Array Networks Rolls Out Application Delivery Controllers for Cloud Systems

Array Networks announced a 60G bps application-delivery controller that will be capable of meeting increased bandwidth demand in the data center.

The APV9650 ADC (application delivery controller) appliance has more Layers 4 and 7 throughput and an unbeatable price-performance, compared with that of competitors, Array Networks said Feb. 8. Designed for both private- and public-cloud computing environments, the company’s flagship appliance is designed to be both scalable and powerful, Neville Nandkeshwar, director of product marketing at Array Networks, told eWEEK.

The APV9650 is based on a parallelized, multicore architecture in a compact energy-efficient form factor, Nandkeshwar said. The cloud-focused appliance consumes 30 percent less power than the competition while occupying only two standard units of rack space, he said.

Designed to “excel” in the world’s largest and most demanding virtualized data centers, the APV9650 is ideal for global enterprises and cloud-service providers such as Salesforce.com and Amazon, Nandkeshwar said. The APV9650 ADC can deliver guaranteed availability, security and performance to customers like tier-one content providers, high-volume e-commerce sites and mobile-service providers, he said.

The 60G bps capability will allow applications such as video on demand and live video streaming to run efficiently, he said.

The appliance supports IPv6 addresses and 2,048-bit SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption for accelerating performance. Encryption is math-sensitive and can place a heavy burden on application performance and load time, said Sunil Cherian, vice president of product marketing at Array Networks. Financial services and health care are two industries with environments that often have “lots of traffic” and require high performance, Cherian said.

The appliance is tightly integrated with local and global traffic management, a high-performance application firewall, TCP multiplexing, dynamic caching, selective compression and virtual environment integration, Array Networks said. The APV9650 has a unified command and control interface to manage multiple distributed systems and is interoperable with third-party monitoring tools, Cherian said.

The APV9650 also features 10G Ethernet and high-speed HTTP processing to maximize server efficiency and minimize application latency while supporting millions of concurrent users, Nandkeshwar said.

The ADC can support more than 20 million concurrent connections, said Cherian. As organizations move more applications to the cloud, data centers are under increased pressure to handle more connections, he said. There is also a general effort to offload applications from servers and eliminate stand-alone appliances, he said.

The APV9650 is controlled by SpeedCore, the company’s ultra-scalable software platform for application delivery networking, which the company introduced along with the SpeedCore API on Feb. 8. Customers can use the API to integrate SpeedCore with other applications, Nandekeshwar said. The IpPv6 support, application-aware traffic management, extensible integration and Web application acceleration capabilities on the APV9650 are driven by SpeedCore, according to Nandkeshwar.

Customers can combine application traffic intelligence with virtual management, billing, reporting or threat-management platforms using SpeedCore’s APIs, Nandkeshwar said.

The APV9650 appliance is available immediately with SpeedCore, but the software has not been deployed to other Array Networks products, Cherian said. By the end of the first quarter, all products in Array Networks’ lineup will be refreshed with SpeedCore, Cherian said. However, there is no upgrade path at this time for existing customers, he said.