Partner Article

Riverbed introduces "Application Delivery As A Service"

Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, today announced an industry game-changer – a new platform enabling any customer to deliver application delivery controller-as-a-service (ADCaaS) with the Stingray® Services Controller. This new product will automate the deployment of application delivery services for any network architecture including software defined networking (SDN).

Typically, ADCs have been deployed in a network-centric model of “one application per ADC box” or where a shared ADC infrastructure must support the demands of multiple applications. With the Stingray Services Controller, Riverbed makes possible an “ADC per application” deployment model. This directly addresses the evolving application and data center architectures, workflows, and operations models that call for a next generation ADC architecture that can remove today’s bottlenecks, delivering improved agility, high levels of automation, and quicker time-to-service. Riverbed’s ADCaaS enabling technology now gives cloud providers and enterprises deploying in the private cloud the ability to provision, scale, and deploy their ADC as needed.

“Riverbed’s Stingray Services Controller and the Joyent high-performance cloud will enable our customers to provision, license, and scale ADC services in a very easy, agile, and cost effective way,” said Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer, Joyent. “This ground-breaking, high-performance approach maps to our DNA and will enable us to deploy and manage ADCs in a truly elastic cloud delivery model.”

Legacy ADC Challenges

The Stingray Services Controller addresses the challenges IT architects and operators face when trying to deploy traditional ADC architectures with emerging software-defined architectures and within their existing or virtualised data centers. The following list highlights some of the challenges impacting business and operations:

· Deploying ADC services takes days or months

· Inability to guarantee performance per application or tenant due to shared tenancy

· Scaling ADC operations requires pre-procuring over-capacity with bigger boxes rather than dynamically sizing in real-time

· Tedious change control processes make ADC operations time-consuming and cumbersome

Consumption Model for Elastic Scaling

With the introduction of the Stingray Services Controller, enterprises andcloud providers will be able to automatically provision, deploy, license, meter, and manage their ADC inventory in an as-a-service model.

The Stingray Services Controller will also provide a new consumption model for customers deploying ADC services, called the Stingray Traffic Manager (STM) “micro” instance. These STM “micro” instances can range from small ADC instances to large Stingray instances all on commodity servers. This eliminates the traditional throughput-based ADC sizing model that forces customers to guess their traffic load and pre-procure ADC capabilities in advance. With the STM “micro” instance, ADC services can now be elastically scaled on demand and right-sized to suit each application in the data center, offering high density, full isolation, and multi-tenancy scaling.

“With the emergence of the virtualised data center, legacy ADCs can be a bottleneck and were starting to be excluded from virtualisation strategies and cloud deployments,” said Jeff Pancottine, senior vice president and general manager of the Riverbed Stingray application delivery business unit. “With Stingray Services Controller, customers will have a hyper-elastic ADC platform that can adapt to workload changes. This is a game changer – today we are introducing a software-defined application delivery fabric that enables Layer 7 services on top of any data center architecture.”

Availability: The Stingray Services Controller is expected to be generally available in Q3 2013.

Access to Stingray Services Controller

• Interop Las Vegas 2013: Riverbed will demonstrate its Stingray Services Controller

at Interop Las Vegas booth #1351 taking place May 7 - 10 at Mandalay Bay. On May 8, conference goers can visit Riverbed’s booth from 4:40 to 6 p.m. for a happy hour.

• Follow Stingray Services Controller on twitter using #RiverbedStingray

• Video describing Stingray Services Controller: http://youtu.be/FeQrxz6NDlo

• ADC-as-a-Service infographic: http://www.riverbed.com/about/document-repository/Riverbed-Stingray-ADCaaS-Infographic-May7-2013pdf.html

• Stingray Services Controller product brief: http://www.riverbed.com/about/document-repository/Stingray-Services-Controller-Product-Brief.html

• Stingray Services Controller product brochure: http://www.riverbed.com/about/document-repository/Stingray-Services-Controller-Brochure.html

More than 22,000 organisations worldwide depend on Riverbed to understand, optimise and consolidate their IT infrastructure, through solutions that overcome performance issues caused by distance, distributed computing, and ever increasing amounts of data. As IT organisations embark on strategic initiatives to virtualise, consolidate and migrate workloads into cloud environments, users are moved farther from their data. Slow applications, slow file transfers and inefficient websites can negatively impact the performance and success of these initiatives. Riverbed transforms IT performance by providing solutions spanning WAN optimisation, storage delivery, application-aware network performance management, application performance management, application delivery controllers, web content optimisation (WCO), and cloud data protection. By providing the broadest portfolio of performance solutions that deliver anywhere, any-application optimisation, Riverbed enables organisations to increase productivity and efficiency, while enhancing business resilience and controlling costs.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jack Stanley .