Highest ADC Density, Performance: Application Delivery Partitions
The proliferation of applications, services and mobile clients, coupled with user demands for a better experience with guaranteed availability, is driving the need for web hosting providers, enterprises and service providers to leverage ADCs to optimize application delivery. At the same time, efficient data center growth and simplifying your ADC footprint are imperative — in essence, you need more bang for your ADC buck.
But the legacy ADC game is dogged by a dilemma: do you plunk down the cash to buy more appliances to achieve the higher density necessary to support all your apps along with the required performance and watch your TCO go through the roof? Or do you opt to keep your budget in check and chug along inefficiently?
It’s a difficult choice, and one that some ADC vendors force you to make. With a multi-tenant Application Delivery Controller (ADC) with A10 Application Delivery Partitions (ADPs), however, you get the highest multi-tenant density and best performance of any ADC coupled with the lowest cost per partition. It’s the best of both worlds: high tenant density and cost efficiency.
How do ADPs work?
ADPs utilize virtualization technology within A10 Thunder and vThunder ADC appliances to create multiple partitions on a single A10 platform. Each partition supports Layer 3 virtualization to provide strong isolation from one partition to the next to deliver ultra-high density and high performance.
If you’re undergoing an ADC refresh and looking to break free from inefficient and unreliable legacy boxes, ADPs can give you a partition density boost that is an essential component to supporting hundreds of apps. With ADPs, a single Thunder ADC appliance can deliver more than 1,000 partitions, and expand to over 8,000 in a Virtual Chassis System (VCS) cluster. And because A10’s ADPs don’t use a hypervisor, performance is divided according to the required number of partitions without your applications having to suffer the third-party software performance tax.
App-specific policies
You may have hundreds of apps running inside your operations, and you need a way to granularly provide app-specific ADC policies to most, or perhaps all, of your apps; policies that can be fine-tuned to that particular application. But having one ADC appliance per application is neither feasible nor practical. ADCs with multi-tenant support enable you to add a unique policy per app. With ADPs, you can individually configure an app-specific policy to more than 1,000 apps using a single appliance, allowing each app to be optimized irrespective of all the others, which eliminates the one-size-fits-all approach most commonly used in the ADC market. With A10, you can individually configure partitions to optimize a specific set of applications and users by having a unique set of ADC processing rules for each.
Built on ACOS
ADPs are built on A10’s scalable Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) and comprise discrete computing elements that efficiently and securely segment and isolate each ADC partition, which features:
- Administrative resources for granular access controls, including roles, users and privileges
- System resources through which consumable resources are allocated per partition including the number of concurrent sessions of each partition, along with Layer 4 connections per second per partition
- Network resources such as network interfaces, VLANs, IP addresses and dynamic routing, along with separate Layer 3 networking resources defined per partitions
- Application resources which includes real servers, virtual servers and templates, and separate application Virtual IP Address and Layer 7 aFleX TCL scripting rules for deep packet inspection and traffic adjustment
For Layer 3 Virtualization, you can use the same IP address ranges to ensure the multi-tenant data center architecture has the same flexibility as a separately deployed device, meaning you can choose for each ADP to have the same IP addresses defined.
ADP use cases
Any type of organization can use ADPs to drive operational efficiency. For example, Subaru used ADPs to consolidate their enterprise environment and lower TCO by combining internal applications and web properties in a single ADC deployment. And Peak Hosting reduced its TCO and differentiated its cloud and hosting services by offering full ADC functionality and management to customers. ADPs enabled Peak to eliminate the need to buy unique ADCs for each customer while still giving customers full control over their application environments.
ADPs in the A10 Thunder ADC platforms arm you for efficiency and simplicity. They give you, your organization and your applications a straightforward method to achieve higher density and higher performance multi-tenant ADCs. You can reduce the number of ADC units required without paying the hypervisor performance penalty and simultaneously reduce management complexity and simplify your ADC footprint.
Organizations can also use ADPs for public cloud or private cloud enablement and to improve overall data center efficiency.
Time for an ADC refresh? Ready to experience high density and high performance ADC multi-tenancy without breaking the bank? Start your ADC refresh today.
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