Transforming application delivery to improve data centre efficiency

ENTERPRISES have been embracing private and public clouds in the interest of becoming more agile and optimising IT budgets. When data centres operate more efficiently, organisations can spend less on infrastructure and more on strategic projects. Realising this, IT departments are consolidating their data centres and replacing traditional hardware solutions with virtualised infrastructures. But in doing so, many are overlooking simple things that could make their data centres more efficient, flexible and secure, while increasing business agility and availability for critical applications. Consequently, an emerging trend is the shift away from the ‘Field of Dreams’ strategy - the build it and the applications will come approach - to one that starts with a business need, followed by the specific application and then the appropriate underlying infrastructure.

Reducing costs by working smarter
IT departments are transforming from enterprise cost centres into service brokers for lines-of- business (LOB). With a chargeback framework in place, departments can be held accountable for their usage and it becomes apparent how IT resources can be allocated. Rather than over-buying hardware, software and network infrastructure to accommodate possible future demands, a chargeback framework makes utilisation transparent and helps build the business case for resource allocation. It also allows unused assets to be reclaimed and reassigned, reducing waste.
Better TCO also requires clever utilisation of data centre resources. Intelligent load balancers, known as Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), provide a reliable mechanism for delivering optimal high availability of business critical applications without starving other applications on overloaded servers. Additionally, if all application traffic flows traverse ADCs, they are in a prime location to support a chargeback framework and provide insights on infrastructure utilisation. And with finer-grain resource optimisation, enterprises can move application provisioning out of IT into the hands of LOB administrators, reducing IT overhead while providing the business with greater operational flexibility.

Efficiency and flexibility
Flexibility is one of the major reasons enterprises are moving applications to the cloud. Gartner estimates that end-user spending on public cloud services worldwide will approximately double from $132 billion in 2013 to $250 billion in 2017. To stay competitive, organisations require higher levels of resource flexibility and dynamic scaling. This has triggered the need for technologies that allow data and application flows to traverse cloud boundaries, steering across heterogeneous private, public and hybrid environments without operational impact to end-users.
While it is common knowledge that load balancers have been distributing workloads across computing resources for much of the last two decades, ADCs provide additional functionality that enables applications to run more efficiently, such as monitoring the health and application loads of target instances, analysing end-user requests and directing application requests to the best possible server for the job.
The bidirectional monitoring reveals how applications are performing and how applications are used. API integration allows this data to be fed into various management and monitoring systems to provide a consolidated view of the application environment. As a result, IT can improve application efficiency and resource utilisation as well as add new servers as necessary to suit an application. From the end-user’s point of view, applications simply behave predictably. According to Gartner, “…well-orchestrated operational processes involve understanding, documenting and constantly reviewing end-user service levels and mapping them back into the core IT delivery capabilities.” Not all ADCs are created equal, however. As IT departments continue virtualising data centre hardware, it is important to consider the benefits of virtualised load balancing and how it supports modern architectures. Virtualised load balancers reduce the amount of physical resources needed to support an application, which reduces hardware and operating costs. Virtual load balancers are also more flexible than device oriented load balancers because of the elasticity and agility that are native to virtual infrastructures. As data centre consolidation continues, some IT leaders are rethinking how they approach application-specific resource allocation.
While most organisations still build infrastructures and then deploy applications, some companies are going the other way. For example, one financial services business has almost completely virtualised its infrastructure and applications and is now writing applications first and then deciding what infrastructure is required to support the application. According to the CIO, the new approach gives greater flexibility when deploying, moving, and retiring applications. The approach also enables his department to better align applications and resources.
A Word about security
Some organisations hesitate to extend their data centres into the public cloud because they are concerned about security, compliance and their ability to meet SLAs. More mature Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) options are making it possible to run critical workloads with higher levels of confidence.

In addition, modern tools available from the likes of VMware with its vCloud Hybrid Service, bridge data centres and clouds, enabling IT departments to use a single solution for managing both and
providing a common interface, common rules and common management c
apabilities on premise and off premise.
This centralised visibility and control allows IT departments to take a universal approach to security, compliance and service level quality.
Meanwhile, valid concerns about application security remain. According to a recent data breach report sponsored by Risk Based Security and the Open Security Foundation, outside attacks were to blame for 97 percent of 2.5 billion reported compromised records. Seventy-two percent of the breaches were caused by hacking; 17 percent were web-based.
ADCs can provide an additional layer of security to protect enterprise systems from application-specific attacks, operating system-specific exploits and denial of service attacks, by inspecting traffic, blocking common attacks before they reach servers, limiting access to authorised users through endpoint authentication and the secure publishing of protected application resources.
Bottom Line
When consolidating enterprise data centres, it is important to ensure that there is operational consistency between on premise and off premise resources. While consolidation helps organisations reduce TCO, achieve greater flexibility and operational efficiency, the cost-savings are even more dramatic when server virtualisation is coupled with virtualised load balancers.

Using ADCs, enterprises can ensure better application performance, higher availability, greater scalability and business agility, along with more robust security, whether they’re using traditional data centres or hybrid cloud implementations.