2010 application delivery reality report

The Webtorials Analyst Division just released the 2010 Application Delivery Reality Report, authored by Jim. In the report, Jim takes a hard look at the rapidly changing needs for Application Delivery as we transition the network infrastructure to a new generation that involves cloud computing and many other network-based services.

The arithmetic of ADCs

As Jim noted in the report, “While ensuring acceptable application delivery has always been important, it historically was not a top of mind issue for the majority of IT organizations. That changed several years ago when IT organizations began to develop a concerted focus on it. As part of this focus, many IT organizations began to deploy a first generation of solutions that were intended to protect the organization from a growing number of security attacks, to mitigate the impact of chatty protocols such as CIFS (Common Internet File System), to offload computationally intensive processing (e.g., TCP termination and multiplexing) from servers and to manage application performance on an end-to-end basis. We’ll call the application delivery challenges and solutions of this era ‘Application Delivery 1.0.’

“However, at the same time that many IT organizations are still in the process of implementing solutions that respond to the challenges of the Application Delivery 1.0 era a new generation of challenges is emerging. These challenges are driven in large part by the:

* Emergence of a sophisticated mobile workforce.

* Shifting emphasis and growing sophistication of cyber crime.

* Adoption of varying forms of virtualization.

* Adoption of cloud computing.

And it’s these “Application Delivery 2.0” challenges that the report has as its primary focus. With an extensive custom survey database forming the basis of the discussion, Jim identifies some excellent conclusions.

Perhaps the most telling of these conclusions, though is that IT organizations tend to be woefully unprepared for application delivery. As stated in the report, “While IT organizations realize that there are a number of optimization and management tasks that they must get better at in the next year, they don’t tend to think that getting better at these tasks is terribly challenging. In some cases, such as improving the performance of TCP, they are correct. In other cases, however, such as ‘Ensuring acceptable performance for the applications that are acquired from a SaaS provider’ and ‘Dynamically moving VMs, and all of the supporting management functionality, between physical servers,’ the Survey Respondents seem to be underestimating the difficulty of the task.”