When an IT professional uses the term virtualization, they are usually referring to server virtualization. However, as will be described in this newsletter, one of the most interesting sessions at the recent Interop conference was the one that Jim hosted on the topic of virtual service delivery appliances.
Hot products at Interop
For the sake of bounding the discussion at Interop, the panel focused on just virtual WAN optimization controllers (WOC) and virtual Application Delivery Controllers (ADC). The six panelists were Radware, Zeus, Certeon, Citrix, A10 and F5. Two of the vendors on the panel, Zeus and Certeon, only provide a virtual appliance while the other four vendors provide both a virtual and a physical appliance.
There was complete agreement among the panelists that a virtual application delivery appliance provides IT organizations with the flexibility to deploy appliances faster and to deploy them in places where it would be difficult to deploy a physical appliance – such as in a cloud computing service provider’s data center. Interestingly enough, flexibility was about the only area in which there was complete agreement. Not surprisingly, the two panelists who only provide a virtual appliance stated that a virtual appliance meets all the requirements, while the other panelists stated that there are times in which a hardware based appliance is still required.
There was somewhat broad agreement that a virtual appliance reduces the total cost that is associated with an application delivery appliance. Citrix, for example, stated that their virtual application delivery controllers cost one third less than their hardware based products. F5 didn’t dispute that virtual application delivery controllers reduce cost but the F5 speaker cautioned the audience that a virtual appliance may not save all that much as “you still have to buy hardware”.
When asked about the evaluation criteria that IT organizations should use when choosing a virtual application delivery appliance, most of the panelists stressed the importance of acquiring a virtual application delivery appliance that was hypervisor agnostic. Radware suggested two additional criteria. They suggested that when evaluating virtual application delivery appliances that IT organizations verify that the solution provides full network, management and fault isolation as well as a resource guarantee between each virtual appliance. Radware also suggested that IT organizations should identify which on-demand scaling options are offered in terms of the number of possible virtual application delivery appliances, the total possible throughput and the maximum total capacity.
The bottom line is that any IT organization looking to evaluate virtual application delivery appliances needs to look at these products very closely. They are not all the same.
