While application acceleration does belong in the network rack, it does not belong in packet delivery devices (e.g., routers, firewalls), but rather a new class of products focused on application delivery. Put simply, it’s about users and applications, not packets and ports!

Networking vendors have done well over the last 20 years developing and optimising packet infrastructure. They focused on getting packets from A to B, and now offer a high-performance, secure, packet delivery infrastructure.

To provide this, they focused on elements like IP addresses and TCP ports. Application delivery, however, in order to ensure application-level performance and security, needs to focus on a different set of key elements - the user (who they are, their role), the application, and the nature of their interaction (the session). For the future, application delivery will leverage, but remain separate from packet delivery - because of these differences in requirements and focus. It’s like refrigerators and ovens - just because they’re co-located doesn’t mean they should be integrated.

Chatty applications over the WAN is bad news for performance. Most application performance problems occur because of inefficiencies and limitations within applications - not because of issues with TCP/IP. Application performance problems stem mainly from chatty, WAN-inefficient application protocols (e.g., CIFS, HTTP, or HTTPS) stretched over long distances, and cause long user wait time (latency). For instance, Microsoft’s Common Internet File System (CIFS) can make 1000 round trips for a 4MB file.

Few latency improvements can be made by optimising TCP. To effectively reduce wait time, application protocols must be optimised to be more WAN-efficient. While an application acceleration solution needs other components (application prioritisation, TCP optimisations, caching and compression), application-specific optimisations are the only ways to significantly reduce latency.

Those protocol optimisations, as well as a comprehensive set of bandwidth reduction capabilities, and business-relevant application prioritisation are only possible through understanding the user, the application, and the session. Packet delivery infrastructure understands none of these things. An application delivery infrastructure has to. But there are bigger issues. The evolution of enterprise applications and networks are clarifying the differences between packet delivery and application delivery - and highlighting the need for separate infrastructures.

Applications are evolving - SSL-encrypted applications comprise a rapidly growing 20 to 30 per cent of enterprise traffic - any enterprise application delivery solution must be able to securely accelerate SSL applications - be they internally or externally hosted. Packet-level devices are, by design, blind to SSL traffic. Additionally, rich media applications (like video) are another growing portion of enterprise traffic - and can only be accelerated with application-level proxies.

And networks are evolving. Gartner’s Mark Fabbi has predicted that 50 per cent of enterprises will connect branch offices directly to the Internet by 2009, requiring Internet-gateway style controls at remote sites. While packet delivery devices are a key part of the enterprise Internet gateway, application delivery devices are required to make decisions where knowledge of the user, the application, and the session is required.

Packet delivery is understood, but what we now need is effective application delivery. Given networking vendors’ acquisition of acceleration technologies, expect integration efforts, but as outlined above, there are architectural limitations to delivering an application acceleration solution. A comprehensive understanding and control of the user, the application, and the session will elude packet delivery devices for the foreseeable future.

Additionally, the issues associated with integrating the disparate networking and acceleration technologies pushes integrated product beyond the time and budget horizons of most enterprises. Most organisations recognise the differences in focus of packet delivery and application delivery, and demand integration of performance and security at the packet level, and separate, but similar integration at the application layer (performance and security in a single device). Just like kitchens don’t have refrigerovens, packet delivery and application delivery infrastructures will remain separate.

BIOS, Jun 16, 06 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Networking