Application delivery value emerging to ensure rapid cloud computing practices

Application of the prosperity and experience needs of the promotion, so that the traditional load balanced development to today's application delivery, however, with the advent of mobile internet and cloud computing applications, operators have put forward new requirements for the application delivery equipment, the major application delivery vendors also launched a concept based on their respective application delivery solutions, We have also invited digital applications to the top of the major companies in the market to explore the opportunities and challenges of the application delivery market in the telecommunications industry.

Dialogue guests:

Zhao June, vice president of Radware China

Citrix business Director of the Ang division of Greater China Yugiqing

Array NX Marketing Director Yue Peng

A10 NX managing Director, Asia Pacific Weiga

Shen Qiang, Blue coat product marketing manager, China

Confidence comes from the market

"Communications World Weekly": Recently, the application of delivery has been widely concerned about the market, enterprises have confidence in the future, I would like to know what kind of confidence from?

Wu Yuepeng: Array is very optimistic about the application delivery of the market prospects, this is a broad market demand decision: First of all, the huge increase in application access, customer access to the application of the experience requirements more and more demanding, speed, delay requirements more stringent; Secondly, web application is becoming a popular application deployment mode, This is where application delivery comes in. At the same time, E-commerce needs to be more secure and reliable. In addition, the drive and stimulation of data center virtualization and cloud computing will challenge application delivery and lead to deeper application delivery requirements.

Yugiqing: As the types of application systems become more complex and more important, markets begin to focus on end-to-end delivery applications, rather than just implementing a single feature, and Citrix's confidence in application delivery comes from two.

First, as applications become richer and more complex, and users are more concerned about application systems, manufacturers develop products and choose products that take into account how to help application systems to be more reliable, secure, and deliver applications to consumers more quickly.

Second, the application delivery products mostly from the load balanced development, and gradually increase the function of various auxiliary enterprise application system, this process has gone through more than 10 years of time, the product has been very mature.

Weiga: The domestic application delivery market has been in a tepid state until 2005, but the rapid development since 2005, after the annual market growth of more than 30%, and from the customer group analysis, acceptance of application delivery concept of more and more enterprises, in these enterprises, there are a large number of application delivery requirements, So we have confidence in the future of this market.

"Communications World Weekly": Application delivery Equipment has begun to be used in the telecommunications industry, but with the further evolution of technology, application delivery market will also change, how to view the telecom-grade application delivery market demand and development prospects?

Zhao: Operators began to use load balancing products, and later in the application of the promotion, constantly add a variety of functions, including SSL VPN, application security, application acceleration, etc., gradually developed to later application delivery. At present, as the size of mobile internet applications and cloud computing begin to provide services, operators need to deliver products more and more, and require application delivery to support virtualized environments. Radware now nearly half of the market comes from the telecoms industry and will also work to ensure its position in the telecoms sector.

Wu Yuepeng: Carrier demand for application delivery comes mainly from the following aspects: firstly, the traditional load balancing function in the application delivery can guarantee the continuity of business and the high reliability of service; Secondly, the operator's data volume is exploding, application delivery can be accelerated in application, QOS, link optimization, SSL acceleration and other aspects to ensure the high quality of telecommunications services; Thirdly, how to guarantee the rapid stability of the operators ' external portals is directly related to the service quality and corporate image of the telecom operators.

Weiga: The telecommunications industry has a large number of application systems, all of which have a real need for application delivery equipment. At present, some telecommunications systems have adopted the application delivery equipment, but there is still a large number of requirements, and telecommunications services to provide a variety of service is still increasing, especially when 3G applications once mature, application delivery needs will be greater.

Shen Qiang: Over the past few years, operators have moved from the "infrastructure" to the "Application layer" in the personal market, dramatically increasing user loyalty and ARPU values, and this change is taking place in the corporate marketplace. To help carriers enter the enterprise application delivery market, Blue coat will share the experience with 8 of the world's 10 largest carriers, usually in three ways.

First, the establishment of a specialized system integration department or subsidiary, transformation into a specialized system integration company, to provide enterprises with application delivery solutions, so as to improve user loyalty and access to system integration of the best way to profit;

Second, in the existing line services bundled network acceleration, network security or QoS management equipment, will be packaged "value-added" line and application delivery equipment to sell together to the enterprise;

Third, deploy the application delivery solution directly in the operator's own system and sell the optimized and secure network bandwidth to the enterprise.

Mobile interconnection and the opportunity of the cloud era

"Communications World Weekly": The current China's 3G deployment is increasingly perfect, the resulting mobile interconnection application is an explosion of growth, which brings the application of the market to bring about the challenges and opportunities?

Yugiqing: 3G does add a lot of opportunities for application delivery. In general, 3G allows users to access high-speed Internet anytime and anywhere, and will certainly drive new application types, such as online video services, online application stores, etc., which will increase the demand for application delivery products.

The challenge comes from the complexity of the operator's requirements for the application delivery product, for example, how to optimize the concurrent connection of the online application store based on Web2.0 development, how to reduce the burden of the server by caching and compressing technology, and of course, the application delivery product has more strong application layer processing ability, namely 7 layer processing ability.

Shen Qiang: 3G has brought about two major changes to mobile Internet applications: First, bandwidth demand continues to grow and video content is growing, giving mobile operators huge infrastructure investment pressures, high net settlement costs and user experience complaints. Therefore, carriers need to deploy application delivery solutions to push hot sites and video content as far as possible to the location closer to the user, to reduce network traffic, improve the user experience. Second, 3G makes the enterprise mobile office really to the practical stage, but the wireless network innate Gao Shiyan, the stability is poor the flaw has affected the user experience seriously, the mobile office personnel to the network acceleration and the optimization demand is increasingly urgent. At the same time, mobile operators can also take the Mobile office acceleration as a breakthrough point, infiltration into the enterprise application delivery market.

"Communications World Weekly": In the concept of cloud computing, the impact of the virtualization trend on telecom operators is also increasing, resulting in the IT infrastructure transformation, how to upgrade the application delivery to achieve more efficient support?

Zhao: The three most basic conditions of cloud computing are on-demand access, broadband response and resource sharing pool, the way to achieve these conditions is virtualization. Operators to create virtual data centers need to consider the factors of unified integration, economic flexibility, high availability and high performance, and the unified integration and virtualization of the data center infrastructure will have a significant impact on the functionality of the application delivery control devices. Radware's Vadi strategy integrates computing resources, application delivery, and virtualization services into a unified, flexible, and scalable application delivery virtualization infrastructure. At the same time, the application delivery devices provided by Radware can be extended on demand and upgraded to achieve higher performance by upgrading the software.

Wu Yuepeng: As a delivery and usage model for IT resources, the most basic model of cloud computing includes two ends, the application terminal and the cloud, however, to make cloud computing truly become a reality, still need an important link, that is "ladder", "ladder" is based on a series of technology and product, let end user be able to efficiently, Securely use resources in the cloud. In array view, security and efficiency constitute the two basic principles of ladder construction, array is the use of application delivery technology to achieve the role of "ladder builders."

Yugiqing: From the experience of Citrix cooperation, the first practice of cloud computing is the operator, but cloud computing has a new need for application delivery: First, application delivery as a key product that is tightly coupled to the application system should also be called on-demand, dynamically, like other virtualized servers Secondly, the access volume of the platform is more unpredictable than that of a single system, therefore, the need for application delivery products requires better performance scalability, this ability can not be replaced by hardware replacement, because the hardware cut will increase the risk of the system, but should be software licensing to adapt to the changes in user access traffic.

Weiga: Virtualization is an important means of implementing the concept of on-demand delivery of cloud computing, and telecom operators have a huge advantage in implementing cloud computing, which is being launched, and A10 is ready for cloud computing Virtualization's application delivery solution when cloud computing is emerging, with VMware, Hyper-V, Virtualization products such as Xen enable on-demand delivery of applications and flexible automation.

Shen Qiang: Cloud computing and virtualization make a lot of direct changes to the corporate network, so in today's and future networks, application delivery will become an integral part of the network and play a key role, including the following three aspects.

First, the application of security solutions to complement the existing firewall, UTM, IDs of the border security system, in order to deal with the corporate network and the internet gradually fade the boundaries of the security risks introduced;

Second, the Network Acceleration scheme ensures that the user obtains the same speed as the LAN when using cloud services across the WAN or Internet;

Thirdly, network visibility and application QoS management ensure the performance and user experience of delay-sensitive applications.

The focus or the synthesizer?

"Communications World Weekly": Application delivery to the security gateway, flow control scheme, application security, load balancing, WAN optimization, such as integration, how to see such a convergence? Do you think these functions are "focus" or "synthesizer"?

Wu Yuepeng: We are more inclined to integrate solutions, if each feature is a device, this will add more nodes, bring a delay, a single point of failure, and customers also increased investment. But from each individual function item, also needs the factory to make the specialized, each function completes, therefore "the synthesis" and "concentrates" does not contradict.

Weiga: The industry has been arguing for years about whether multiple functions should be integrated into a single device or proprietary functionality through proprietary devices. The advantage of "synthesizer" is to reduce the input, the disadvantage is the decline of the overall performance of the equipment, and the advantage of "focus" is that individual performance can be done higher, the disadvantage is that the total cost of ownership is too high.

The A10 hardware architecture and the exclusive ACOs operating system allow a single device to run multiple functions that are no longer a problem, and when multiple features are enabled, the overall performance of the device is not degraded, and in the case of running a single feature, performance is better than the "dedicated" device.

Shen Qiang: Application delivery is a network design architecture, not a specific product, it involves a variety of related devices in the network, it is impossible to deploy a place in the network called "Application Delivery Device" to solve all the problems, a device "synthesizer" is not realistic. Therefore, selecting multiple but integrated application delivery solutions provided by the same vendor should be the best way for enterprise deployment application delivery.