A Cloud-Y But Bright Future For Application Delivery Networking

May 26, 2021

You may have noticed a recent flurry of activity from Array centered around cloud initiatives. Within the past two months, we’ve announced availability of our vAPV virtual application delivery controller on both the AWS Marketplace, and the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. These public cloud offerings provide a great deal of flexibility, often at a very reasonable cost, to augment or replace existing premise-based datacenter hardware.

A third announcement, “Array Networks and Nutanix Partner to Provide Virtual Application Delivery on Hyper-Converged Systems,” highlights yet another option Array is providing for datacenter managers who seek the many benefits of moving to Web-scale, hyperconverged infrastructure .

Hyperconverged infrastructure makes a great deal of sense for many medium- to large-sized organizations. Space and power requirements can be reduced by around 75%, a major savings in terms of rackspace- and OPEX-constrained organizations. The all-in-one design of the Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform, combining storage, compute and networking in one, also represents a major reduction in management overhead, while driving simplicity to the data center.

The heart of any datacenter operation, however, is less about “what it is” than “what it can do for me.” The latter revolves around applications – many of which are not cloud-enabled – such as Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, Oracle, SAP and similar business-critical tools.

These vital applications, which serve and promote productivity within an organization, need to be highly available, secure, and with rock-solid performance in order to achieve the gains needed to not just to survive, but to thrive in this global economy.

That’s where application delivery controllers shine.

By intelligently load balancing production traffic across multiple servers either locally or globally, Array’s vAPV application delivery controllers assure performance and availability – even if a server is down or offline for maintenance. Multi-layer security is provided through a proprietary SSL stack (which has proved immune to the vast majority of OpenSSL bugs), as well as our WebWall® application security suite and other means.

In addition, Array’s dedicated APV Series ADC appliances can be used to front-end Nutanix if greater levels of SSL transaction processing or compute-intensive tasks are needed. Working in conjunction with or in place of Array vAPV virtual application delivery controllers, the APV Series physical appliances offload SSL processing, reducing server load and freeing processing capacity for other tasks.

It should be noted that we’ve worked closely with many of the largest business application providers to develop detailed deployment guides to assist in rolling out ADCs to support performance, availability and secure access to these mission-critical applications.

We’ve also worked closely with Nutanix to ensure interoperability and interworking between our respective platforms, and we’ve recently completed testing on Nutanix’s low cost, KVM-based Acropolis hypervisor (AHV). When paired with Array’s application delivery controllers, which are typically 40% (or more) less than comparable ADCs, this combination offers a great balance of performance, features and flexibility and a much lower price-point.

Array’s new cloud-y options offer a wide range of flexibility for any network manager looking to incorporate a cloud-based strategy. If you’re looking specifically at moving to a Nutanix-based private or hybrid cloud infrastructure, learn more about Array’s application delivery networking solutions for Nutanix on our hyperconverged infrastructure page, or our APV Series overview page.

Roland Hsu