What happens when you start up your laptop and open your e-mail? There's a spinning wheel while everything creeps into place.
Now extend that spinning wheel across your whole organization, and to business-critical applications such as Oracle or SAP. That adds up to a lot of time lost—as well as frustration.
Customer-facing applications, such as online commerce sites or order tracking systems, face similar problems. If pages are slow to load, or the site fails at a critical moment, your customers will simply click away to a competitor’s site.
That means losing money, productivity, and customers.
A VIRTUAL APPLIANCE BEATS LIMITATIONS
Until now, IT teams have used Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) to boost application performance. These are typically physical appliances that manage how bandwidth is allocated across the network in a process known as load balancing.
At times of peak demand, ADCs assign more bandwidth to the right applications and Web pages. The trouble is, the business landscape is very different to how it was just a few years ago.
Virtualization has transformed the way data centers and applications are managed, and it’s now having the same impact on networks, by providing more flexibility over how application resources can be used to support the rapid growth in customer transactions.
The cloud, mobile workers, Big Data, and the rise of video conferencing mean that networks must accommodate much higher volumes of traffic—and complex usage patterns that are harder to manage.
Conventional ADCs don’t offer the flexibility needed to cope with this kind of traffic. However, virtualized ADCs give you the versatility and automation you need.
A NEW APPROACH TO NETWORKING
Virtualization is one of the key factors driving the evolution of the New IP. This new approach to networking is all about becoming more open, secure, agile, and reliable—in line with the needs of businesses that are increasingly technology-driven.
Virtualization is already widely used in data centers, because it saves on hardware costs, reduces device footprint, and increases flexibility. It makes the whole business infrastructure more agile and adaptable.
Virtualized ADCs, such as the Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager, offer the same benefits of lower CapEx and OpEx—along with agility and flexibility.
Instead of dealing mainly with data traffic peaks and troughs, vADCs can continually monitor how applications and Web-based services are being used—adjusting bandwidth and performance automatically. It means everything can perform at the best possible level, including customer-facing applications and Web sites.
TODAY, ALMOST EVERYTHING RUNS ON APPLICATIONS
For users—and your customers—it’s really about the speed at which an application responds when you ask it to do something.
For the IT department, there is a wealth of additional benefits. vADCs make it easier and less costly to deploy new applications, and they help maximize the value of virtualized servers.
But ultimately, vADCs matter because almost everything today runs on applications. Production, project management, sales management, financial control, customer service—they all benefit from the acceleration delivered by vADCs. And that gives you faster innovation, faster service delivery, and faster time-to-value.
Follow this link to a Brocade infographic that will tell you more about the business case for vADCs.
