For countless companies, Hurricane Irene provided a chance for IT firms to test the effectiveness of their disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

First and foremost, companies needed to ensure continuous data center services, and preliminary evidence seems to indicate they succeeded.  The centers themselves were well-protected from the elements; many, for example, are designed with raised floors to minimize flood damage.  At the same time, plans to back-up data offsite went off without a hitch.  As a result, a majority of east coast data centers operated seamlessly, without any major disruption to customers.

The only major bit of disconcerting news comes from Vermont, where serious flooding affected the state’s website and damaged hardware.

Disaster preparedness and recovery is, of course, predicated on the sound execution of technology to enable data back-up and replication.  However, many companies experience the most severe failure points in the areas of process management.  For example, companies may fail to institute a coherent chain of command to enable quick decision-making.  They may also fail to prioritize the data that may be at risk, taking a costly “one-size fits all” approach.

 The principles and benefits of application server virtualization are well understood. At the very least, the consolidation of physical resources can drive significant capital and operational expenditure savings. Although the scope of virtualization programs vary between different organizations, most businesses are trying to improve the efficiency, agility and the resilience of their data centers - in addition to driving for greater cost savings.

In order to truly profit from the benefits derived from the virtual data center, a complete architecture redesign of all layers of the data center is needed. The first layer is virtualization and consolidation of the server and storage infrastructure. According to recent surveys, most organizations have deployed server virtualization but have not yet virtualized 100% of their environment, creating hybrid environments of dedicated and virtualized servers.

The second layer is the virtualization and consolidation of network and infrastructure hardware and the transition from a siloed architecture to a flatter, less tiered virtualized network design. Infrastructure virtualization and consolidation has a major impact on the role of the Application Delivery Controller. In the virtualized data center, new services can deployed quickly and configuration changes addressed instantly. To avoid negating the benefits of virtual server technology, ADC resources should also be able  to be provisioned instantaneously; without the need for protracted physical equipment deployment and configuration. Creating a virtualized Application Delivery infrastructure layer allows alignment of the Application Delivery services with the frequent changes in the virtualized data center, and also provides each application with an Application Delivery service matching its SLA and performance predictability needs.

The shift from siloed and sprawled data centers designs to consolidated, flatter architectures has placed new requirements on Application Delivery Controllers. Radware has addressed the need with its new Virtualized Application Delivery Infrastructure strategy; enabling the consolidation and virtualization of Application Delivery services as an integral part of the virtual data center architecture, its orchestration and provisioning systems. It’s Application Delivery Controller product line has been transformed so that virtual ADC instances (vADCs) now can run on top of specialized or general purpose computing resources. Three different form factors are supported:

i. Dedicated ADC – a dedicated physical ADC device running a single vADC

ii. ADC-VX – multiple vADCs running on top of a specialized ADC hypervisor and dedicated ADC hardware

iii. Soft ADC - vADC instances running as virtual appliances on general hardware

ADCs play a special role in the data center; they ensure the performance and quality of experience of applications and, as such, must demonstrate highly predictable performance, have its own dedicated and isolated resources. Radware’s ADC-VX product delivers the best of both the virtual and physical world’s; the financial and architectural benefits of platform consolidation and virtualization but with the predictable performance and resiliency of physical units.

As with server consolidation, ADC consolidation can achieve significant cost savings. Users of virtualized ADC-VX technology can expect to see total cost of ownerships savings of over 30% compared to physical ADC implementations.

Radware’s ADC-VX brings increased flexibility and agility to the virtualized data center by providing full virtualization of the application delivery services, while meeting application SLA requirements, providing predictable performance and reducing risks associated with physical-to-virtualization migrations. With ADC-VX, for the first time, ADC services are fully virtualized and offer the same level of agility as all other virtual elements in the virtualized data center.

A successful and scalable cloud-ready data center network must do four things:

 Simplify.  By reducing as much network complexities and virtualizing.

 Share.     Cloud-ready data centers requires an increase in network resources to be allocated, expanded, and re-allocated efficiently.  Allowing for this natural progression, means less hardware more sharing.

 Secure.   To enhance your overall simplification strategy, security services can also should be consolidated and virtualized. This approach enhances the flexibility and efficiency for the entire data center security solution. Data center security services such as application-aware denial of service, firewall, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and VPN can consolidated on a security platform to provide the flexibility and efficiency required to dynamically assign resources to the services.  By adhering to industry standards you can minimize risk and speed time to implementation when configuring security solutions for the cloud-ready data center.                                                                                                  

Automate. By standardizing on platforms and even more importantly operating systems, you can automate most management tasks and processes across the network.  Many solutions are offered as point products and don’t work efficiently together thus creating more work.  Your strategy should also involve reducing management complexities.