Our colleague, Robin Layland, has just completed his yearly “Challenge” update in the Application Delivery Networking space. The format for the full challenge, which is available at Webtorials, is that Robin gives an update on the “State of the Industry” in the introduction, and this is followed by several report sponsors responding to Robin’s comments and queries.
Application delivery: starting over again
In this and the next two newsletters, we’ll be highlighting some of Robin’s comments as a “guest columnist,” starting with an overview of where we are today.
“Application delivery is one of the few technologies that both improves the end-user experience and lowers the cost of enterprise networks. It improves response time, reduces bandwidth, optimizes server performance, provides enhanced security and gives visibility into what is happening at the application layer. Most importantly it saves a significant amount of money, providing a very short ROI.
“Application delivery is critical to a well functioning data center, branch office and traveling and telecommuting employee. It is being recognized as a key component to a successful cloud computing strategy.
“What is Application Delivery Networking? A simple answer is that it is collection of functions and services that allows applications to run more efficiently that sits between the network switches and routers, layer 2 and 3, and the application. The first wave focused on application acceleration, WAN bandwidth optimization, server load balancing and server offload for Web applications. It quickly became evident that application delivery needed to cover more than Web applications and expanded to covering a wide range of applications and protocols. Next application monitoring was added since it is hard to provide good application service without understanding what is happening at the application layer. Now application delivery is branching out to provide additional application layer services such as security and key application support functions.
“Application Delivery’s early successes cemented its role in the network. The rapid growth of the Web would not have been possible without server load balancing that cost effectively allowed the number of servers a Web application was running on to grow. Server consolidation projects that moved servers from the branch office to the data center to reduce operating cost and improve control and management would have failed without application acceleration. WAN bandwidth costs would have shot up and response time would have deteriorated without the benefit of application delivery’s WAN optimization and application acceleration. Servers cost would have grown even more if they were still wasting cycles performing tasks such as SSL processing without the server offload features provided by application delivery solutions. These are just a few examples. The key lesson is that application delivery has played and will continue to play a critical role building an efficient running network while keeping cost down.
“The industry has evolved to a point where enterprises need to think strategically about Application Delivery, enterprises need an Application Delivery Networking strategy. A strategy that deploys application delivery networking throughout the network.”
In the next newsletter, we’ll continue with comments from Robin concerning the components of an Application Delivery strategy.
