A combination of inputs forced this blog post from me.
I read with real interest the Citrix release re VPX, their new (very new, just a preview) Software Application Delivery Controller. Our very own Owen Garrett’s response says a lot of what I would have said on the subject.
At about the same time as this release was hitting the streets (or should that be Tweets?), we were having a conversation in the office about the viability of open source or commercial software network infrastructure.
Obviously we were aware that it is possible, what was of more interest was the capability of the products that was our interest. On the security front, software was pretty much where the products started, and only later in the evolution of the space did the appliances start to appear. Now we have come round to the software products leading from the front again. The number and range of firewalls and VPNs alone is quite astounding.
There are now also commercial and open source routers, Matthew Nickasch over on the NetworkWorld site talks about these. What we are seeing is the coming of age of software products in the spaces once ruled by the hardware appliance. This movement is driven, in the main, by just how capable commodity hardware has become. The old proprietary appliance versus software arguments can surely now be put to bed.
In test after test, and customer quote after quote, we hear the same thing, that software can achieve the same performance as the appliance but (and here’s the important bit) at a fraction of the price (here’s a typical Zeus example).
Yes, the price issue.
Obviously the present economic state of the whole World, makes virtually every organisation somewhat more price sensitive than they may have been in the past. The price/performance double whammy is driving customers into the open arms of the software vendors. Here is our version of that particular story.
Analysts are also realising what is happening in these markets. In the market place that Zeus operate in, Gartner Research’s Joe Skorupa has been recent quoted as saying "SoftADCs will be an important component of the ADC market, serving customers from small to midsize enterprises, where price is critical, to large enterprise and cloud data centers, where flexibility and agility are paramount,". We will be watching this space with increased interest : )
Citrix, as a major software vendor, were always favourite to create a software version of their Netscaler products (especially with their virtualisation business). However, they seem to have been a little worried about killing the golden-egg-laying-goose and have pulled back slightly. How heavily Citrix will push their software version and with what success remains to be seen.
What is certain is that Virtualization technology is revolutionizing the legacy server-centric datacenter, and Cloud Computing (outsourced virtualization) promises to build on this further to deliver huge cost savings in both capital and operational expenditure. As organizations look to embrace the benefits that Virtualization can bring to their datacenter, software is really the only option as you move forward.
This diagram below demonstrates the evolutionary process of moving from physical hardware in the datacenter to Virtualization technologies and beyond into the Cloud.
Nick Bond
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