With so many products claiming to help applications perform well over WANs, how do you know which solutions solve which problems? To bring order to the perplexing chaos of product offerings, we have created a taxonomy for Application Delivery Systems (ADSs). Over the course of the coming weeks in our blog we will fit each of the technologies into this taxonomy and give you a thumbnail sketch of what problem each technology solves and how it works.
But first, why did we cook up this term ADS to cover all the products and services designed to help applications perform well over WANs? We chose the word application because it is application performance after all, not network or other types of performance that these offerings help – delivery because the offerings help performance of applications “delivered” to the user over a network – and system because to work their magic all ADS solutions must work as a pair of elements within the network or on the user’s desktop.
WAN application performance solutions employ two basic approaches, a single-ended approach, and a dual-ended approach – and solutions perform two functions, they control and/or accelerate application performance. We refer to single-ended solutions as Centralized Application Delivery Systems (Centralized ADSs), and dual-ended systems as Distributed Application Delivery Systems (Distributed ADSs).
Here’s the basic taxonomy structure.
