Riverbed introduces new platform for 'Application Delivery as a Service'

Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, recently announced an industry game-changer – a new platform enabling any customer to deliver application delivery controller-as-a-service (ADCaaS) with the Stingray Services Controller.

This new product will automate the deployment of application delivery services for any network architecture including software defined networking (SDN).

Typically, ADCs have been deployed in a network-centric model of “one application per ADC box” or where a shared ADC infrastructure must support the demands of multiple applications. With the Stingray Services Controller, Riverbed makes possible an “ADC per application” deployment model. This directly addresses the evolving application and data centre architectures, workflows, and operations models that call for a next generation ADC architecture that can remove today’s bottlenecks, delivering improved agility, high levels of automation, and quicker time-to-service. Riverbed’s ADCaaS enabling technology now gives cloud providers and enterprises deploying in the private cloud the ability to provision, scale, and deploy their ADC as needed.

“Riverbed’s Stingray Services Controller and the Joyent high-performance cloud will enable our customers to provision, license, and scale ADC services in a very easy, agile, and cost effective way,” said Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer, Joyent. “This ground-breaking, high-performance approach maps to our DNA and will enable us to deploy and manage ADCs in a truly elastic cloud delivery model.”

Legacy ADC Challenges
The Stingray Services Controller addresses the challenges IT architects and operators face when trying to deploy traditional ADC architectures with emerging software-defined architectures and within their existing or virtualised data centres. The following list highlights some of the challenges impacting business and operations:

• Deploying ADC services takes days or months
• Inability to guarantee performance per application or tenant due to shared tenancy
• Scaling ADC operations requires pre-procuring over-capacity with bigger boxes rather than dynamically sizing in real-time
• Tedious change control processes make ADC operations time-consuming and cumbersome

Consumption Model for Elastic Scaling
With the introduction of the Stingray Services Controller, enterprises and cloud providers will be able to automatically provision, deploy, license, meter, and manage their ADC inventory in an as-a-service model.

The Stingray Services Controller will also provide a new consumption model for customers deploying ADC services, called the Stingray Traffic Manager (STM) “micro” instance. These STM “micro” instances can range from small ADC instances to large Stingray instances all on commodity servers. This eliminates the traditional throughput-based ADC sizing model that forces customers to guess their traffic load and pre-procure ADC capabilities in advance. With the STM “micro” instance, ADC services can now be elastically scaled on demand and right-sized to suit each application in the data centre, offering high density, full isolation, and multi-tenancy scaling.

“With the emergence of the virtualised data centre, legacy ADCs can be a bottleneck and were starting to be excluded from virtualisation strategies and cloud deployments,” said Brent Lees, Senior Product Manager, EMEA, Riverbed. “With Stingray Services Controller, customers will have a hyper-elastic ADC platform that can adapt to workload changes. This is a game changer – today we are introducing a software-defined application delivery fabric that enables Layer 7 services on top of any data centre architecture.”

The Stingray Services Controller is expected to be generally available in Q3 2013.