Thursday 23 February 2012

Application Delivery Networking: Functions of application delivery controller

In this technology driven business environment, data centers have become the lifeline of every organization, irrespective of its size. The concept of electronic data storage and transfer has been prevalent since the birth of the computers. However, with the advent of technology, the size of the machines reduced drastically with an increase in computing powers. These developments like a chain reaction led to the wider use of the technology in the everyday functioning of large business houses and global organization, leading to use of technology driven machines in a networked environment.

Data centers, with their efficient computing services in a networked environment and a safe and secure storage system for the mission critical data were made up of large rooms or multiple floors of a building and housed servers, storage devices, telecom and application delivery networking systems. The application delivery network is nothing but a suit of technologies that ensures application availability, security and visibility throughout the network, irrespective of the location or device. Prevalent in most data centers catering to a global organization, such networking systems are a combination of wide area networking and application delivery controllers.

Application delivery controller also known as web switch or a content switch is loaded with a number of useful functions. As an advanced traffic management device in a networked environment, this helps to distribute specific applications to a number of geographically distant servers and sites. Being placed between the router or firewall and a web farm it also facilitates load balancing of the website traffic at times when there is a mix of applications over a wider network. Having evolved from layer 4-7 switches, the application delivery controllers facilitates content manipulation, advanced routing strategies and also monitors the configurable server health.

Though application delivery controller in all networking systems offer a number of features like compression, cache, connection multiplexing, application layer security, SSL offload, content switching along with server load balancing, the application delivery networking is being separated for a general network optimization and application specific optimization. Other functions that the ADC’s are capable of are TCP offload and acceleration capabilities in branch networks and integration of malware and DDOS protection on web application through firewall protection.

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