Successfully Deploying Globalized Applications Requires Application Delivery Controllers

– Whitepaper

Table of Contents

Abstract... 3

Virtualization imposes new challenges on mission critical application deployments ... 3

ADC evolution into business applications and virtual data centers ... 4

A new ADC paradigm with ADC virtualization and AppShape™ technology ... 4

Deploying applications using KVM over IBM PureSystems ... 5

Introducing Radware solution for KVM ... 5

The need to support KVM hypervisor ... 5

Radware joins the Open Virtualization Alliance to leverage open source solutions ... 6

Radware vADC solution for IBM PureSystems ... 6

Benefits of Radware vADC solution for KVM ... 7

A customer case: Virtual ADC Simplifies Cloud Migrations ... 7

Summary ... 9

Abstract

Radware enters the Open Virtualization Alliance to deliver the first virtual Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) solution for KVM – minimizing complexity, adding flexibility and dramatically reducing overall costs in globalized applications projects leveraging virtualized private, hybrid and public cloud solutions. Together with IBM PureSystems and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, Radware virtual ADC solution fully complies with the application lifecycle.

Virtualization imposes new challenges on mission critical application deployments

Deploying virtualized data centers (private clouds) creates a direct cost reduction by reducing the number of computing, network, and storage devices and the cost associated with operating them. At the same time, data center virtualization also increases a business’s agility, as it is simpler to perform modifications in the data center infrastructure – such as topology changes or configuration refinements – in order to be aligned with the business objectives. However, the deployment of virtualized infrastructure creates new significant challenges from an application delivery viewpoint: the Application Delivery Controller (ADC) has to be fully integrated into the virtual data center orchestrating and management system; it has to support a multi-tenant environment.

An Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is a network device in the data center that provides the “glue” between the network and the application server layer. It allows distributing application traffic over the network in a manner that will increase the application availability and performance. The ADC performs common tasks done by servers or web sites in an effort to remove load from the servers themselves – to accelerate the application performance, improve the server efficiency and improve user experience (see figure 1). The ADC has evolved from basic load balancers that distributed traffic among servers in a farm or cluster to smart devices that contain application logic and perform “smart” decisions.

Enterprise Data Center

Access

Router Firewall ADC

Partners

Customers

The main challenge when virtualizing the ADC is that it poses a potential risk as the application SLA (Service Level Agreement) might be compromised due to several ADC services utilizing shared resources. Furthermore, deploying an application delivery solution in multi-application or multi-tenant environments whether it be a virtualized, cloud or even physical data center, implies operating multiple ADC devices or using complex, shared configuration files, which increases operational complexity – making the operations less efficient and increasing costs.

ADC evolution into business applications and virtual data centers

The first generation of ADC solutions focused on general network and applications optimization and scalability.

Increasing capacity of a service is quite simple; once a new application server is installed and added to the server farm, all you need is to add the new server into the relevant ADC traffic redirection policy – and it starts load balancing the traffic between the extended farm servers.

The second generation of ADC solutions has acknowledged that applications can be better optimized when tailored to the specific vendor. ADCs are certified with leading business applications from vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, VMware and more. Radware goes one step further to publish detailed performance reports showing the performance improvements and cost reduction. For example, when deploying Radware ADC with Microsoft SharePoint, the response time of SharePoint servers is accelerated by 350% and the servers’ CPU load is reduced by 40%.

The adoption of data center virtualization ecosystems, keeping in-sync with cloud data center’s dynamic changes, being truly “aware” of on-demand business applications, needing to scale in a cost-effective manner and lowering costs – all require a new class of ADC, hence the 3rd ADC generation is introduced. This ADC delivers a complete set of services to ensure the availability, performance and security of the mission-critical applications in the physical, virtual and cloud data centers.

A new ADC paradigm with ADC virtualization and AppShape™ technology

Radware ADC virtualization solutions caters to all sizes and types of virtualized data centers and organizations – from mid-sized companies, large enterprise data centers and carriers to cloud and hosting providers. Any organization looking to consolidate and virtualize the ADC infrastructure will save costs and increase business agility.

The core of Radware’s ADC virtualization solution is the virtual ADC instance (vADC). vADCs run on top of specialized or general purpose computing resources and support all capabilities of a standard ADC device - thus transforming the ADCs into application delivery services (see figure 2).

Deployment of application delivery services requires expertise of the application and traditionally take weeks of staff work to configure, optimize and test for production. To accelerate and optimize the application delivery services, Radware offers AppShape. AppShape technology reduces deployment time of application delivery services by 86%, while guaranteeing maximum value for each business critical application in terms of availability, performance and security.

Figure 2 - Virtual ADC instances fully integrated into the Virtual Data Center and Cloud Eco-Systems

AppShape offers configuration templates and wizards for leading business applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Lync, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle 10g, PeopleSoft, SAP ERP and more removing expertise from application rollouts. AppShape helps users setup and configure all the required ADC options in a user friendly format, including application server information, specific application health checks and redundancy options. Through certification and testing campaigns, optimized policy is automated for the administrator or orchestration solution.

Deploying applications using KVM over IBM PureSystems

Radware has partnered with Red Hat to extend Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) ecosystem by offering Red Hat certified virtual application delivery solution (vADC) for Red Hat and IBM Users. Radware’s solution for RHEV

Virtualized Enterprise Data Center Access

Router Firewall Partners

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Employees & Users

Mobile Users

Orchestration System

®

E-BUSINESS SUITE vADC

vADC

vADC

Configure vADC instance per

application using AppShape templates Orchestration system provisions

and manages vADC instances

Figure 3 - Usage of operating systems for websites (W3Techs - WWW Technology Surveys)

Medium to large size enterprises, service providers and cloud providers are running their mission critical

applications and revenue generating application on Linux and are looking on KVM as a native virtualization solution for their existing IT infrastructure.

Furthermore, KVM is embedded in the Linux OS. This allows Linux users to leverage on their existing image and server deployment management system when they start their journey to virtual application infrastructure. The result is incremental modification of their IT infrastructure towards virtual data center, saving significantly on cost of new infrastructure deployment as well as training and maintenance of systems and human expertise.

Radware joins the Open Virtualization Alliance to leverage open source solutions

At Radware we believe that open source will be climbing-up the cloud software stack, from KVM as a server operating system to the OpenStack cloud management systems. Because of this, Radware has joined the open virtualization alliance (OVA), governed by HP, IBM, Intel and Red Hat. Our mission is to join forces and help develop the open source virtualization solution ecosystem – where the application delivery (ADC) plays a key component in enabling to deliver highly available mission critical applications while ensuring excellent user response time and allowing tremendous cost savings.

Radware vADC solution for IBM PureSystems

As an IBM PureSystems independent software vendor (ISV), Radware compliments IBM PureSystems by

providing an integrated ADC virtual appliance through IBM PureFlex Systems catalogue. As a leader in integrated application delivery solutions for enterprise and carrier data centers, we believe that virtualizing business critical applications requires much more than just a hypervisor. Mission critical applications require virtualization services for computing, storage, networking, load balancing and security. They also require virtualization operations

management, as well as, cloud service management layers to create a complete IT virtualization solution or cloud platform.

Subsequently, Radware has decided to become an IBM PureSystems ISV and offer its vADC solution for PureSystems customers. PureSystems is an expert integrated system that provides users with complete

networking, computing, storage and management features in one system, designed for private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. Enterprises and cloud providers select PureSystems for its simplicity, cost reduction and elasticity. Offering vADC solution for PureSystems is a great opportunity for Radware and a must for customers who need to assure the availability of their critical mission applications, or deploy applications that make use of a server cluster – all deployed on IBM PureSystems.

Furthermore, as KVM is already embedded into the Linux operating system – Radware vADC (Alteon VA) for KVM can be deployed on any Linux machine, without the need to install a specialized hypervisor.

Unix

Windows

63.8%

Percentages of wesites using various operating systems

Note: a website may use more than one operating system

W3Techs.com, 6 September 2012

36.3%

Benefits of Radware vADC solution for KVM

The customer benefits of the joint Radware vADC solution are:

• Resilient, highly-available applications that run on top of RHEV infrastructure by leveraging server health monitoring, local and global load balancing, persistency, content modifications and more. The RHEV-based virtualized server infrastructure is ensured to be always available, more robust and responsive.

• Fastest performing applications and improved employee productivity deliver up to 3 times faster application response time with up to 60% reduced bandwidth consumption through Alteon VA’s application acceleration features that include SSL acceleration, TCP connection multiplexing, TCP protocol optimization, smart caching and compression.

• Rapid RHEV Application Roll-Out - Radware’s AppShape™

provides application configuration templates, automatic configuration synchronization, full reporting, compliance and logging that enable fast application roll-out and simplified operations of RHEV infrastructure for greater cost reduction.

• Seamless, on demand scalability – Radware’s “pay-as-you-grow” approach enables additional capacity to the solution to address business growth with no service interruption or system reconfiguration up to 1Gbps of throughput capacity.

• Maximum business agility through simplified management workflows – Radware’s vDirect for RHEV simplifies the alignment of the dynamic changes in the virtual infrastructure with Alteon VA’s ADC services.

A customer case: Virtual ADC Simplifies Cloud Migrations

IBM and Radware collaborate to offer simplified solutions leveraging advanced services while driving a cost containment strategy to customers. The customer case we describe here depicts a typical application lifecycle deployment in an enterprise environment. The case described here shall take the reader beyond the standard ADC deployment benefits (3 times faster application response, 60% bandwidth consumption, etc.) and demonstrate the role of the ADC solution in application evolution and operations.

“Mission-critical applications

and services running in RHEV

environments must be highly

available and deliver excellent

performance. With Radware

becoming an ISV for IBM

PureSystems, customers can not

only address these challenges,

but also deploy and manage

their mission-critical applications

together with an advanced

ADC service on one consistent

virtualization environment.”

Gilad Zlotkin - Vice President, Virtualization and Management Products - Radware

Figure 4 – building hybrid application infrastructure to support the application life cycle

The first step was to design, deploy and evaluate the BPM application in the cloud. This step takes advantage of the reduced cost and simplicity of cloud operations. Once the application had been tested and qualified, the customer deployed the application in their private cloud data center. The customer maintained the application in the cloud to handle application bursts and disaster recovery.

The ADC played and continues to play a key role in driving the above application lifecycle. Once qualified, the vADC configuration is copied as is from the public cloud to the private cloud thanks to the vADC migration capabilities across all form factors. The vADC also supports application elasticity allowing automatic support for added or removed servers in each location. Facilitation of the hybrid model, where the public cloud resources are deployed for disaster recovery and application bursts were done by configuring the vADC with a global load balancing policy between the private and public cloud data center.

The vADC can dynamically compliment business logic between cloud assets with policy control retained by the IT administrator. This allows customers to maximize their existing investments while globalizing their IT applications and providing access to a new range of available application tools, transforming IT into a monetized, global application store. The result is a simplified, accelerated and secure application experience focused on cost reduction and innovation.

The customer decision to deploy KVM as its virtualization technology foundation was supported by the following motivations:

• Virtualizing existing Linux servers - their data center runs Linux OS on IBM systems. The migration to KVM as a natural part of Linux saved the need to introduce new IT infrastructure.

• Hypervisor of choice for the cloud provider – the cloud provider offered RHEV KVM as the cloud IT

infrastructure, which enables simple and smooth migration from the public to private cloud services as part of the application life cycle.

IBM SmartCloud Data Center

Firewall ADC-VX SmartCloud Enterprise Portal Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Enterprise Data Center ADC-VA

Firewall IBM PureSystems

Customers

Employees & Users

Mobile Users

Orchestration System

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

Internet

Summary

When rolling out a new service or expanding an existing service, the ADC has an important role enhancing the availability and performance of mission critical applications. As a globalized application gateway the ADC facilitates hybrid architectures meant to save customers money ensuring a simplified, accelerated and secure application experience.

Radware enters the Open Virtualization Alliance to deliver the first virtual ADC solution for KVM – minimizing complexity, adding flexibility and dramatically reducing overall costs in globalized applications projects leveraging virtualized private, hybrid and public cloud solutions. Together with IBM PureSystems and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, Radware ADC solution for KVM fully complies with the application lifecycle.

The transformation of ADC computing resources, ADC services and virtualization services into an integrated, agile and scalable virtual application delivery infrastructure is unique to Radware. It enables the creation of the first ever ADC fabric that addresses the requirements of the virtual data center from an ADC creating a true hybrid application infrastructure that is fully aligned with the economy requirements and models of IBM PureSystems and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.