Cisco Cisco ACE Application Control Engine Module Weißbuch
White Paper
© 2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 1 of 7
Ten Criteria for a Sound Investment in Application
Switches
Switches
Application switches, also referred to as application delivery controllers (ADCs) or
application front ends (AFEs), bring the following important benefits to IT organizations:
●
Increased application availability and scalability
●
Accelerated web services and application response times
●
Support of data center consolidation and reduced power, cooling, and space requirements
●
Faster application deployment times, as well as reduced ongoing management of
application infrastructure
●
Increased application, Extensible Markup Language (XML) web services, and data center
security
●
Better utilization of server resources through offloading of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
Protocol and Transport Control Protocol (TCP) processing
Choosing the best application switching solution can be challenging because of the wide range of
solutions now available from many vendors. How do you make a well-informed decision, achieving
the greatest benefits of application switching and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO)?
To help you, this document describes 10 primary criteria you should consider before investing in
an application switching solution and why these criteria can be important to the success of your
business. This document also provides a useful tool to assist you in the search for the right
solution for your business.
Selection Criterion
IT organizations can use the criteria presented here to select an application switching solution.
Table 1 at the end of this document uses these same criteria to compare the Cisco
®
Application
Control Engine (ACE) solution to solutions from other vendors.
Performance and Scalability
Performance refers to a solution’s throughput capacity and also the way the solution performs in
the particular environment in which it is deployed. Scalability refers to the capability of the solution
to adapt to the growing needs of the enterprise.
Customers need to evaluate the performance of the application switch being deployed from
several viewpoints. First, consider raw bandwidth: How much throughput is actually available for
application delivery? The device may claim a performance rate of 10 Gbps, but does performance
degrade significantly if additional features within the solution are enabled or if the solution is
deployed more broadly across multiple applications within the organization? Does the solution use
purpose-built hardware that can process transactions, connections setup, and connections
teardown quickly?