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| Posted: |
28 Apr 2008 |
| Published: |
01 Jul 2007 |
| Format: |
PDF
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| Length: |
7
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| Type: |
White Paper |
| Language: |
English |
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ABSTRACT:
One of the unfortunate effects of the continued evolution of the load balancer into today's application delivery controller (ADC) is that it is often too easy to forget the basic problem for which load balancers were originally created - producing highly available, scalable, and predictable application services. We get too lost in the realm of intelligent application routing, virtualized application services, and shared infrastructure deployments to remember that none of these things are possible without a firm basis in basic load balancing technology. So how important is load balancing, and how do its effects lead to streamlined application delivery?
ADCs are the natural evolution to the critical network real estate that load balancers of the past held, and while they owe a great deal to those bygone devices, they are a distinctly new breed providing not just availability, but performance and security. As their name suggests, they are concerned with all aspects of delivering an application in the best way possible.
Just as load balancers evolved to become ADCs, the ever-changing needs of the technical world will continue to mold and shape ADCs into something even more capable of adapting to the availability, performance, and security requirements of application delivery. Ideas of integrating Network Access Control (generic NAC), new ideas in application caching/compression, and even the increasing importance of applying business rules to the management and control of application delivery will continue to stretch the boundaries of the benefits that these devices can offer an organization. The increasing pressure to consolidate and minimize the number of devices in the network between the user and the application will continue to collapse traditional stand-alone technologies (like firewalls, anti-virus, and IPS) into the realm of the ADC. As new technologies and protocols are developed in an attempt to satiate the increasing desire for on-anywhere, from-anywhere access to applications and data, the ADCs of tomorrow will likely provide the intelligence to determine how these (and other) technologies will be integrated into the existing network, as well as where and when they'd be most effective.
While it remains unclear exactly how many technologies will be directly replaced by ADC delivered components, it is clear that ADCs will evolve into the primary conduit and integration point through which these integrated technologies interface with the applications being delivered and the users who use them.
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AUTHOR:
Ken Salchow
Jr. Manager, Product Management
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BROWSE RELATED RESOURCES:
Application Deployment | Load Balancing | Network Security |
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View All Resources
sponsored by F5 Networks |
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