Cisco Cisco ACE Application Control Engine Module Weißbuch

White Paper

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Integrating Application Delivery Solutions into the Data
Center Infrastructure

What You Will Learn

IT organizations are being challenged to provide employees with a growing number of business-

critical applications, often with strict requirements for high availability, low latency, and scalability.

Many companies are currently working on data center consolidation and virtualization projects with

the goal of meeting these requirements while reducing costs and adding the flexibility needed to

manage the continuous evolution and migration of applications to meet their business needs.

Application delivery devices are crucial components of the data center infrastructure, significantly

improving application performance and resiliency by providing load balancing, server offloading,

application optimization, and security features. Although standalone application delivery

appliances are excellent for many environments such as small to medium-sized server farms or

hosting environments with dedicated hardware for individual customers, more demanding data

centers can greatly benefit from the deployment of application delivery devices that natively

integrate with the switching and routing data center infrastructure.

This document examines the value of using integrated application delivery devices to meet the

challenges of delivering hundreds of dynamic business-critical applications while containing costs

and simplifying infrastructure. In particular, it describes the Cisco

solution. The Cisco ACE

Application Control Engine Module, which provides the highest levels of performance and

scalability, secure virtualization, and role-based administration capabilities, is natively integrated

with the Cisco Catalyst

6500 Series Switches and Cisco 7600 Series Routers. This document

describes some of the solution’s main integration features from a technical standpoint and its

benefits in comparison to those of traditional appliances: cabling, power, and cooling savings;

greater availability; higher performance; and enhanced security.

Challenges of Today’s Application Infrastructure

Enterprises are challenged to adapt their data centers to efficiently deliver hundreds (and in some

cases, thousands) of business-critical applications to their employees, regardless of their physical

location, providing high availability, scalability, and security.

As business processes continue to be automated and streamlined, applications continue to grow

in number and evolve, incorporating new functions or adapting to more efficient technologies such

as the Web and Extensible Markup Language (XML). At the same time, many applications

continue to be developed and improved using proprietary protocols or industry-specific standards

(for example, Financial Information Exchange [FIX] for financial applications and Picture Archiving

and Communication Systems [PACS] for the healthcare industry), creating a mix of technologies

and requirements that need to coexist and transparently work together to help ensure the success

of the business. In addition, in many environments, applications are still deployed and managed in

separate silos across the network, with performance and security often being secondary concerns.