Cisco Cisco ACE Application Control Engine Module 白書

White Paper

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The Business Case for Cisco ACE Application Control
Engine Application Switches

Cisco

next-generation application switches deliver measurable improvements in

application provisioning times, scalability, performance, and security.

As businesses consolidate their data centers and expand the reach of their core business

applications, their data center infrastructures must adapt to support associated changes in

availability, security, scalability, and environmental requirements.

Meeting this challenge in the data center substantially helps businesses meet their revenue and

profit goals. An annual study of companies with more than 1000 employees conducted by global

researcher Infonetics, for example, consistently shows that large organizations each lose millions

of dollars every year to application downtime and degradation, despite the existence of mature

technologies such as server load balancing. In 2006, a similar Infonetics study of 80 North

American midmarket businesses showed that these companies, too, experience application

downtime and degradation, at a cost of about US$867,000 annually in lost revenue and

productivity.

Using Cisco ACE Application Control Engine high-performance application switches, however, IT

personnel can significantly curb these losses by increasing the manageability, security, and

performance of business applications hosted in the data center. Cisco ACE application switches

distribute end-user application requests across a server farm. They also offload compute-intensive

communications and security processing tasks, such as TCP and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

encryption processing, from application servers. Application switching and processing offload

functions are pivotal to the business continuity of data center applications, and third-party testing

has proven Cisco ACE application switches to be the strongest performers in their class.

In addition to these fundamentals, however, Cisco ACE application switches contain

enhancements that are unique in the industry to further improve application deployment times and

resiliency while delivering significant power and cooling efficiencies and savings. These value-

added functions include virtualization and roles-based administration.

Virtualization means that architecturally, a single physical Cisco ACE application switch can

function as multiple virtual ACE devices, substantially reducing capital, space, and power

requirements in the data center and enhancing an organization’s capability to scale its data center

resources.

Role-based administration allows different IT personnel and organizations to provision and

manage multiple virtual devices in parallel within a single Cisco ACE platform. As a result, IT

departments deploy applications much faster than if the different groups had to provision the

application switches in a serial fashion.