Radware Ltd.

03/28/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 03/29/2024 07:09

Ensuring Business Continuity: The Vital Role of Proper ADC Configuration

The Imperative of Proper ADC Configuration

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, the proper configuration of an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is not just a matter of convenience-it is a critical component of business survival. When network or application failures strike unexpectedly, the repercussions can be severe, directly impacting your company's bottom line and ongoing operations. In the most extreme cases, unplanned outages can lead to significant data and financial losses, posing a threat to the very existence of your business.

While achieving complete elimination of downtime may be challenging, its severity can undoubtedly be mitigated. To navigate through such precarious situations effectively, businesses must fortify their Application Delivery architecture with layers of flexibility, security, and resilience. At the core of this strategic preparedness lies the proper configuration of ADC instances.

Essential Considerations When Deploying Your ADC and How Radware Alteon Ticks All Boxes!

1. Deployment Model:

Determine the most suitable deployment model for your organization, considering factors such as on-premises hardware appliances, virtual appliances, cloud-based services, or hybrid deployments. Choose a deployment model that aligns with your infrastructure, budget, and operational requirements.

Why Choose Alteon: Alteon provides various form factors suitable for all deployment models. This includes a range of physical appliances with varying L4/L7 throughput, port density, and SSL performance. Other supported form factors encompass private cloud environments like VMware and OpenStack, as well as public cloud platforms such as GCP (Google Cloud Platform), Azure, and AWS. These environments all utilize the same image with an identical feature set, ensuring consistency and compatibility across various deployment scenarios.

2. Scalability and Performance:

Make certain that the ADC solution is capable of scaling to accommodate escalating application requirements as they evolve over time. Assess both anticipated and unforeseen capacity peak loads to ensure availability for fluctuations in demand.

Why Choose Alteon: The Alteon Cluster Manager facilitates the provisioning, management, and maintenance of Alteon clusters. Auto-scaling is achieved through ongoing monitoring of resource utilization (CPU and throughput) across cluster members. Upon reaching user-defined thresholds, the system initiates either scale-out or scale-in events accordingly.

3. High Availability Requirements:

Assess the need for high availability (HA) and redundancy in your application delivery infrastructure. Implement redundant ADC instances, failover mechanisms, and disaster recovery strategies to minimize downtime and ensure continuous availability.

Why Choose Alteon: Alteon high availability mechanism supports the following models:

Switch HA: A switch-based group aggregates all virtual IP addresses on an Alteon as a single entity. The active Alteon supports all traffic or services. The backup Alteon acts as a standby for services on the active primary Alteon. If the primary Alteon fails, the backup Alteon takes over processing for all services.

Extended HA: An extension of Switch HA mode enables failover within a cluster of more than two (and up to four) Alteons.

Service HA: Several VIPs can be grouped together and behave as a single entity for failover purposes. A service group is comprised of several VIPs and their associated floating IP addresses. You can define up to 64 service groups on a single Alteon platform.

4. Geographic Distribution and Global Load Balancing:

If your organization operates across multiple geographical regions, consider implementing Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) to optimize traffic routing and ensure optimal user experience across distributed deployments.

Why choosing Alteon: Alteon GSLB has the following advantages:

GSLB directs users to the best performing sites within a geographic region. Competitive solutions that rely on metrics such as router hops fail to consider important factors such as network congestion and health check mechanisms for checking server load when making load balancing decisions.

Intelligent load distribution including Round Trip Time (RTT) based decision, funnels most traffic to the best performing sites and assures that they will not be overwhelmed. All resources are effectively used, improving the user's experience.

Finally, Local server load balancing, global server load balancing, application redirection, and Layer 2-3 switching within a single platform. This enables additional applications such as Web cache redirection, DNS redirection, security system load balancing, IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) load balancing and router load balancing.

Users are automatically redirected to the next best site when all servers at a site are down or congested, improving service and content availability.

5. Complex Configurations:

ADC configurations can become complex and require unique expertise, especially in large-scale deployments. Make sure to Implement automation and orchestration tools to simplify the ADC lifecycle management for the various teams in your organization.

Why choose Alteon: The Alteon Management platform CyberController, offers users the flexibility to opt for fully automated template-based deployment as self-service for non-expert ADC users, or workflow engine for more complex process like certificate updates, bulk software updates and more, both can be manually fine-tuned to adjust the templates per the application needs.

Furthermore, Alteon offers extensive support for RESTful APIs and seamlessly integrates with third-party Automation & Orchestration tools such as VMware, OpenStack Ansible and Terraform.

6. Budget and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO):

Evaluate the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the ADC solution, including upfront costs, licensing fees, ongoing maintenance, and operational expenses. Choose a solution that provides the best value for your organization while meeting your performance and scalability needs.

Why choosing Alteon: Radware's Global Elastic License (GEL) presents a groundbreaking solution to these challenges, offering a subscription-based model that brings numerous benefits over traditional perpetual licenses, here are some of the capabilities:

Predictable Costs & Lower TCO: GEL offers a pay-as-you-grow model, enabling organizations to align costs with their actual usage. By eliminating the need for long-term capacity planning, organizations can avoid overprovisioning and reduce unnecessary expenses.

Flexibility & Agility: At the simple click of a button, administrators can spin up any number of ADC instances in any size, in any environment they are needed. Moreover, these instances can be easily scaled up or down based on on-demand capacity requirements, eliminating the complexities and costs associated with purchasing additional licenses.

Operational Simplicity: GEL simplifies license management by providing a single capacity-based license with all the capability and add-on services that your ADC requires. This license can be utilized across different environments(on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud).

Conclusion

Correct configuration of an ADC is fundamental to the efficient and secure delivery of applications. Organizations should invest time and resources in properly configuring ADCs based on best practices, industry standards, and specific application requirements to maximize the benefits of their application delivery infrastructure.

To learn more about how Radware Alteon ADC can help your business continuity, check out this link: Radware Alteon solution information.