Wikipedia defines application delivery controller as “a network device in the datacenter that helps perform common tasks done by web sites in an effort to remove load from the web servers themselves.” It is only recently that enterprises have started using application delivery controllers on a large scale. Gartner realized the shift in demand among enterprises when as part of its research titled ‘Application Delivery Controller End-User Spending, Worldwide, 2005-2010’ it discovered that enterprises wanted solutions that are advanced than the simple server load balancers. They want solutions with a richer feature set, increased functionality, and greater focus on effective application delivery.

According to Gartner, application delivery controllers “provide a set of functions to optimize enterprise application environments. The market evolved from the load-balancing systems that were specifically developed to ensure the availability and scalability of websites. Enterprises use ADCs to optimize reliability, end-user performance, data center resource use, and security for a variety of enterprise applications.”

Application delivery controllers offer features such as compression, connection multiplexing, SSL offload, cache, application layer security, content switching combined with basic server load balancing. Some offer advanced features such as content manipulation, selective compression, advanced routing strategies, selective caching of dynamic content, Web application firewall, XML validation and transformation, highly configurable server health monitoring and so on.

Today the advent of virtualization, public and private clouds, the explosion in mobile traffic, and the move towards new standards including IPv6 and 2048-bit encryption have completely transformed the work environment. Hence, enterprises are faced with the challenge of providing performance and scalability in line with the demands of mobile and cloud computing and the agility to extract maximum efficiency and ROI from application infrastructure.

The availability of application delivery controllers helps enterprises to address these issues as it combines cutting-edge performance and scalability with transformative features to deliver unmatched value and ROI. It provides an agile point of control for the data center and cloud, enabling enterprises and service providers to scale applications without sacrificing availability, performance, or security.

Today enterprises gather, store, and access huge chunks of data every minute. This puts huge burden on servers thereby affecting speed and uptime. Thanks to solutions like application delivery controllers, enterprises can not only manage proper traffic but also optimize web and application performance.


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