F5’s Look Ahead

I’ve always admired how F5 Networks built its business. Against what seemed heavy odds at the time, F5 took the fight to Cisco Systems and established market leadership in load balancing, which subsequently morphed into market leadership in application delivery controllers (ADC).

F5 now talks about its “Intelligent Services Platform,” which “connects any user, anywhere, from any device to the best application resources, independent of infrastructure.”

To be sure, as various permutations of cloud computing take hold and mobile devices proliferate, the market is shifting, and F5 is attempting to move with it. To get a feel for how F5 sees the world, where it sees things going, and how it intends to meet new challenges, you might want to have a look at a 211-slide (yes, that many) presentation that company executives made to analysts and investors yesterday. 

By its nature, the presentation is mostly high-level stuff, but it offers interesting nuggets on markets, products, technologies, and partnerships.  

Advertisement

Cisco Puts ACE in the Hole (or Maybe Not)

Although Cisco reportedly confirmed that it will discontinue further development of its Application Control Engine (ACE), a Cisco representative now says that it isn’t the case, and that ACE will be developed further.

Regardless of what Cisco eventually does with ACE, we have not seen the last of the company in the application-delivery controller (ADC) market. In fact, the latest indications, as published in articles at SearchNetworking and The Register, suggest that Cisco, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, will be back.

The salient question is whether Cisco’s next foray into the ADC market, regardless of the form it takes, will produce results any different from its previous efforts, which were catalogued by yours truly about two years ago. Indeed, Cisco has been beaten consistently and repeatedly by F5 Networks in load balancing. Cisco’s losing streak goes back more than a decade, and it is likely to continue if the company stumbles back into the market halfheartedly.

While there is no question that F5 has gotten the better of Cisco continually in load balancing, a more interesting question relates to why Cisco has failed. One line of reasoning suggests that Cisco neither understands nor appreciates Layer 4-7 network services, including load balancing and WAN optimization. Cisco, this argument asserts, is a switching and routing company, proficient at layers 2 and 3, but woefully out of its comfort zone higher up the stack.

Bigger Picture

There’s some legitimacy to that argument, but it doesn’t provide a complete picture. More often than not, Cisco’s load-balancing products and technologies were predicated on the fruits of acquisitions rather than on organic innovation. That is true going all the way back to the long-dead LocalDirector, which was based on technology Cisco obtained through the acquisition of Network Translation Inc. in 1996. Subsequent to that, Cisco acquired former F5 competitor ArrowPoint Communications for $5.7 billion in 2000.  The personnel in these load-balancing companies clearly understood network services, even if the old-guard switching and routing stalwarts at Cisco did not.

So, we’re left with two possibilities. Cisco made bad acquisition choices, effectively acquiring the wrong load-balancing companies, or Cisco failed to execute properly in taking the products and technologies of the acquired companies to market. I’m leaning toward the latter scenario.

Cisco’s primary problem in areas such as load balancing and WAN optimization, as it has been expressed to me by former Cisco executives, is that the company strategically understands that it needs to play in these markets, but that it invariably fails to make the commitment necessary to success. Why is that?

A Matter of Focus and Priority

It comes down to market sizes and business priorities. Switching and routing always ruled the roost, and the resources, at Cisco. That’s still true today, perhaps even to a greater extent now that the company is coming under renewed attack in its core markets after failing to break new ground in many of what CEO John Chambers called the company’s market adjacencies. (Flip, anyone?)

Fundamentally, nothing seems to have changed. Cisco might take another run at ADCs, but there’s no reason to suppose that it would end differently this time unless Cisco makes a sustained and uncompromising commitment to the market and the technologies. Nothing less will do.

Cisco can be sure that is ADC competitors, as in the past, will not give it any breaks.

LineRate’s L4-7 Pitch Tailored to Cloud

I’ve written previously about the growing separation between how large cloud service providers see their networks and how enterprises perceive theirs. The chasm seems to get wider by the day, with the major cloud shops adopting innovative approaches to reduce network-related costs and to increase service agility, while their enterprise brethren seem to be  assuming the role of conservative traditionalists — not that there’s anything inherently or necessarily wrong with that.

The truth is, the characteristics and requirements of those networks and the applications that ride on them have diverged, though ultimately a cloud-driven reconvergence is destined to occur.  For now, though, the cloudy service providers are going one way, and the enterprises — and most definitely the networking professionals within them — are standing firm on familiar ground.

It’s no surprise, then, to see LineRate Systems, which is bringing a software-on-commodity-box approach to L4-7 network services, target big cloud shops with its new all-software LineRate Proxy.

Targeting Cloud Shops

LineRate says its eponymous Proxy delivers a broad range of full-proxy Layer 4-7 network services, including load balancing, content switching, content filtering, SSL termination and origination, ACL/IP filtering, TCP optimization, DDoS blocking, application- performance visibility, server-health monitoring, and an IPv4/v6 translation gateway. The product has snared a customer — the online photo- and video-sharing service Photobucket — willing to sing its praises, and the company apparently has two other customers onboard.

As a hook to get those customers and others to adopt its product, LineRate offers pay-for-capacity subscription licensing and a performance guarantee that it says eliminates upfront capital expenditures and does away with the risks associated with capacity planning and the costs of over-provisioning. It’s a great way to overcome, or at least mitigate, the new-tech jitters that prospective customers might experience when approached by a startup.

I’ll touch on the company’s “secret sauce” shortly, but let’s first explain how LineRate got to where it is now. As CEO Steve Georgis explained in an interview late last week, LineRate has been around since 2008. It is a VC-backed company, based in Boulder, Colorado, which grew from research conducted at the University of Colorado by John Giacomoni, now LineRate’s chief technology officer (CTO), and by Manish Vachharajani, LineRate’s chief software architect.

Replacing L4-7 Hardware Appliances 

As reported by the Boulder County Business Report, LineRate closed a $4.75 million Series A round in April 2011, in which Boulder Ventures was the lead investor. Including seed investments, LineRate has raised about $5.4 million in aggregate, and it is reportedly raising a Series B round.

LineRate calls what it does “software defined network services” (SDNS) and company CEO Georgis says the overall SDN market comprises three layers: the Layer 2-3 network fabric, the Layer 4-7 network services, and the applications and web services that run above everything else. LineRate, obviously, plays in the middle, a neighborhood it shares with Embrane, among others.

LineRate contends that software is the new data path. As such, its raison d’être is to eliminate the need for specialized Layer 4-7 hardware appliances by replacing them with software, which it provides, running on industry-standard hardware, which can be and are provided by ODMs and OEMs alike.

LineRate’s Secret Sauce

The company’s software, and its aforementioned secret sauce, is called the LineRate Operating System (LROS). As mentioned above, it was developed from research work that Giacomoni and Vachharajani completed in high-performance computing (HPC), where their focus was on optimizing resource utilization of off-the-shelf hardware.

Based on FreeBSD but augmented with LineRate’s own TCP stack, LROS has been optimized to squeeze maximum performance from the x86 architecture. As a result, Georgis says, LROS can provide 5-10x more network-performance than can a general-purpose operating system, such as Linux or BSD. LineRate claims its software delivers sufficiently impressive performance — 20 to 40 Gbps network processing on a commodity x86 server, with what the company describes as “high session scalability” — to obviate the need for specialized L4-7 hardware appliances.

This sort of story is one that service providers are likely to find intriguing. We have seen variations on this theme at the big cloud shops, first with virtualized servers, then with switches and routers, and now — if LineRate has its way — with L4-7 appliances.

LineRate says it can back up its bluster with the ability to support hundreds of thousands of full-proxy L7 connections per second, amounting to two million concurrent active flows. As such, LineRate claims LROS’s ability to support scale-out high availability and its inherent multi-tenancy make well qualified for the needs of cloud-service providers.  The LineRate Proxy uses a REST API-based architecture, which the company says allows it to integrate with any cloud orchestration or data-center management framework.

Wondering About Service Reach?

At Photobucket.com, which has 23 million users that upload about four million photos and videos per day, the LineRate Proxy has been employed as a L7 HTTP load balancer and intelligent-content switch in a 10-Gbps network. The LineRate software runs on a pair of low-cost, high-availability x86 servers, doing away with the need to do a forklift upgrade on a legacy hardware solution that Georgis said included products from “a market-leading load-balancing vendor and a vendor that was once a market leader in the space.”

LineRate claims its scalable subscription model also paid off for Photobucket, by eliminating the need for long-term capacity planning and up-front capital expenditures. It says Photobucket benefits from its “guaranteed performance,” and that on-demand scaling has eliminated risks associated with under- or over-provisioning. On the whole, LineRate says its solution offered an entry cost 70 percent lower than that of a competing hardware-appliance purchase.

When the company first emerged, the founders indicated that load balancing would be the first L4-7 network service that it would target. It will be interesting to see whether its other early-adopter customers also are using the LineRate Proxy for load balancing. Will the product prove more specialized than the L4-7 Ginsu knife the company is positioning?

It’s too early to say. The answer will be provided by future deployments.

The estimable Ivan Pepelnjak offers his perspective, including astute commentary on how and where the LineRate Proxy is likely to find favor.

Not Just a Marketing Overlay

Ivan pokes gentle fun at LineRate’s espousal of SDNS, and his wariness is understandable. Even the least likely of networking vendors seem to be cloaking themselves in SDN garb these days, both to draw the fickle attention of trend-chasing venture capitalists and to catch the preoccupied eyes of the service providers that actually employ SDN technologies.

Nonetheless, there are aspects to what LineRate does that undeniably have a lot in common with what I will call an SDN ethos (sorry to be so effete). One of the key value propositions that LineRate promotes — in addition to its comparatively low cost of entry, its service-based pricing, and its performance guarantee — is the simple scale-out approach it offers to service providers.

As Ivan points out, “ . . . whenever you need more bandwidth, you can take another server from your compute pool and repurpose it as a networking appliance.” That’s definitely a page from the SDN playbook that the big cloud-service providers, such as those who run the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), are following. Ideally, they’d like to use virtualization and SDN to run everything on commodity boxes, perhaps sourced directly from ODMs, and then reallocate hardware dynamically as circumstances dictate.

In a comment on Ivan’s post, Brad Hedlund, formerly of Cisco and now of Dell, offers another potential SDN connection for the LineRate Proxy. Hedlund writes that it “would be really cool if they ran the Open vSwitch on the southbound interfaces, and partnered with Nicira and/or Big Switch, so that the appliance could be used as a gateway in overlay-based clouds such as, um, Rackspace.”

He might have something there. So, maybe, in the final analysis, the SDNS terminology is more than a marketing overlay.

Embrane Emerges from Stealth, Brings Heleos to Light

I had planned to write about something else today — and I still might get around to it — but then Embrane came out of stealth mode. I feel compelled to comment, partly because I have written about the company previously, but also because what Embrane is doing deserves notice.

Embrane’s Heleos

With regard to aforementioned previous post, which dealt with Dell acquisition candidates in Layer 4-7 network services, I am now persuaded that Dell is more likely to pull the trigger on a deal for an A10 Networks, let’s say, than it is to take a more forward-looking leap at venture-funded Embrane. That’s because I now know about Embrane’s technology, product positioning, and strategic direction, and also because I strongly suspect that Dell is looking for a purchase that will provide more immediate payback within its installed base and current strategic orientation.

Still, let’s put Dell aside for now and focus exclusively on Embrane.

The company’s founders, former Andiamo-Cisco lads Dante Malagrinò and Marco Di Benedetto, have taken their company out of the shadows and into the light with their announcement of Heleos, which Embrane calls “the industry’s first distributed software platform for virtualizing layer 4-7 network services.” What that means, according to Embrane, is that cloud service providers (CSPs) and enterprises can use Heleos to build more agile networks to deliver cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS). I can perhaps see the qualified utility of Heleos for the former, but I think the applicability and value for the latter constituency is more tenuous.

Three Wise Men

But I am getting ahead of myself, putting the proverbial cart before the horse. So let’s take a step back and consult some learned minds (including  an”ethereal” one) on what Heleos is, how it works, what it does, and where and how it might confer value.

Since the Embrane announcement hit the newswires, I have read expositions on the company and its new product from The 451 Group’s Eric Hanselman, from rock-climbing Ivan Pepelnjak (technical director at NIL Data Communications), and from EtherealMind’s Greg Ferro.  Each has provided valuable insight and analysis. If you’re interested in learning about Embrane and Heleos, I encourage you to read what they’ve written on the subject. (Only one of Hanselman’s two The 451 Group pieces is available publicly online at no charge).

Pepelnjak provides an exemplary technical description and overview of Heleos. He sets out the problem it’s trying to solve, considers the pros and cons of the alternative solutions (hardware appliances and virtual appliances), expertly explores Embrane’s architecture, examines use cases, and concludes with a tidy summary. He ultimately takes a positive view of Heleos, depicting Embrane’s architecture as “one of the best proposed solutions” he’s seen hitherto for scalable virtual appliances in public and private cloud environments.

Limited Upside

Ferro reaches a different conclusion, but not before setting the context and providing a compelling description of what Embrane does. After considering Heleos, Ferro ascertains that its management of IP flows equates to “flow balancing as a form of load balancing.” From all that I’ve read and heard, it seems an apt classification. He also notes that Embrane, while using flow management, is not an “OpenFlow/SDN business. Although I see conceptual similarities between what Embrane is doing and what OpenFlow does, I agree with Ferro, if only because, as I understand it, OpenFlow reaches no higher than the network layer. I suppose the same is true for SDN, but this is where ambiguity enters the frame.

Even as I wrote this piece, there was a kerfuffle on Twitter as to whether or to what extent Embrane’s Heleos can be categorized as the latest manifestation of SDN. (Hours later, at post time, this vigorous exchange of views continues.)

That’s an interesting debate — and I’m sure it will continue — but I’m most intrigued by the business and market implications of what Embrane has delivered. On that score, Ferro sees Embrane’s platform play as having limited upside, restricted to large cloud-service providers with commensurately large data centers. He concludes there’s not much here for enterprises, a view with which I concur.

Competitive Considerations

Hanselman covers some of the same ground that Ferro and Pepelnjak traverse, but he also expends some effort examining the competitive landscape that Embrane is entering. In that Embrane is delivering a virtualization platform for network services, that it will be up against Layer 4-7 stalwarts such as F5 Networks, A10 Networks, Riverbed/Zeus, Radware, Brocade, Citrix, Cisco, among others. F5, the market leader, already recognizes and is acting upon some of the market and technology drivers that doubtless inspired the team that brought Heleos to fruition.

With that in mind, I wish to consider Embrane’s business prospects.

Embrane closed a Series B round of $18 million in August. It was lead by New Enterprise Associates and included the involvement of Lightspeed Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, both of whom participated in a $9-million series A round in March 2010.

To determine whether Embrane is a good horse to back (hmm, what’s with the horse metaphors today?), one has to consider the applicability of its technology to its addressable market — very large cloud-service providers — and then also project its likelihood of providing a solution that is preferable and superior to alternative approaches and competitors.

Counting the Caveats

While I tend to agree with those who believe Embrane will find favor with at least some large cloud-service providers, I wonder how much favor there is to find. There are three compelling caveats to Embrane’s commercial success:

1. L4-7 network services, while vitally important cloud service providers and large enterprises, represent a much smaller market than L2-L3 networking, virtualized or otherwise. Just as a benchmark, Dell’Oro reported earlier this year that the L2-3 Ethernet Switch market would be worth approximately $25 billion in 2015, with the L4-7 application delivery controller (ADC) market expected to reach more than $1.5 billion, though the virtual-appliance segment is expected show most growth in that space. Some will say, accurately, that L4-7 network services are growing faster than L2-3 networking. Even so, the gap is size remains notable, which is why SDN and OpenFlow have been drawing so much attention in an increasingly virtualized and “cloudified” world.
2. Embrane’s focus on large-scale cloud service providers, and not on enterprises (despite what’s stated in the press release), while rational and perfectly understandable, further circumscribes its addressable market.
3. F5 Networks is a tough competitor, more agile and focused than a Cisco Systems, and will not easily concede customers or market share to a newcomer. Embrane might have to pick up scraps that fall to the floor rather than feasting at the head table. At this point, I don’t think F5 is concerned about Embrane, though that could change if Embrane can use NaviSite — its first customer, now owned by TimeWarner Cable — as a reference account and validator for further business among cloud service providers.

Notwithstanding those reservations, I look forward to seeing more of Embrane as we head into 2012. The company has brought a creative approach and innovation platform architecture to market, a higher-layer counterpart and analog to what’s happening further down the stack with SDN and OpenFlow.

Assessing Dell’s Layer 4-7 Options

As it continues to integrate and assimilate its acquisition of Force10 Networks, Dell is thinking about its next networking move.

Based on what has been said recently by Dario Zamarian, Dell’s GM and SVP of networking, the company definitely will be making that move soon. In an article covering Dell’s transition from box pusher to data-center and cloud contender, Zamarian told Fritz Nelson of InformationWeek that “Dell needs to offer Layer 4 and Layer 7 network services, citing security, load balancing, and overall orchestration as its areas of emphasis.”

Zamarian didn’t say whether the move into Layer 4-7 network services would occur through acquisition, internal development, or partnership. However, as I invoke deductive reasoning that would make Sherlock Holmes green with envy (or not), I think it’s safe to conclude an acquisition is the most likely route.

F5 Connection

Why? Well, Dell already has partnerships that cover Layer 4-7 services. F5 Networks, the leader in the application-delivery controllers (ADCs), is a significant Dell partner in the Layer 4-7 sphere. Dell and F5 have partnered for 10 years, and Dell bills itself as the largest reseller of F5 solutions. If you consider what Zamarian described as Dell’s next networking priority, F5 certainly fits the bill.

There’s one problem. F5 probably isn’t selling at any price Dell would be willing to pay.  As of today, F5 has a market capitalization of more than $8.5 billion. Dell has the cash, about $16 billion and counting, to buy F5 at a premium, but it’s unlikely Dell would be willing to fork over more than $11 billion — which, presuming mutual interest, might be F5’s absolute minimum asking price — to close the deal. Besides, observers have been thinking F5 would be acquired since before the Internet bubble of 2000 burst. It’s not likely to happen this time either.

Dell could see whether one of its other partners, Citrix, is willing to sell its NetScaler business. I’m not sure that’s likely to happen, though. I definitely can’t envision Dell buying Citrix outright. Citrix’s market cap, at more than $13.7 billion, is too high, and there are pieces of the business Dell probably wouldn’t want to own.

Shopping Not Far From Home?

Who else is in the mix? Radware is an F5 competitor that Dell might consider, but I don’t see that happening. Dell’s networking group is based in the Bay Area, and I think they’ll be looking for something closer to home, easier to integrate.

That brings us to F5 rival A10 Networks. Force10 Networks, which Dell now owns, had a partnership with A10, and there’s a possibility Dell might inherit and expand upon that relationship.

Then again, maybe not. Generally, A10 is a seen as purveyor of cost-effective ADCs. It is not typically perceived as an innovator and trailblazer, and it isn’t thought to have the best solutions for complex enterprise or data-center environments, exactly the areas where Dell wants to press its advantage. It’s also worth bearing in mind that A10 has been involved in exchanges of not-so-friendly litigious fire — yes, lawsuits volleyed back and forth furiously — with F5 and others.

All in all, A10 doesn’t seem a perfect fit for Dell’s needs, though the price might be right.

Something Programmable 

Another candidate, one that’s quite intriguing in many respects, is Embrane. The company is bringing programmable network services, delivered on commodity x86 servers, to the upper layers of the stack, addressing many of the areas in which Zamarian expressed interest. Embrane is focusing on virtualized data centers where Dell wants to be a player, but initially its appeal will be with service providers rather than with enterprises.

In an article written by Stacey Higginbotham and published at GigaOM this summer, Embrane CEO Dante Malagrinò explained that his company’s technology would enable hosting companies to provide virtualized services at Layers 4 through 7, including load balancing, firewalls, virtual private networking (VPN),  among others.

Some of you might see similarities between what Embrane is offering and the OpenFlow-enabled software-defined networking (SDN). Indeed, there are similarities, but, as Embrane points out, OpenFlow promises network virtualization and programmability at Layers 2 and 3 of the stack, not at Layers 4 through 7.

Higher-Layer Complement to OpenFlow

Dell, as we know, has talked extensively about the potential of OpenFlow to deliver operational cost savings and innovative services to data centers at service provides and enterprises. One could see what Embrane does as a higher-layer complement to OpenFlow’s network programmability. Both technologies take intelligence away from specialized networking gear and place it at the edge of the network, running in software on industry-standard hardware.

Interestingly, there aren’t many degrees of separation between the principals at Embrane and Dell’s Zamarian. It doesn’t take much sleuthing to learn that Zamarian knows both Malagrinò and Marco Di Benedetto, Embrane’s CTO. They worked together at Cisco Systems. Moreover, Zamarian and Malagrinò both studied at the Politecnico di Torino, though a decade or so apart.  Zamarian also has connections to Embrane board members.

Play an Old Game, Or Define a New One

In and of itself, those don’t mean anything. Dell would have to see value in what Embrane offers, and Embrane and its backers would have to want to sell. The company announced that in August that it had closed an $18-million Series-financing round, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Lightspeed Venture Partners and North Bridge Ventures also took part in the round, which followed initial lead investments in the company’s $9-million Series-A funding.

Embrane’s product has been in beta, but the company planned a commercial launch before the end of this year. Its blog has been quiet since August.

I would be surprised to see Dell acquire F5, and I don’t think Citrix will part with NetScaler. If Dell is thinking about plugging L4-7 holes cost-effectively, it might opt for an acquisition of A10, but, if it’s thinking more ambitiously — if it really is transforming itself into a solutions provider for cloud providers and data centers — then it might reach for something with the potential to establish a new game rather than play at an old one.

After F5 Backs Off, Whither Allot?

The strategic disposition of deep-packet inspection specialist Allot Communications has been open to interpretation lately.

In July, rumors and reports suggested that F5 Networks had been in months-long negotiations to acquire Allot. Those talks broke down, with F5 reportedly backing away from the table to reconsider its options. On that score, it’s worth noting that F5 struck a partnership early this year with Allot competitor Procera Networks.

No Deal with F5

Allot is a publicly listed company, traded on NASDAQ under the ALLT symbol. The company currently sports a market capitalization of about $275 million. In its aforementioned acquisition negotiations with F5, Allot apparently was asking for something in the salubrious neighborhood of half a billion dollars, a significant premium on its current valuation.

Since talks with F5 apparently collapsed, Allot chose to change course and announced plans to raise about $72 million through a secondary stock offering. The proceeds from that offering were to be used for “general corporate purposes, including acquisitions, investments in companies or products, or to buy use rights to complementary technologies.”

Course Correction

In what the company seems to perceive as a buy-or-be-bought world, it had reversed its role to the former from the latter. Then, early this month, Allot scrapped those its plans for a secondary offering, citing adverse market conditions.

All of which leaves Allot . . . where, exactly? The company obviously reserves the right to resuscitate its plans for a secondary offering, but it’s also possible that Allot will go in a different direction. Perhaps, in fact, Allot remains receptive to acquisition, by F5 Networks or by somebody else.

Allot has trod a tortuous strategic path this summer. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.

F5 Deals with Its Virtual Threat

F5 Networks has done well selling its BIG-IP application delivery controllers (ADCs), the devices formerly known as load balancers. Customers and channel partners clearly have derived a lot of value from F5’s ADCs, too.

It isn’t for nothing, after all, that F5 has established itself as the dominant player in the ADC market. As I have recounted in this space previously, F5 has convincingly and repeatedly repelled attempts by Cisco Systems to dethrone it. Even when it was a the old Cisco, the networking colossus that bestrode the globe, it couldn’t beat F5 at the load-balancing game.

Questions to Answer

Now, though, I have begun to wonder whether the vicissitudes of technological change might do to F5 what Cisco was unable to accomplish. Could the seemingly endless push in data centers for increased virtualization, with its attendant cost savings, cut into F5’s ADC cash cow? Could virtualized ADCs (vADCs), sold at lower prices than purpose-built hardware-appliance ADCs, eat into F5’s top and bottom lines?  To what extent are these vADCs capable of doing the work that physical ADC (pADC) appliances perform today?

F5 has been pondering the same questions, and it has provided some answers in a column written for Enterprise Systems by Alan Murphy, a senior technical marketing manager. To summarize, Murphy acknowledges that vADCs have been considered replacements for pADCs in the data center, but he advises strongly against their adoption. That’s obviously the sort of advice one would expect from F5 — and I’m sure proponents of vADCs will contend that there’s a self-serving element to F5’s guidance — but there’s also plausibility to the points F5 raises.

Fundamentally, F5 argues that pADCs are superior to vADCs in mission-critical scenarios involving application security, optimization, and availability at the data-center edge. According to F5, pADCs’ purpose-built hardware is optimized to perform “application delivery, SSL acceleration, and compression.” In contrast, vADCs, which run on industry-standard hardware and often share computing resources, can’t scale application traffic or perform to the same degree.

More — or the Same — for Less

F5 does concede that vADCs are appropriate for some applications. Their portability, affordability, and ease of deployment make them good candidates, for instance, for application-development environments, where costs and logistics preclude deployment of pADCs. While that might seem like a minor concession to the vADC camp, F5 allows that virtualized load balancers also have their uses alongside application-specific services and virtualized workloads such as SharePoint.

In the end, F5 envisions the coexistence of pADCs and vADCs. In the near term, as F5 contends, it’s likely true that pADCs will retain their grip on mission-critical data-center applications.

Looking further ahead, however, it’s harder to say how markets and technologies will evolve. As today’s tumult on the public markets suggests, IT cost cutting could be the one unvarying constant that drives ongoing change in this industry. In that vein, we should watch not only the progress of virtualized load balancers, but also, on a higher level, the virtualization of network infrastructure represented by software-defined networking and protocols such as OpenFlow.

There’s no question that managers of data centers at enterprises and cloud service providers will be on an endless quest to slash capex and opex. If technologies can do more — or even the same — for less, they figure to find patronage.