Accelerating Your (Secure) Ride to the Cloud: Get in the Fast Lane

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Accelerating Your (Secure) Ride to the Cloud: Get in the Fast Lane

posted on Monday, February 01, 2010 5:22 AM

The challenges associated with cloud computing and remote data center locations are strikingly similar, particularly with regards to performance and transfers of large files across bandwidth constrained, e.g. WAN, links. Congestion, latency, and prioritization of other applications can slow down the transfer of data across data centers, whether traditional or cloud-based. Conversely, the utilization of Internet-connected WAN-speed links to provide both transfer of large data files and application service to myriad remote employees and users via mobile devices, roaming laptops, and dedicated desktops in remote offices, can cause performance challenges.

The challenges are only going to become more complex as more and more users, employees, and customers take advantage of advances in technology to effectively maintain an “always on” connection with the services you provide. This is more challenging than ever before because of the increasingly flexible manner in which applications are accessed across a variety of devices and locations, sometimes simultaneously.

IDC also reported in its new Marketplace Model and Forecast report that more than a quarter of the world's population, or 1.6 billion people, used the Internet in 2009 on a PC, mobile phone, video-game console, or other device. By 2013, that number is expected to rise to 2.2 billion.

-- InformationWeek, “1 Billion Mobile Internet Devices Seen By 2013”

What’s necessary to address the performance challenges of today’s volatile and mutli-faceted network environments is to be able to first identify who is accessing what application from where and what type of device so that the appropriate mechanisms to address the specific issues raised by a given combination of device, user, network, and application can be effectively utilized.

F5 addresses these challenges and provides the means by which organizations can apply optimization, acceleration, and security policies based on a variety of parameters. This allows organizations to specifically target devices, users, locations, applications or any combination thereof with the right set of solutions at the right time to mitigate performance and security challenges introduced by today’s increasingly mobile user-base and application deployment strategies. The solution to these problems does not, surprisingly, introduce more complexity into the data center. On the contrary, F5’s solution to these challenges actually simplifies the application delivery network by unifying many of these highly related functions onto a single, easily managed platform.

F5’s BIG-IP^® Edge Gateway^™ unifies secure SSL VPN access, dynamic access and optimization control, and application acceleration for remote users—regardless of the device or access network—on a single, scalable platform. BIG-IP Edge Gateway accelerates and optimizes applications, offering significant performance gains (up to eight times faster), and ensures that users are always seamlessly connected via F5’s new BIG-IP Edge Client^™ with smart connection technology. Smart connection technology’s unique persistence and access intelligence makes sure that as a user roams networks—wireless (802.11), cell (3G and LTE), or wired—they stay connected, and the integrity of their application session is protected. The client also includes best-in-class endpoint security and unique application and network acceleration.

Reducing the impact on transfer of large data files such as virtual machine images deployed into cloud computing environments or secondary data centers, BIG-IP WAN Optimization Module^™(WOM^™) accelerates data transfer over the network by optimizing traffic and bandwidth through the use of adaptive compression and de-duplication technologies. WOM reduces bandwidth costs while increasing transfer rates up to 70 times over existing methods. This new BIG-IP product module ensures data is replicated quickly and reliably at speeds greater than 1 Gbps—faster and less-expensive than any alternative on the market today.

By leveraging both Edge Gateway and WOM, organizations can reduce bandwidth consumption and ensure no application or data transfer suffers to the benefit of others. Leveraging Edge Gateway organizations can target acceleration policies based on the unique characteristics of the endpoint, the network, and the application and ensure that IT resources are not wasted by being applied to applications and users that will not benefit from them.

You can find more information on Edge Gateway and WOM at F5’s corporate website.