useful.
On my way back I pondered about my conversations with these customers. It seems that most of them are on the move to standardize on newer, more modern technologies and I felt that our next-generation ADC solution just fits hand-in-glove!
Until next time,
Nir
