We have been discussing ensuring acceptable application delivery for the last five years. The initial discussions were about issues such as optimizing chatty protocols, offloading SSL processing from servers and getting an end-to-end view into the performance of applications. One would think that after five years that the topic would get old. However, as we will describe in this newsletter, driven in part by the challenges and opportunities presented by varying forms of virtualization, the topic of ensuring acceptable application delivery is as fresh and vital today as it was five years ago.
One of the many reasons why ensuring acceptable application delivery is so relevant today is that many IT organizations are still attempting to get better at some of the traditional application delivery challenges such as optimizing the performance of chatty protocols or managing the quality of VoIP calls.
Another one of the reasons why ensuring acceptable application delivery is so relevant today is that virtualization both creates fundamentally new challenges and at the same time, virtualization enables new solutions to be deployed. For example, a virtualized server supports a number of applications, and because of the ever-increasing power of servers, the number of applications that a given server can support is steadily increasing. While this presents tremendous business benefits it also presents many IT challenges. One such challenge is that IT organizations now need to manage individual virtual machines (VM).
However, virtualization also provides some new tools that IT organizations can use to get better at ensuring acceptable application delivery. These tools include virtual WAN optimization controllers (vWOC) and virtual Application Delivery Controllers (vADC). In many cases vWOCs and vADCs are notably less expensive than are their physical counterparts, which means that IT organizations can more easily afford to implement them. In addition, because they are virtual, vWOCs and vADCs can migrate between physical servers with the same speed as do VMs.
So, does virtualization present more challenges relative to ensuring acceptable application delivery or more benefits? That question is one of the central themes of a survey we are currently conducting. Kindly cast your vote and give us your input. What virtualization challenges are you facing and what virtualized solutions are you deploying?
