Going Green by Embracing ADC Virtualization

CIOs and IT managers today are in a constant struggle between two strongly opposing forces – on the one hand there is the need to expand the IT infrastructure to support a growing business, while on the other hand there is the constant lack in data center floor space and the need to cut operational costs such as electricity and cooling.

While the expansion of the IT infrastructure to support new business is unstoppable, there are ways to do so without necessarily throwing more hardware into the data center. One of the main options that exists for IT staff to expand the infrastructure while keeping costs down is server virtualization.

By virtualizing server hardware using technologies by vendors such as VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft, IT staff can consolidate 10, 15 or even 20 physical servers into one server running multiple virtual server instances (virtual machines). By consolidating these servers, IT staff can improve the utilization of their servers and free up the data center floor and rack space thus, greatly reducing power and cooling requirements of the data center – essentially making them a much greener business.

While server virtualization is the first thing which comes to mind when discussing virtualization within a data center, additional virtualization technologies have started to emerge in the past year. One of these new technologies is ADC (application delivery controller) virtualization. By using ADC (News - Alert) virtualization technologies, , IT organizations will need less ADC hardware to support the business’ ADC requirements thus, reducing operational costs of real estate, power, cooling and spare parts. For example, by consolidating 6 traditional ADC devices into 1 virtualized ADC device running 6 virtual ADC instances (vADCs), IT organizations can save up to 4200kWh of their power consumption requirements on a multiyear project.

When looking into ADC virtualization technologies, IT organizations should look for the following capabilities when choosing a vendor:

-          Ensure the ADC vendor has multiple virtualization options to choose from, whether it is an ADC provided as a virtual appliance (software-based ADC) which can run on the existing server virtualization infrastructure, or an ADC device which allows for the consolidation of multiple ADCs through virtualization.

-          Verify that the ADC solution supports server offloading capabilities such as SSL encryption/decryption, which when offloaded to the ADC, saves a lot in terms of the server's CPU and power consumption.

-          Ensure the ADC virtualization solution is designed to enable organizations to consolidate their ADC hardware devices without compromising the resiliency or performance predictability of their ADC services and eliminate the risks involved with the consolidation of ADC hardware – this can be achieved by ensuring complete fault, network and management isolation between the different virtual ADC instances.

-          Verify that a resource guarantee mechanism exists in the ADC virtualization solution, which will ensure that each virtual ADC instance is allocated within a dedicated resource for its operation. This way, every virtual instance can utilize only those resources for which it was specifically allocated, resulting in performance guaranty for each instance.

-          Ensure the ADC virtualization solution supports integration with the virtual data center management system and that it can be automatically attuned to correctly redirect traffic whenever virtual machines are moved within the data center or across data centers. This will, further allow for cost saving in a dynamic manner - by moving application workloads to the minimal set of servers or a cheaper location (“follow the moon”) while ensuring that the ADC is constantly in sync.

 IT organizations should ensure that through the consolidation of the hardware ADCS, they gain significant savings on cooling, power, etc. and thus, have clear results in terms of proof of costs savings and ROI

To summarize, through the use of ADC virtualization IT organizations can achieve the same business benefits provided by server virtualization within the application delivery layer. Such benefits include but are not limited to reduced power, rack space, data center floor space, and cooling requirements through the consolidation and virtualization of ADC devices – thus allowing the business to become even greener.

Amir Peles is Chief Technology Officer at Radware (News - Alert). To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin