F5 Synthesis: How SDAS are delivered - Converged systems
#SDAS The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The premise of cloud is based, like other emergent technologies, at least partially on the notion of abstraction. Cloud providers are able to achieve what appears to be boundless compute, limitless storage and never-ending network capacity by being able to simply "plug and play" the hardware necessary to expand capacity when needed. Enterprises, too, looking to achieve similar capabilities are desirous of a means to achieve this level of simplicity of scale.
And by desirous I mean "really, really, REALLY want" it. At least that's how I read the fact that the number one "emerging trend" identified by our State of Application Delivery in 2014 survey was - you guessed it - private cloud. In case that's not enough to convince of its significance, when asked for which initiatives organizations had purchased technology in the past 12 months the number one answer (with 45% of respondents) was - you guessed it - private cloud.
So getting a "plug and play" or Lego-like infrastructure building blocks that can improve the time to deploy and reduce costs while adding value is pretty important to a whole lot of organizations today.
Technology, of course, has a ready answer.
IDC calls it "Integrated Infrastructure." Gartner names it "Integrated systems." Others have their own terms but they're all describing essentially the same thing: combinations of server, storage and network infrastructure bundled together with management software that facilitates the provisioning and management of the whole.
Offered as a holistic system, these integrated offerings act as the Lego-like building blocks of a rapidly scalable data center or private cloud implementation. While each is self-contained, as it were, the management and orchestration that powers each integrated "rack" enables a broader, more holistic view of the entire set. They are designed to be repeatable and provide the consistency necessary in a cloud computing environment to enable a truly transparent and non-disruptive scale of the compute, storage and network resources that underpin every data center, everywhere.
As a building block for private cloud, converged systems provide a componentized approach to enabling organizations to deliver the services essential to a cloud computing environment in which applications will be deployed: scale, security and performance. Those services should be delivered in such a way as to support the business demands of converged systems: reduced capital and operational costs while improving reliability.
After all, if you're deploying all the components necessary to deliver applications then you have to deploy all the components, including the application (layer 4-7) services.
That's where F5 comes in.
F5 Software Defined Application Services (SDAS) via Converged systems
F5 delivers Software Defined Application Services (SDAS) in a number of ways: in the data center via F5 Synthesis, in the cloud and thanks to F5 Silverline, our cloud-based service delivery platform, as a service. But they can also be delivered via Integrated Systems like that of VCE Vblock or Microsoft's Cloud Platform System (CPS)
Converged systems take advantage of F5 programmability to ensure simplified management and orchestration of F5 SDAS through the central command and control software such systems rely on to reduce operational costs across the entire application deployment spectrum. The pre-validated approach means eliminating integration after delivery and offers a much faster time to ready deployment.
Converged systems offer greater agility in deployment, better economy of scale with reduced operational and capital costs and ensure a better consumer experience, where consumer means the IT professionals tasked with building out a private cloud. With F5 SDAS in the mix, organizations can also be assured of the availability and scale of the application services they rely on to ensure the security, performance and availability of the applications growing business and improving productivity today.