If you’re like most organizations, lack of application availability and poor performance issues for key services cause instant uproars from within user communities. For IT organizations, this means balancing user complaints while simultaneously trying to resolve the issue.
Help users keep their pitchforks in the shed where they belong.
I recently talked to Brandon Reid one of our Networking Technical Architects at Softchoice. He revealed four reasons he believes application delivery controllers (ADCs) are critical to create a strong application infrastructure, and by proxy, happy, productive users.
Reason #4 – Improved high availability and scalability equals increased predictability.
Application issues are often caused by inadequate computing power, or server downtime caused by hardware or software failure.
While there are a host of strategies to mitigate these issues, one of the best options to address them is F5’s BIG-IP solutions <link to customer facing slick>, which provides a more dynamic way to distribute traffic across servers and VMs guaranteeing application elasticity and ensuring capacity bottlenecks are eliminated and performance standards are kept.
Reason #3 – Caching and compression minimize server workloads and allow you to get more out of your servers.
Storage pros can probably relate to this: you slave over a hot SAN sitting in the rack space below you for years to guarantee that users can access their data over and over again. Suddenly, an appliance connects to you and says, “Why don’t I keep some of that frequently requested information for you, so you can take a break from these cycles?” Caching is just one feature that ADV’s can support to improve application performance and free up cycles on your server infrastructure.
Compression and caching combined improve application performance by freeing up processing power and minimizing bandwidth consumption (generally needed to ensure availability and expected performance levels of tier-1 applications).
With F5 BIG-IP solutions, WebAccelerator and WAN Optimization Module (WOM), F5 take application delivery intelligence to the WAN. Features like Location Optimization, CSS Caching and Adaptive Compression redirect users to the closest hosts, move information closer to users and move data efficiently across WAN connects. This creates a reliable end-user experience and reduces the opex allocated to bandwidth and latency issues.
Reason #2 – Optimize performance for BYOD and mobility.
With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, users expect to be able to access applications when and where they want to and with the same responsiveness and reliability they are used to when in the office. Unfortunately, most applications are not designed to perform well in this type of computer-constrained, latency-sensitive environment.
Application Delivery Controllers drastically improve performance and guarantee always-on access to applications regardless of user, device or location. This is because they reduce the size of data and dynamically redirect requests to the next readily available data center.
Reason #1 – A better user experience through single authentication points.
A major benefit of Application Delivery Controllers is the capability to grant users instant gratification. ADC’s have the ability to offload the authentication process from the individual application to a centralized location across all applications – including support for AAA authentication and Active Directory integration.
What you can do right now
The Networking Technical and Solution Architects at Softchoice regularly assist customers by finding solutions that are the right fit for their organization. Contact your Softchoice Account Manager or tweet us directly and we’ll set up a short, focused conversation between you and our team of experts to understand your unique requirements.
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