Application Delivery Solution Ensure Availability, Performance and Security of Mission-critical Applications in the Physical and Virtual Data Center - Whitepaper
Table of Contents Executive Summary... 3 Application Delivery On-Going Challenges... 3 Availability Challenges... 3 Performance Challenges... 3 Security Challenges... 4 Virtualization Challenges... 4 Scalability Challenges... 4 Application Operational Complexity... 4 Connectivity Challenges... 5 Radware Application Delivery Solution... 5 Ensuring 24x7 Application Availability... 5 Faster Application Response Time and Server Offloading... 6 Application Availability Even When Under Attack... 6 ADC Virtualization and Consolidation... 7 Ultimate On-Demand Scalability... 8 Application-Smart ADC with AppShape Technology... 9 High Port Density with 10GE Connectivity... 9 Summary... 10 Smart Network. Smart Business. 2
Executive Summary Today s data center challenges not only span the classic needs for application availability, performance and security. The adoption of data center virtualization ecosystems, keeping in-sync with the data center s dynamic changes, being truly aware of deployed business applications, the need to scale in a cost-effective manner and lowering costs all require a new class of Application Delivery Controller (ADC). Radware s application delivery solution delivers a complete set of services to ensure the availability, performance and security of the mission-critical applications in the physical and virtual data center. By leveraging Radware s separate ADC service per application and the AppShape technology, the solution provides a broad set of application-aware capabilities including load balancing, integrated application acceleration, security protection, ADC virtualization and disaster recovery (DR). Coupled with Radware s on-demand infrastructure approach, it enables simplified operations and delivers maximal business value and faster ROI while lowering TCO. Application Delivery On-Going Challenges Business productivity, profitability and competitiveness depend on reliable, secure, optimal, and agile delivery of business applications. Business availability and user productivity are hindered by unexpected downtimes, sluggish performance of applications, and the disruptive effects of security breaches on the infrastructure, which may also compromise confidential and sensitive data. Data center virtualization adoption adds more simplicity and agility to the IT operations, but at the same time creates new challenges that need to be addressed. Availability Challenges Business reputation, productivity and profitability depend on 24X7 business application and Web site/portal availability. The financial implications of downtime and hence lost user transactions, due to application/hardware failures or ISP outages, can account for up to 3.6% of annual revenues, which roughly equates to about $900,000 for a small to medium-sized enterprise and could run into several millions of dollars for larger enterprises. From a customer-facing or partner-facing point of view, the organization s reputation, revenue-generating services and productivity are directly impacted by its ability to ensure its availability to its employees, clients and partners. This challenge becomes even more critical during seasonal peaks such as end of quarter, online holiday shopping, etc. In other words, at times where many users continuously use an online business or when employees use mission-critical, internal business applications the business must ensure that they are always available. Performance Challenges As a result of growing workforce mobility and data center consolidation, there is an increase in the number of remote users who traverse WAN/wireless/cellular networks to access mission-critical applications. In addition, with the increased usage of chatty protocols and the growing popularity of complex business applications that use larger transactions, there is increased pressure on the network, and data center servers are becoming highly utilized, without being able to process all requests in a timely fashion, at all times. Productivity and satisfaction levels of customers and partners are severely hampered by long latencies, protocol chattiness, and larger transaction volume. Performance degradation translates into an annual loss of approximately $260,000 in revenue and productivity for a medium-sized enterprise. Not being able to provide the sufficient capacity required increases the risk of users abandoning the service, weakening the competitive position of the online business. Smart Network. Smart Business. 3
Security Challenges As enterprises expose more applications and services to employees, customers, and business partners, the risk of security breaches increases. According to a CSI Survey, 46% of respondents stated that their organizations experienced one or more types of security incidents in the past 12 months. In addition, almost one-fifth of those respondents further said they had suffered a targeted attack, defined as a malware attack aimed exclusively at their organization or at organizations within a small subset of the general population. These security breaches inflict annual losses ranging from $100K in the mid-sized enterprise to several million dollars in large enterprises. These attacks compromise the availability and performance of your business, as well as the integrity of your sensitive data, damaging your business reputation and your ability to execute. Virtualization Challenges Deploying virtualized data centers benefits in direct cost reduction by reducing the number of servers, network equipment and the cost associated with operating them. At the same time, it also increases the 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 applications in a fully-virtualized or hybrid data center creates new, significant challenges from an application delivery viewpoint. The virtual data center uses a single, consolidated virtualization infrastructure which enables deploying multiple resources on-the-fly, so that adding or removing applications takes place dynamically and quickly. As the ADC is a critical element of the network infrastructure, it must play an active role in the virtualization ecosystem to ensure the resilience and efficiency of virtualized applications while being synchronized with these dynamic changes at all times. These changes might include adding a new VM to a virtual application cluster, removing it from the application cluster, or provisioning a new critical application. Left unchecked, virtual application availability and performance could suffer significant degradation. In addition, deploying an application delivery solution in multi-application environments be it a virtualized, hybrid 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. Finally, virtualizing the ADC imposes potential risk as the application SLA might be compromised due to several ADC services that utilize shared resources. Scalability Challenges In today s global business landscape, data center infrastructure and applications are ever-changing; new applications are rolled-out, more users use the applications and the overall throughput, transactions and SSL connections capacity increase. Therefore it is essential to standardize on a solution that addresses not only today s requirements, but also tomorrow s, in the most cost-effective manner and with minimal hardware modifications. In addition, the data center s local resources might be exhausted in extreme situations such as flash crowd, Cyber Friday, holiday promotions, enter of quarter and more. In such cases, it is essential that the data center will be able to use additional resources from a secondary data center or from the cloud. Application Operational Complexity From an application viewpoint, IT managers experience increased hassle, complexity and costs in managing the ADC services for these applications in a simple, risk-free fashion through their entire lifecycle. New application rollout as well as on-going application configuration changes must be manually aligned on the ADC respectively, while Smart Network. Smart Business. 4
layer 4-7 policies, reports and logs are not application-specific. In other words, most ADCs today lack applicationawareness and treat any application in a generic fashion making their operation less intuitive and more complex. Moreover, application mobility tasks are typically cumbersome as they involve going through many configuration steps and require time and effort, reducing agility and increasing costs. Connectivity Challenges Today s data centers are gradually migrating to adopt various next-generation technologies. One of the fast changing area is the data center s core switching. While most organizations today use 1GE connectivity in their core switches, next-generation switches that employ 10GE connectivity are seen more often. This shift affects the surrounding network infrastructure elements that need to be continuously connected to the core switching. In particular, the application delivery controllers must be capable of connecting to both the plain old 1GE switches as well as to next-generation 10GE switches, without forcing customers to replace the hardware in order to reduce CAPEX and OPEX. In addition, businesses become more complex in terms of more applications, more departments and more application rollout stages. Therefore, the ADC must be capable of supporting more server farms and more physical networks, and is required to provide flexible connectivity. Radware Application Delivery Solution Radware s application delivery solution delivers a complete set of services to ensure the availability, performance and security of the mission-critical applications in the data center. Ensuring 24x7 Application Availability Radware application delivery solution ensures absolute uptime and effective disaster recovery (DR) for local and globally dispersed applications at all times. By leveraging advanced health checks, traffic redirection, persistency and content modifications capabilities, it guarantees transaction completion with a resilient solution that performs real-time identification and bypassing of any faulty element (such as application failure, server failure, server farm failure and even site failure) along the transaction path. The solution fully supports IPv6 and it functions as a full IPv4/6 gateway, enabling to transparently load balance applications over IPv4 or IPv6 networks with no need to modify the applications. In addition, Radware s global server load balancing (GSLB) service ensures the global availability of all applications whether they are based on DNS or not. Radware s application delivery solution s capabilities that improve application availability include: Health Monitoring - eliminates business loss due to IT failures via transaction filature bypassing Traffic Redirection - guarantees highest SLAs by ensuring that the best server always serves client requests while eliminating server overload Global Server Load Balancing enables business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) for all users, at any place, at all times. Hence it guarantees highest SLA and best quality of experience (QoE) to users for globally-deployed services Link High-Availability facilitates reliable, scalable, low-cost site connectivity while optimizing application end-to-end response time Full Redundancy - Active-Active or Active-Passive Device redundancy ensures high-availability to reduce service interruptions and guarantee service uptime while lowering TCO Smart Network. Smart Business. 5
Faster Application Response Time and Server Offloading Radware s application delivery solution s integrated application acceleration features are designed to accelerate application response time and ensure best application SLA while offloading server processing. By offloading processor intensive operations, such as SSL, from the servers, it frees the servers CPUs to handle additional requests, which results in reduced application servers hardware and lower CAPEX. Moreover, the bandwidth management service aligns the utilization of network resources with business objectives to guarantee SLA. In addition, Radware s application delivery solution offers the best performance in any layer 4-7 metric versus the competition. As a result, it enables enterprises to address traffic growth, ensure fast application response time and meet application SLA in the 1-80Gbps throughput range - at all times. Radware certifies its solution with leading business applications from vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, VMware and more, and publishes detailed performance testing 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%. Radware s application delivery solution s capabilities that shorten application response time and offload server processing include: SSL Offloading - maximizes server infrastructure investments by offloading server processing. Hence it creates major savings on server CAPEX, as less servers can serve more content to more users HTTP Multiplexing - reduces the number of servers required via server connection reduction, to reduce server CAPEX Caching enables faster application response time by delivering Web objects directly to the browser. In addition, it also reduces server CAPEX through offloading server processing Web Compression - Increase savings on OPEX by reducing traffic volumes and bandwidth costs. in addition, it also improves QoE and increase end-user and employee productivity TCP Optimization - improves QoE and increase end-user and employee satisfaction by reducing protocol chattiness Bandwidth Management enables to meet application SLA based on per device, user, location or application. It also optimizes network usage and reduce costs by aligning network allocation with business priorities Optimized XML Processing - offloads servers through optimized XML processing, which results in server CAPEX reduction Application Availability Even When Under Attack Radware application delivery solution ensures undisrupted business continuity and full compliance by protecting against emerging network attacks and application vulnerability exploitation. The solution s broad security capabilities extend to Denial of Service (DoS) protection, Web Application Firewall (WAF), XML/Web Services threat protection and stateful access control (ACL). This consolidation of best-of-breed security technologies provides full compliance, reporting and auditing. In addition, it results in significant CAPEX by eliminating the need to deploy standalone point-solutions. Radware s application delivery solution s capabilities that secure applications and enable compliance include: Denial of Service (DoS) Protection - ensures business up-time even under heavy attacks through mitigating various flood attacks, packet anomalies and DoS tools Web Application Firewall (WAF) - guarantees business continuity of Web-enabled applications and their full compliance Smart Network. Smart Business. 6
XML and Web Services Security - ensures the continuity and availability of business processes that rely on Web Services Compliance, Reporting and Auditing - real-time visibility into network wide security threats enabling compliance and forensics Stateful Access Control - increases application resiliency and guarantee proper, continuous operation by enforcing various access policies ADC Virtualization and Consolidation ADC Virtualization with Radware s Virtual Application Delivery Infrastructure ADC-VX, part of Radware s Virtual Application Delivery Infrastructure (VADI) strategy, is the industry-first ADC virtualization and consolidation platform based on a specialized ADC hypervisor. ADC-VX is built on a unique architecture that virtualizes the resources of Radware ADC platform including CPU, memory, network and acceleration resources. This specialized hypervisor runs virtual ADC instances (vadc) where each delivers full ADC functionality. Each virtual ADC instance contains a complete and separated environment of resources, OS, configurations and management. ADC-VX is the ultimate ADC consolidation platform, enabling organizations to consolidate their ADC hardware devices without compromising resiliency or performance predictability of their ADC services. Radware s ADC-VX offers the highest consolidation ratio in the industry, starting with 1Gbps of throughput capacity with up to 480 ADC services on a single device applying to environments from any size. This highest consolidation ratio results in higher savings of hardware and operational expenses as well as faster ROI compared to any other consolidation solution in the industry. vadc per Application Approach Thanks to the high vadcs density and its wide throughput range (1Gbps to 80Gbps), organizations can adopt an innovative and very cost effective deployment model of their ADCs named vadc per Application. By allocating a separate, fully-isolated vadc instance for each application, businesses can maximize application availability thanks to fault isolation mechanism and to meet application SLA requirement with a resource reservation mechanism. Moreover, this deployment model simplifies operations by maintaining a separate, simpler configuration file per each application, and increases business agility thanks to fast roll out of new vadcs and applications. With vadc per application, the cost of application delivery is significantly reduced compared to traditional ADC deployment models. Radware s separate vadc per application approach advantages are listed in the following table: Benefits Shared ADC Multiple Dedicated ADCs Radware ADC Resiliency SLA Agility Operations Scalability Cost Fault isolation between applications Private & guaranteed resources per application Fast & simple application rollout Configuration, troubleshooting, software upgrades Application centric visibility Cost effectively add new application & capacity Reduced number of ADC appliances Reduced rack space, power, cooling & service costs Table 1: Radware s ADC Advantages vs. Legacy ADC Smart Network. Smart Business. 7
Automatic Synchronization of Virtual Infrastructure Configuration Changes Radware application delivery solution ensures that any change in the virtual infrastructure, that might impact the ADC configuration, is automatically synchronized with the ADC in real-time, without manual configuration of the ADC or coding any complex scripts. Using Radware s ADC solution, IT administrators can easily map a cluster of VMs that define a service in the virtual environment to its corresponding ADC configuration. For instance, once a new VM is added to the virtual service cluster, the ADC is automatically reconfigured in real-time, so that the respective server is added to the service farm or group accordingly. Therefore, Radware ADC solution eliminates the need for frequent manual configuration updates to the ADC, reduces on-going coordination between network and server teams and eliminates scripting and manual configuration of the virtual environment. Ultimate On-Demand Scalability Pay-as-you-Grow Approach Radware application delivery solution leverages the company on demand infrastructure approach, which delivers breakthrough performance and superior scalability to meet evolving network and business requirements. Based on its on-demand, pay-as-you-grow approach, no forklift upgrade nor device restart - are required even when new business requirements arise, helping companies to guarantee short-term and long-term savings on CAPEX and OPEX for full investment protection. It enables customers to pay for the exact capacity currently required, while allowing them to add additional vadc instances, scale the throughput capacity, add more application-aware services or application acceleration services on demand, and even scale out of the data center to meet new or changing application and infrastructure needs. Radware ADC solution enables to scale from 1Gbps up to 80Gbps using only three platforms, ensuring that each customer can start at a point that best suits their needs and leaving room to scale, as follows: Scale 1-16Gbps with up to 24 vadc instances Scale 8-20Gbps with up to 28 vadc instances Scale 20-80Gbps with up to 480 vadc instances Radware s Pay-as-you-Grow approach business benefits: Eliminate overspending on the initial required solution Overcome capacity planning challenges and reduce risk Eliminate large-scale upgrade projects that are required every time you max out the capacity of your switches Enable to rollout new applications with no additional hardware by simply adding more vadcs, throughput or services No need to design, test, stage, install and debug a new hardware device Platform Longevity Guarantee Introducing a platform into a data center is a long and costly process that involves evaluation, certification, development, deployment and training. Forklift upgrade of certified products results in an extremely expensive process and affects IT productivity. Radware s 5-year platform longevity guarantee allows extending the project lifetime with faster ROI. Radware s On Demand approach combined with the platform longevity guarantee enables customers to achieve full business benefits with CAPEX and OPEX savings over time. Smart Network. Smart Business. 8
Application-Smart ADC with AppShape Technology Radware s AppShape technology enables the transformation into an Application-Smart ADC and is designed to accelerate, ease and optimize application deployment on the ADC. With Radware s AppShape, each ADC service is tailored to and aware of a specific business application (such as SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and more). Hence, the ADC can be managed from an application-oriented perspective which extends to applicationspecific configuration templates, reports, logs and compliance resulting in fast application roll-out and simplified application management. In addition, Radware s AppShape simplifies operations through auto-discovery of application resources changes and automatically synchronizing them to the ADC with no human intervention, increasing business agility and reducing time, risk and costs. Using AppShape, Radware application delivery solution is best tuned to provide the maximum value for each business critical application in terms of availability, performance and security. SIEBEL CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT E-BUSINESS SUITE Application-Smart ADC Figure 1: Application Awareness via Radware s AppShape Technology High Port Density with 10GE Connectivity Radware ADC platforms share a common design philosophy: develop ADCs that satisfy today s data center needs and also cater to emerging technologies; and design systems to provide a long an useful lifetime of service. Radware ADC platforms feature high port density which enables versatile connectivity options, enabling each ADC to connect directly to more server farms or to ensure the physical separation of different networks without the need for intermediate switches. The result is simplified network architectures with fewer devices, reduced electrical and cooling costs, less rack space leading to greater savings. Smart Network. Smart Business. 9
In addition, Radware ADC platforms offer 10GE ports, so that connecting to existing 1GE-interface switches as well as to next-generation 10GE-interface switches is straightforward. As core switching fabric is refreshed over the next few years, Radware ADC will continue to play well with its neighbors for best investment protection. Summary Today s data center challenges not only span the classic needs for application availability, performance and security. The adoption of data center virtualization ecosystems, keeping in-sync with the data center s dynamic changes, being able to connect to current and future switches, being truly aware of deployed business applications, the need to scale in a cost-effective manner and lowering costs all require a new class of ADC. Radware s application delivery controller (ADC) solution is the most future-proof solution on the market, delivering a complete set of services to ensure the availability, performance and security of the mission-critical applications in the physical and virtual data center. By leveraging Radware s separate ADC service per application and the AppShape technology, the solution provides a broad set of application-aware capabilities including load balancing, integrated application acceleration, security protection, ADC virtualization and disaster recovery (DR). Coupled with Radware s on-demand infrastructure approach and flexible connectivity options, it enables simplified operations and delivers maximal business value and faster ROI while lowering TCO. 2012 Radware, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Radware and all other Radware product and service names are registered trademarks of Radware in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks and names are the property of their respective owners. Smart Network. Smart Business. 10 PRD-ADC-Solution-WP-03-2012/02-US