With the growing number of applications in use in today's enterprises, network administrators are facing new challenges.
This is according to Brent Lees, senior product marketing manager for EMEA at Riverbed Technology, who notes IT professionals continue to see growth in the number of applications being deployed and upgraded, as well as a drive to consolidate data centres.
He says, despite these changes, IT budgets are predicated to generally remain the same, leaving IT professionals battling to do more with less.
Lees believes the ultimate challenge for the IT team is to utilise solutions such as consolidation, virtualisation and cloud to drive more value from existing spend.
Given the fact a strong return on investment is the number one way to get the necessary spend approval for new projects, Lees says, if application-focused technologies can reduce capital and operational expense, and maintain the same or better service level, IT administrators will be in a better position to meet their applications' demands while complying with flat budgets.
The adoption of initiatives promising significant cost savings ? such as hybrid networking or cloud-based solutions ? will also make the budget stretch further; particularly in the mid to long term, he says.
According to Lees, the application delivery controller (ADC) is one of the key technologies for application-delivery infrastructure. ADCs help scale, improve availability and secure and optimise applications, allowing organisations to overcome roadblocks to application and business performance, and address the application and budget challenges, he explains.
Lees believes ADC is essential to drive application performance and reliability. "Just as a high-performance car needs automatic control of engine management for fuel efficiency and traction control, a high-performance application needs automatic control of resilience, efficiency surge control and content optimisation, especially in virtual and cloud environments," he points out.
Virtual ADCs let customers dynamically deploy an ADC per application through ADC-as-a-Service (ADCAAS). With ADCAAS, users can quickly spin the ADC up or down for a scalable, secure and elastic delivery of enterprise, cloud and e-commerce applications, explains Lees.
"It can also control and optimise end-user services by inspecting, transforming, prioritising and distributing application traffic across environments, from physical and virtual data centres to public and hybrid clouds," he explains.
To Lees, by adopting a virtual application-delivery controller environment, or ADCAAS, location-independent computing can be cost-effective and help deliver flawless application performance.
He explains without ADCs to manage business-critical applications, organisations will not be able to control and optimise end-user services by inspecting, transforming, prioritising and distributing application traffic across environments, from physical and virtual data centres to public and hybrid clouds. A software-based, cloud-ready, highly automated ADCAAS approach can enable organisations to demonstrate the necessary ROI while significantly improving business processes.
Without a virtual ADC, the cost savings offered by the more efficient use of servers may never be realised, he concludes.
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