Radware virtualises application delivery appliances

ADC-VX is aimed at customers wanting to consolidate application delivery appliances in the datacentre

Radware has unveiled a strategy to provide scalable application delivery services within highly virtualised datacentre environments, with the first available product taking the form of a dedicated hypervisor to virtualise application delivery controllers (ADCs).

Radware's Virtual Application Delivery Infrastructure (Vadi) is designed to separate ADCs from the underlying compute resources, in the same way that server virtualisation decouples server instances from the underlying system hardware.

The first fruit of this strategy is ADC-VX, a specialist hypervisor for running multiple virtual ADC instances on dedicated ADC hardware, namely Radware's OnDemand Switch platforms.

This will be joined in the next 12 months by a dedicated ADC appliance running a single virtual ADC instance, plus a software ADC virtual appliance that can run on virtual server infrastructure.

ADCs are designed to sit in front of application servers and web servers in datacentres and perform load balancing, security and optimisation of application delivery.

In this respect, Radware is competing against Citrix's Netscaler, which is already available as a hardware network appliance and a virtual appliance for Xen and VMware environments.

However, Radware is looking beyond this with an approach that offers greater flexibility and scalability, according to Sharon Trachtman, vice president of global marketing at the firm.

"So far in the industry we have had pure hardware ADCs or virtualised appliances on generic server platforms. Vadi is unique in offering three form factors," she said.

The third form factor is ADC-VX, a hypervisor for Radware's existing OnDemand appliances that partitions each device into two or more virtual instances with separate resources, configuration and management, carefully isolated from each other so that a fault in one will not affect any of the other virtual ADCs.

Customers will be able to mix and match the three form factors, depending on their requirements for service level agreements, performance, and availability, Trachtman said.

"ADC-VX is aimed at customers who want to consolidate the number of ADC hardware boxes they need in their datacentre, but keep flexibility for future expansion," she said.

Radware expects enterprise customers to operate a mixture of all three formats, while cloud providers are expected to plump for the soft ADC option, which will support virtual appliances running atop VMware infrastructure.

The company also announced Vadi Services, a set of services tailored for application delivery, along with an Open API and plug-ins for integrating with standard orchestration and provisioning systems.

ADC-VX is available now as a software upgrade for existing Radware customers, and comes with licences for two virtual ADC instances. Customers will be able to purchase licenses for extra instances in blocks of five and above.