Virtual appliances - A reality check

Insightful analysis by consultants Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, plus links to the latest WAN news headlines

In our last newsletter we discussed one of the reasons why we think that virtual application delivery appliances are important. We will use this newsletter to discuss a recent announcement about virtualized appliances and talk about what you can expect to see happen over the next 12 to 18 months.

In mid March, Blue Coat announced a new a new family of virtual WAN Optimization appliances that it refers to as Blue Coat ProxySG Virtual Appliances. These appliances run on industry-standard servers. They leverage Moore's Law in that they are taking advantage of the constantly improving price/performance ratio for computing. They also leverage the deployment of server virtualization.

Blue Coat claims that the Blue Coat ProxySG Virtual Appliance is among the first WAN optimization solutions to achieve VMware Ready status. In order to achieve this status a product has to run efficiently in the VMware environment and meet all technical criteria and specifications. The VMware Ready program is a validation program designed to provide the best possible user experience among virtual appliances being deployed in production. This status indicates that a vendor such as Blue Coat has followed best practices and the software is optimized for VMware vSphere.

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In our last newsletter we discussed one of the reasons why we think that virtual application delivery appliances are important. We will use this newsletter to discuss a recent announcement about virtualized appliances and talk about what you can expect to see happen over the next 12 to 18 months.

In mid March, Blue Coat announced a new a new family of virtual WAN Optimization appliances that it refers to as Blue Coat ProxySG Virtual Appliances. These appliances run on industry-standard servers. They leverage Moore's Law in that they are taking advantage of the constantly improving price/performance ratio for computing. They also leverage the deployment of server virtualization.

Blue Coat claims that the Blue Coat ProxySG Virtual Appliance is among the first WAN optimization solutions to achieve VMware Ready status. In order to achieve this status a product has to run efficiently in the VMware environment and meet all technical criteria and specifications. The VMware Ready program is a validation program designed to provide the best possible user experience among virtual appliances being deployed in production. This status indicates that a vendor such as Blue Coat has followed best practices and the software is optimized for VMware vSphere.

The Blue Coat approach of focusing on industry-standard servers is in contrast to the approach taken by Riverbed. The Riverbed approach is based on what they refer to as the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP). It provides customers with the capability to run up to five additional services and applications virtually on VMware in a protected partition on the Steelhead appliance. These two approaches give IT organizations a distinct choice: Do they want to base their branch office IT on a server or an appliance?

Virtual application delivery appliances have the potential to disrupt the current application delivery market, Because of that, we believe that throughout 2010 you will see a lot written on the topic. The ball is in the vendor's court to convince you that these products have the performance that you need and can be easily managed. It will also be fascinating to see how aggressively some of the vendors who are anxious to gain market share price these virtual appliances.

If you are going to be at Interop in Vegas next month, Jim is moderating 10 panels – one of which is entitled "The Emergence of Virtualized Application Delivery Appliances". The panel is April 27 at 11:30 a.m. The panelists are from Blue Coat, A10, Citrix, Certeon and F5. The panel is designed to give the attendees deep insight into the wide range of virtual application delivery appliances that are currently available.

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.

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