The choice of technology availability management applications is becoming increasingly important due to the fact that most companies move their data centers into virtual environments.
In this case, they are confronting the issue, is to switch to virtual versions of control programs or rely on traditional bandwidth control device and application availability.
Many organizations now understand the benefits of implementing virtualization in their data centers. A recent study on server virtualization shows that it is implemented in more than 90% of organizations. And, investing in virtualization, the company would like to have a solution for bandwidth management, which would have enjoyed benefits such as consolidation, server containerization and business integrity.
The complexity of virtualization
Despite all the benefits of virtualization, which are widely used in various industries, it carries a number of problems. In a virtual environment, multiple applications are deployed on one physical server. In the case of consolidation, it has many advantages that many companies have already managed to use it. According to industry analysts, up to 80% of all information technology departments are working on centralizing their computer infrastructure of their companies, which will reduce costs for data centers, improving the efficiency of their use with conventional 5-10% to 60-80%. All this is very tempting, but do not solve all problems.
Moving into the virtual environment, critical applications impose the same requirements for business continuity, as in ordinary physical environments. But in virtual environments, they dynamically move the system to ensure constant availability of these complicated applications. Therefore, companies have decided to move their mission-critical applications in an environment that should use the same dynamic and versatile bandwidth control system to prevent downtime and ensure continuous availability.
Because virtualization allows you to create an environment in which you can quickly deploy more resources, adding or removing virtual machines much easier. While in ordinary physical environment, it took a few weeks. In a virtual environment this can be done in minutes. Unfortunately, this does not apply to the ADCs. To ensure the availability and adequacy of the virtual application slightest change in the configuration of the virtual environment, such as adding or removing the server must be accompanied by a corresponding change in the configuration of ADC.
During the deployment, move and delete virtual machines, companies must ensure that redirect incoming traffic at the most affordable and high-speed server. Bandwidth management solutions improve the speed of computers, making them more reliable and secure. It also simplifies administration by driving traffic to the appropriate server. This mainly concerns virtual environments where network bandwidth and scalability are clear limits.
Benefits
However, not every bandwidth control system provides such opportunities. They can be obtained only by using the software controller application. Nevertheless, companies continue to produce the hardware solutions bandwidth management, despite the rapid development of virtual and cloud-based technologies. If necessary, program can easily install and expand on existing equipment, while at the same time; they can be managed like any other application. This is especially useful during the transition to “cloud” technologies. On the background of the rapid development of universal hardware and software systems hardware is rapidly losing its advantage that it could have, say, five years ago.
Cloud systems have even greater requirements for bandwidth management with regard to extensibility, peak load, updates, and greater flexibility than the standard “physical” system. Therefore, data centers must be built on hybrid technologies, it is necessary to use solutions that provide automatic switching between the physical, virtual, “cloud”, and hybrid environments. This will be particularly important if the company later decides to change the location of their applications. And in response to increasing numbers of companies that go to “cloud” technologies, such changes become more frequent.
According to recent estimates, market turnover for “cloud” technology, amounts to about 46.4 billion dollars for now, but it will rise to 150.1 billion dollars by 2013.
The use of hardware solutions manage bandwidth
Although these benefits are evident from data center operators, you need to take commercial interests of end users into account. If software ensures stable operation of the data center, the company is better at handling a larger number of queries and bursts of traffic thereby satisfy the requirements of end users. Nevertheless, this problem is more complicated in the modern systems, due to the high standards of business continuity. Many companies face the daily challenges of network bandwidth and additional capacity.
The most striking example is a Twitter service, whose failures in recent years too often violate the plans for its users by up to 190 million per month.
End users suffer not only from ineffective means of combating the temporary bursts of bandwidth, but also on the technical inspections. So, recently the majority of Facebook service users were upset by the lack of access to their accounts due to the fact that the site has been disabled for technical reasons. Why disable the entire site to address the small problems? After cleaning one department, it does not need to close the entire supermarket, and customers can continue to make purchases in other departments. And what a website is worse?
To eliminate such delays, should use traffic control system that could redirect users to other pages in case of updating. And since such technologies do exist, there is no excuse, even minute interruption of service.
Removal of the three major problems of data centers
100-percent smooth functioning of all systems continues to provide data-center, and, unfortunately, some of the shortcomings of its infrastructure caused by lack of relevant applications can impact the work of end users. Fortunately, with three major problems that often occur in data centers, we can easily cope with the appropriate traffic control programs.
Firstly, it is a problem of server crashes. In this case, processed requests are discarded. Solution for traffic management can eliminate this problem by redirecting traffic to other servers. Moreover, it constantly checks the status of the failed server, and when it again begins to function, it includes a number of active servers.
Another common problem is insufficient capacity of server. And while virtualization can increase the efficiency of the server, there may be situations in which it cannot handle the additional requests. To prevent such problems the program for traffic control monitors the response time of the server and, if necessary, in advance of deploying additional virtual machines or additional resources. And thanks to a dynamic and flexible nature of virtual environments, which will not cause any difficulties.
And finally, if you want to disable one of the virtual machines on one reason or another, solutions to traffic management can clean the virtual machine on the network requests to the extent of their processing, so the processed requests will not be lost, and the connection that is established will not be broken. After all, the virtual machine can be safely disabled without disrupting the other servers, and then turn on, after the completion of its renovation.
The right choice
Since the data centers industry is constantly evolving over time with necessarily new complications. And in order to solve these problems and meet their requirements for traffic, companies must use the same dynamic and flexible software as the world around us, which allows companies to negotiate an effective traffic management with the development of its business and does not require unplanned interruptions or downtime, regardless of the type of the data center: the physical, virtual, cloudy or mixed.
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