There's no shortage of news about cloud computing. Service providers such as Amazon and Google and traditional IT vendors such as Microsoft and IBM have been bolstering their cloud computing platforms and services throughout 2008. In addition, some pioneering enterprise IT shops are looking to deploy private clouds modeled after public providers' networks yet built and managed internally for business users.

But as adoption picks up, and more applications and services are delivered in an on-demand environment, what’s the impact on the WAN and application performance?

I spoke recently with Lori MacVittie of F5 Networks about that issue and how F5’s new high-end application delivery controller platform - the Big-IP 6900 - is geared for supporting cloud-based services by offloading network-related functions from servers and boosting performance of Web applications through caching, compression and other acceleration methods.

The Big-IP 6900 supports up to 6Gbps of Layer 7 throughput and 25,000 SSL transactions per second and combines caching, IPv6 gateway, rate shaping and compression features.

It’s geared for the enterprise cloud computing market (as opposed to the public cloud services providers like Amazon and Google), says MacVittie, who is technical marketing manager at F5. “It’s got more throughput and a lot more processing power to be able to handle a lot of the automation, integration and all the really cool stuff that makes the cloud work,” she says.

One of the core attributes of cloud computing - the ability to expand and contract dynamically to meet capacity and maximize resources - can be aided by application delivery controllers, MacVittie says. But having enough power is key. The 6900 has two multicore processors, for example. “If you’re constantly bringing services or applications online and offline, that application delivery controller has to do a lot more work.”

The modular design of the Big-IP 6500 also plays a role. “It has been upgraded so you can run more modules together,” MacVittie says.

Application delivery controllers can provide efficiencies of 20% to 50% within the cloud provider data center, according to Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner. In addition, “dynamic caching, compression, pre-fetching, and other related Web-acceleration technologies integrated with application delivery controllers can result in major performance improvements for end users, often exceeding 50%,” Skorupa said in a statement.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.