Application delivery and security specialist Radware is announcing the next step in its Virtual Application Delivery Infrastructure (VADI) strategy, including new application delivery controller (ADC) platforms, enhanced data center management and orchestration interoperability, hypervisor support, and new AppShape technology to provide "the industry’s first application delivery fabric." The company says its ADC Fabric breaks new ground in virtualized application delivery by leveraging the concept of a virtual ADC (vADC) resource pool across both single and multiple data centers, transforming physical ADCs from "units" or devices into services, regardless of the underlying computing resources.
This translates in increased agility and simplified operations, and also overcomes the traditionally limited model of requiring two identical ADC appliances for redundancy, by supporting cross-ADC form factor redundant pairs for unlimited scalability and high resiliency. Radware unveiled its VADI Strategy a year ago to bring agility and efficiency of virtualization to application delivery solutions. The architecture transforms computing resources, as well as application delivery and virtualization services, into one integrated infrastructure designed to bridge the gap across underlying hardware resources and serve the various application needs in terms of SLA and performance predictability while delivering maximal agility to application delivery services.
According to Radware, by implementing the fabric within virtual data centers and replacing traditional ADCs with vADC instances, users can assign a vADC instance per application, department or customer, essentially creating a fully virtualized application silo. Not only will this simplify manageability and operations, because one silo can be upgraded at a time without affecting other silos, but each silo can have full fault isolation with its own dedicated components (servers, storage and vADCs) to guarantee application performance and SLAs.
AppShape, which provides an application perspective for shaping the data center infrastructure to specific application needs, is an essential element of ADC Fabric. With it, application deployment and testing times are reduced by a factor of 10 to 100 times, cutting deployment costs up to 86%, says the company.
Other elements of the announcement include the addition of the Alteon 5224 with Radware's ADC-VX running on top, which enables midsize enterprises to create an on-demand consolidation platform capable of supporting up to 24 vADC instances with throughput between 1 and 14 Gbps. The Alteon 10000 platform will also run ADC-VX to support 480 vADCs with up to 80 Gbps of throughput, which is up to 30 times more vADCs on a single device than is available from competitors, says Radware. Alteon VA support has been extended from VMware ESX/ESXi to KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V and Open Xen. vDirect plug-in, which enables integration of the ADC fabric into virtual and cloud data center management systems, now supports VMware’s vCloud Director in addition to VMware’s vCenter Orchestrator.
Tracy Corbo, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates, is impressed with Radware's "unique" hybrid approach to application delivery. Networking virtualization is in its infancy and continues to evolve, and may not follow the exact same path as its server counterparts, she says, but in the meantime, hybrid environments provide a good interim solution. "I don't know that anybody else has this type of approach, and I think it is an ideal approach."
Overall, she says, with these announcements Radware is rounding out its product portfolio and demonstrating its commitment to this space, bringing together the best of the physical and virtual environments and achieving a level of flexibility and scalability that might not otherwise be possible. "They have all bases covered--hardware, virtual and a hybrid solution--as we transition from a hardware to a virtual environment."
See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Data Centers: Virtual vs. Physical (free, registration required).
