As mentioned in the prior newsletter, Layland Consulting and Webtorials have produced the 2007 Application Delivery Challenge, featuring products from Foundry, Cisco, Juniper and Citrix.

As a part of the challenge, it is assumed that there are certain “table stakes” capabilities that must be delivered. In particular, one assumes that, as mentioned in the introduction of the challenge:

* “The application owners want high availability. When one of their servers goes down they want the application switch to seamlessly move the traffic to the other servers.”

* “The end users just want the application switch to make their application appear as if it is always there. When their server goes down, they don’t want to know about it, they expect the application switch to quickly and seamlessly move them to another one.”

* “Security people want to know that no one, except themselves and maybe a select few, can access and configure the application switch. Since it plays a critical role in directing application traffic, any solution needs to be hardened against hackers.”

* “The people who maintain the building would for once like something that does not turn the building into a sauna.”

* And, needless to say, there’s an even longer wish list from the networking crowd.

As a part of delivering on this set of needs, the resulting products each have, as a minimum, according to Robin Layland, “server and appliance load balancing, server and appliance awareness, server off-loading, security, and application acceleration.” Of course, the level of acceleration is somewhat limited because, as mentioned in the prior newsletter, these appliances are asymmetrical products that are placed in the data center as opposed to symmetrical products designed primarily for acceleration.

As Robin points out, the focus here is on what makes each product “better” as opposed to a generic “application delivery appliances are good” marketing pitch. He states: “I did not ask [the vendors] to spend time talking about common features. If they don’t spend time on a capability or feature that I mentioned above that doesn’t mean they don’t have it. Rather, it just means that they do not think it is the capability that differentiates them from the others in the challenge.”

The written portion of the challenge is available now at Webtorials. This will be followed in a few weeks by a series of on-demand Webtorials in which Robin interviews each of the participating vendors.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.