Moving into the Fast Lane

As companies roll out browser-based applications and centralized servers, the market for application acceleration products continues to grow. With the ability to put an end to slow application response time now within reach, it’s no surprise that the sector has been heating up of late, with sales expected to reach $2.3 billion by 2009.

Application acceleration systems are a godsend to organizations that, after consolidating applications and servers at a central location, find their applications are unable to perform over low-latency, high-bandwidth networks. IDC calls the overall market ‘application networking’, and has divided the sector into two segments: application delivery controllers and WAN application delivery. “Data centre switching really relates to the server,” highlights Cindy Borovik, Program Director for IDC’s Datacenter Networks program. “The best way to look at this is to think of it as being like a bodyguard to the server infrastructure. It makes sure that the traffic reaching the server is clean and essentially protects it from a security perspective. It also enables the server infrastructure to scale as appropriately as possible. The WAN application delivery products deal more with the communications over the wide area network and what the traffic needs to do in order to be optimized for the WAN.”

Drivers

A number of factors are contributing to the growth in this sector. As branch offices expand, there is an increase in WAN traffic. However, this does cause some network issues. “We have reached a situation where just adding more bandwidth is not sufficient to enable the performance, reliability and the scale of the applications that enterprises are deploying,” says Borovik. “Previously, the end-user was either local to the server or you had sufficient bandwidth to deploy the application. Now, users are much more global and mobile than ever before. Essentially customers are re-architecting their networks, and application networking products are key to enabling this transformation.”

Considering the rise of enterprise mobility and dispersed workforces, and the fact that the need for IT resources in remote locations has become more critical, the cost of having different storage resources replicated across hundreds of different locations is reaching boiling point. According to Borovick, consolidating the data center is a critical first step. “Data center consolidation is not new,” she says. “But what is new is that the network can handle data center consolidation at a much faster pace. So instead of consolidating your data center from 20 down to 10, we are now seeing people consolidating their data center from 20 down to four and essentially having large-scale data centers in each region. However, the end-users at these remote locations don’t want to suffer in terms of performance. WAN application delivery products are enabling IT to meet the business need of consolidating their assets and increasing security, meeting regulatory requirements, reducing cost, but at the same time not sacrificing application performance.”

Making the right decision

Improving the performance of these business critical applications is imperative for today’s CIO. Borovik describes how WAN application delivery products, along with data center switching products, are like “Swiss army knives” for CIOs as they have such a diverse range of features. “CIO’s need to consider how they want their network to be architectured,” she advises. “They need to think about what applications they are deploying to remote mobile users and then how to use these products to adapt to this. For example, if you are in a situation where you are deploying VoIP then you want to make sure you’re network is ready. Maybe you are in a school district and have students using YouTube. If so, then you need to protect them from inappropriate content. Therefore, your first priority is security URL filtering and some application performance coupled with that. It does, therefore, really depend on who your users are and what your primary goal is. You have to look at your business and then you can apply these technologies in a flexible way to meet your priorities.”

In addition, when choosing a vendor Borovik has a few suggestions to make sure organizations make the right decision. She suggests looking at some level of vendor consolidation: “Customers should do this to avoid a situation where you are supporting six vendors for a particular product. It is very important to look at a) your application; b) the network you have currently deployed; c) the vendors who best fit your needs; and d) the platform that will give you both performance and flexibility. There are a number of good choices out there as the market is incredibly competitive.”

A particular implementation that has impressed Borovik took place in a company in Germany. Here, the company was in the middle of a data center consolation project. “Without deploying the data center switching products, the performance of their applications around the globe would have been unacceptable,” recalls Borovik. “They would have been in a situation where they would have lost revenue because their business partners would have refused to use their inventory system over the wider area. As they have data center switching and a reliable architecture, they will be able to make sure their business is up and running.”

Following the leaders

Currently, some of the most intriguing players in the field include Cisco, Riverbed and Juniper, all of whom offer solutions that are practical and suitable for many organizations. In a recent study by TheInfoPro, Cisco and Riverbed came out as the two most popular vendors and are establishing themselves as the market leaders. Half of the participants of the survey, which consisted of decision-makers from Fortune 1000 and midsize businesses, said they intended to use acceleration technologies in the next 12-15 months. According to the researchers, “Cisco has assumed the position of lead ‘in-plan’ vendor over Riverbed – by a nearly two-to-one margin – for enterprise organizations’ WAN data compression and acceleration technology needs. Packeteer, Expand Networks, Juniper, Blue Coat and F5 Networks were also mentioned as providers under consideration.”

Better consolidation is something that Borovik expects to see more of in the future. “Some of the major network players have already made acquisitions,” she says. “Cisco’s acquisition of Reactivity last week is an example of this. Cisco has made a number of acquisitions in this space and I think will continue to do so. We will continue to see this from other vendors too.”

Along with this, Borovik predicts a number of other trends that are going to take place over the next few years including an increase in customers re-architecturing their networks and how there will be a massive change in traffic patterns. “This has dictated change in the product itself,” she explains. “This is why we are predicting the anticipated continuing success of WAN application both directly sold to the enterprise, but also used by the service providers themselves to help with the delivery of traffic. So, with traffic patterns changing we have continued migration to VoIP. Looking ahead, a potential driver is the increase in storage traffic over the Ethernet network. This type of traffic demands a new type of reliability and predictability. Coupled with this is the continued migration to and reliance on the web-based applications of the enterprise.”

Her final prediction is that the market will continue to keep going up over the next 12-18 months, growing to about $930 million. “We are predicting over 10 percent growth year by year,” she enthuses.

“We have reached a situation where just adding more bandwidth is not sufficient to enable the performance, reliability and the scale of the applications that enterprises are deploying”