caching

VM Sprawl is Bad but Network Sprawl is Badder We worry about VM sprawl but what about device sprawl? Management of a multitude of network-deployed solutions can be as operationally inefficient as managing hundreds of virtual machines, and far more detrimental to the health and performance of your applications. Turning them all into virtual network appliances that might need scaling themselves? That’s even badder. But all you hardware fanbois best not smirk too much because the proliferation of hardware network devices is only slightly less badder than the potential problems arising from virtual network appliance sprawl. WAIT, WHY IS DEVICE SPRAWL BAD AGAIN?... posted @ Friday, February 05, 2010 4:02 AM | Feedback (0)

WILS: What Does It Mean to Align IT with the Business We’ve been talking about “aligning IT with the business” since SOA first took legs but you rarely see CONCRETE EXMAPLES OF WHAT THAT REALLY MEANS. It sounds much more grand and lofty than it really is. To put it in layman’s terms, or at least take it out of marketing terms, aligning IT with the business is really nothing more than justifying or tying a particular IT investment or project to a specific business goal. What that means ultimately is that you, as an IT professional, must understand what those business goals are in the first place. Once... posted @ Wednesday, December 30, 2009 5:11 AM | Feedback (0)

The Cloud Computing – Application Acceleration Connection Like peanut-butter and jelly, cloud computing and application acceleration are just better together. Ann Bednarz of Network World waxes predictive regarding 2010 trends in application delivery and WAN optimization in WAN optimization in 2010. One of the interesting tidbits she offers from research firm Gartner is growth in the application acceleration market:  Second, the research firm is predicting a return to modest growth for the application acceleration market in 2010. Gartner is forecasting a compound annual growth rate of 12.22%, with 2014 revenue of $4.27 billion. This, when viewed alongside... posted @ Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:21 AM | Feedback (2)

‘Drowsy’ Networking No, not the kind you do on Facebook when you’re really, really tired but the kind defined as a means to reduce power consumption without affecting application performance or availability by eliminating non-essential processing and networking whenever possible.  An article on “Drowsy” computing as a means to reduce power consumption in data centers got me thinking about how such concepts might be applied to networking. To summarize the concept of “drowsy” computing its basic premise is that when applications aren’t being heavily used some mechanism is used to reduce the power consumption on... posted @ Wednesday, November 11, 2009 3:23 AM | Feedback (4)

WILS: Why Does Load Balancing Improve Application Performance? IMAGE CREDIT: DANIEL PENNEY Everyone has surely experienced the frustration of an overloaded desktop/laptop. You’ve just got too many apps open at one time and the performance of your machine has been slowly degrading to the point where you can select an application from the toolbar, run down to the local Starbucks, stop and chat with a friend, and return to find the application still not ready for use. The same thing happens on servers. Even though a web/application server is likely only running a few critical applications,... posted @ Thursday, October 22, 2009 4:13 AM | Feedback (2)

The Impact of HTML 5 on Application Infrastructure Smashing Magazine has a cool “cheat sheet” for those interested in the ongoing development of HTML 5. Of interest is what’s being excluded and what’s new, as well as the length of time it’s going to take before HTML 5 is completely supported: XHTML is dead, long live HTML 5! According to W3C News Archive, XHTML 2 working group is expected to stop work end of 2009 and W3C is planning to increase resources on HTML 5 instead. And even although HTML 5 won’t be completely supported until 2022, it doesn’t mean that it won’t... posted @ Tuesday, July 07, 2009 4:06 AM | Feedback (1)

Why not network-side pre-fetching? The acceleration technique known as pre-fetching went the way of the do-do bird sometime around 2002. But perhaps it should be resurrected, just in a different place and with a slightly different focus. A SHORT HISTORY OF ACCELERATION TECHNIQUES Most modern acceleration techniques revolve around two things: decreasing the amount of data to be transferred (compression, optimization of the client-side cache) or twiddling with protocols (TCP, HTTP) and their associated behaviors to improve the overall speed at which a client and server communicate. Back in the early days of application acceleration most technologies were... posted @ Tuesday, April 14, 2009 3:01 AM | Feedback (0)

True or False: Application acceleration solutions teach developers to write inefficient code It has been suggested that the use of application acceleration solutions as a means to improve application performance would result in programmers writing less efficient code. In a comment on “The House that Load Balancing Built” a reader replies: Not only will it cause the application to grow in cost and complexity, it's teaching new and old programmers to not write efficient code and rely on other products and services on [sic] thier behalf. I.E. Why write security into the app, when the ADC can do that for me. Why write code that... posted @ Tuesday, February 17, 2009 3:41 AM | Feedback (8)

The ironic truth about the ugly truth about web application acceleration Lately I've been seeing quite a few links to a white paper popping up in my alerts and feed-reader. Regardless of who's linking to it, it generally reads as promising to reveal some grand secret about how web application acceleration is an epic failure. I finally gave in and clicked on a link and ended up directed to download a white-paper, the description for which essentially distilled "web application acceleration" down to "caching". And then promised to tell me why caching wasn't a good way to accelerate web applications. I didn't download the white paper primarily because equating... posted @ Friday, October 10, 2008 3:17 AM | Feedback (0)

Dear Data Center Guy You walked past me again today without stopping. I remember when you used to stop and admire my glowing red ball every day. But that was back when I was brand new and you thought I was the center of your data center. I heard you talking to some friends about looking for a web acceleration solution yesterday. You were going to a meeting about it later that afternoon and you were so excited it was almost like old times, until you pointed me out on the way by and said, "Oh yeah, there's our load balancer." ... posted @ Friday, August 29, 2008 4:05 AM | Feedback (2)

8 things you can do with an ADC to make your apps secure, fast, and available An application delivery controller (ADC) essentially acts a reverse proxy. That means that client requests interact with the ADC, and the ADC interacts with web and application servers on the client's behalf. This mediation offers the chance to implement acceleration, availability, and security features without requiring changes to existing applications. There are many, many more features in an ADC that provide significant value. These eight capabilities are the most commonly employed features in reverse-proxy application delivery solutions that provide immediate benefits to web applications, and all can be used without modifying applications or the servers on... posted @ Friday, August 01, 2008 4:56 AM | Feedback (2)

Architecting for Speed               I'm going to give you an engine low to the ground.               An extra-big oil pan that'll cut the wind underneath you.               That'll give you more horsepower.               I'll give you a fuel line that'll hold an extra gallon of gas.               I'll shave half an inch off you and shape you like a bullet.               When I get you primed, painted and weighed... ... posted @ Friday, July 25, 2008 11:30 AM | Feedback (0)

Fixing Internet Explorer & AJAX A few weeks ago, as developers are wont to do, I rewrote our online gameroom. Version 1 was getting crusty, and I'd written all the AJAX handlers manually and wanted to clean up the code by using Prototype and Script.aculo.us. You may recall we discussed using these tools to build a Web 2.0 interface to iControl. So I rewrote it and was pretty pleased with myself. Until one of our players asked why it wasn't working in Internet Explorer (IE). Now Version 1 hadn't worked in IE either, but because I have a captive set of users I ignored the... posted @ Thursday, June 26, 2008 4:41 AM | Feedback (9)

Accelerating AJAX If you've ever used the quite popular Prototype framework, you've noticed that there are some unique options available that are designed to help reduce the number of connections made to the server when automatically updating specific content. The decay rate in Prototype's PeriodicalUpdater is designed to help reduce the number of requests made to the server when content is not refreshing on every request.         Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater("content-id", "url", { frequency: 10, decay: 2, method: 'get'} ) This code will start making a call to url and updating content-id every 10 seconds. If the content hasn't changed, decay will... posted @ Tuesday, May 20, 2008 4:36 AM | Feedback (0)

Green IT: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle There's more than one way to go green with application delivery networks The past few months have seen a high volume in the number of "green" products announced, many of them in the application delivery realm. Almost universally these announcements have focused on the products themselves as a method of reducing power consumption both in power required to run the device and in lessening the amount of heat generated that requires cooling. But there's another way to "go green" with application delivery, one that doesn't necessarily rely on the application delivery controller being "green" itself. The Three "R"s ... posted @ Monday, May 05, 2008 12:19 PM | Feedback (0)

Don't just balance the load, distribute it Using application fluency and layer 7 routing to implement of an efficient, scalable, and cost-effective application architecture There is a subtle difference between the word balance and distribute. Balancing implies a simple decision process. If I have three boxes and three people, I give one box to each person in order - regardless of the weight of those boxes and the ability of the people to carry them. Distribution, on the other hand, implies some form of intelligence behind the decision process. I give the boxes to the people most capable of carrying their weight so that no person gets overloaded... posted @ Wednesday, February 27, 2008 10:15 AM | Feedback (2)