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Today’s web and application infrastructure continues to expand applications for e-commerce, and communications with customers, partners and internal employees. For those responsible for deploying, maintaining and supporting these networked applications, there is an increasing need to get the highest performance out of datacenter equipment, while simplifying the complexity that causes excess overhead and unnecessary costs.
The costs associated with network downtime can run six figures and above on an hourly basis. If not controlled, downtime can also lead to customer dissatisfaction and lost business. These consequences are unacceptable in a market where it costs ten times more to attract a new customer than it does to maintain a current one.
Managing Internet user traffic and applications
One of the greatest challenges to any organization is the maintaining of continuous and economical web and application infrastructure uptime. Business-critical websites and intranets face many challenges, from user traffic spikes, servers bogged down trying to handle compute-intensive SSL transactions, large and numerous data file requests, I/O and memory overloads, and hackers trying to flood servers with malicious attacks.
Today’s global economy relies on Internet sites to run optimally 24x7, while IT staffs demand 100% operationally ready solutions. The operational readiness, maintainability, and durability of today’s Internet sites are directly tied to the myriad of equipment all connected together within the datacenter infrastructure.
Application delivery controllers deliver datacenter cost savings
Application delivery controllers (ADC) and server load balancers optimize web and application infrastructure, providing high-availability, high-performance, flexible scalability and secure operations - while streamlining IT costs. ADCs simplify the management of networked resources, and optimize and accelerate user access to diverse servers, content and transaction-based systems.
Approximately 10% of the application servers in a typical datacenter are not used efficiently. Yet, these systems still require ongoing backups, maintenance and licensing costs; not to mention the energy costs associated with running them. However, application delivery controllers and server load balancers can make these under-utilized servers highly optimized, adding new efficiencies to the datacenter.
Many organizations believe that in order to reduce operating costs, they must invest in new energy-efficient technologies. While this has merit, by leveraging application delivery controllers and server load balancers, there is as much to be gained by optimizing existing systems, than replacing them. When a server is idle, it can use up to 70% of its power. By optimizing servers, there is a huge opportunity for maximizing energy usage. As an example, at 10 cents per kilowatt per hour, and 500 servers in a datacenter that are only getting 50% utilization, by leveraging ADCs you can maximize what would have been over $70,000 of wasted energy each year, while increasing the performance, reliability and ability to scale your site.
Improving Datacenter Operations
The following are examples of how application delivery controllers and server load balancers can help reduce datacenter costs and optimize datacenter operations:
* Maximize server utilization
* Optimize investments into existing equipment
* Improve performance by distributing user traffic loads among multiple web and application servers
* Optimize server and application resources by efficiently allocating traffic across a servers based on application types
* Increase site performance by distributing user traffic based on server resources
* Cost-effectively scale server capacity to keep up with growing traffic demands
* Reduce single points-of-failure
The evolution of application delivery
Until recently, even basic server load balancing was cost prohibitive for small-to-medium sized businesses. Today, advanced application delivery controllers and server load balancers are not only affordable, but the consolidation of Layer 4-7 load balancing and content switching, and server offload capabilities such as SSL, data caching and compression, provides SMBs with cost-effective out-of-the-box infrastructure.
Costs associated with deploying, maintaining and supporting web and application infrastructure can be dramatically reduced with new application delivery controllers
Integrated capabilities for application delivery controllers improve reliability and lower costs.
Datacenter managers know that reliable web and application infrastructure is crucial to providing customers, partners and employees with fast and reliable access to information and transactions. ADCs integrate four important functions of site management.
1. High-availability
2. Server offload
3. User traffic distribution among server resources
4. Application security
These capabilities help to reduce costs associated with managing sites, while keeping sites up and running.
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