What's driving Application Delivery 2.0?

In the last WAN newsletter we pointed out our belief that we are entering a new era of application delivery – one that we refer to as Application Delivery 2.0. We also began to discuss some of the challenges that are associated with this new era of application delivery. In this newsletter we will continue to discuss the challenges that are driving Application Delivery 2.0. We will also mention some steps that IT organizations are taking to respond to these challenges.

Best practices for speeding WAN application delivery

Cloud computing will have a dramatic impact on application delivery. One of the many reasons we say that is that we recently talked to an IT organization that told us it started to use an application from a software-as-a-service provider. However, the performance was so bad, it had to bring the application in-house.

Part of today's WAN reality is that most IT organizations don't provide direct Internet access to branch office employees. Instead, the traffic of these employees transits the corporate WAN to some central point where it accesses the Internet. As a result of this design, the delay, packet loss and jitter of the corporate WAN is added to the delay, packet loss and jitter of the Internet.

One of the application delivery challenges brought about by the increased use of public cloud computing is that IT organizations will make greater utilization of the Internet to access key resources from cloud computing service providers – be that applications, storage or compute resources. In some cases, combining the performance defects of the corporate WAN with those of the Internet will result in unacceptable application performance. The IT organizations that we talked to told us that they are less likely to redesign their Internet access than they are to deploy solutions from vendors such as Akamai that are intended to improve the performance of the Internet.

A dominant characteristic of private cloud computing solutions is the virtualization of the organization's data center servers and the implementation of the ability to move a virtual machine between disparate physical servers. However, these capabilities make unique demands on the data center network. We have talked to a number of IT organizations that have told us they either already have, or are currently in the process of redesigning their data center LAN to cope with these challenges. In particular, they are redesigning their data center LANs to provide better performance and greater scalability.

Next month at Interop in NYC, Jim will be moderating 10 sessions. One of the sessions is entitled The Next Generation Data Center Network. This session will examine the types of changes that IT organizations need to make to their data center LANs to respond to the challenges of Application Delivery 2.0. If you will be at Interop, this will be a great session to attend.