Welcome to Application Delivery 2.0

Network World, last week published an article declaring that many IT organizations are entering a new era of application deliver – one that they refer to as Application Delivery 2.0. The challenges of the Application Delivery 2.0 era will be notably more complex and challenging than are those of the current one.

First the background:

While ensuring acceptable application delivery has always been important, it historically was not a top of mind issue for most IT organizations. That changed a few years ago when IT organizations began to focus on ensuring acceptable application delivery. They did this by deploying a first generation of solutions that were intended to mitigate the impact of chatty protocols such as CIFS (Common Internet File System), to offload computationally intensive processing (for example TCP termination and multiplexing) off of servers, and to provide visibility into the performance of applications. Unfortunately, the IT organization of a few years ago typically approached application delivery from a tactical, stove-piped approach.

Hence, we are hesitant to use the phrase Application Delivery 2.0 as it sounds so much like just one more marketing cliché. However, we see distinct evidence, both from vendors and from IT organizations that we are indeed entering a second generation of application delivery.

Part of the characterization of Application Delivery 2.0 is that IT organizations are beginning to face a new set of challenges. That does not mean that the traditional challenges of supporting chatty protocols or maximizing the performance of servers have gone away. As is so often the case in our industry, IT organizations have to support traditional or legacy technologies and challenges at the same time that they have to respond to new technologies and challenges.

One of the new challenges facing IT organizations stems from the changing role of the mobile worker. A few years ago, there were relatively few mobile workers and the communications needs of the mobile workers of that era were satisfied with simple cell phones. That is no longer the case. Now it is common to have 25% or more of employees be mobile at any point in time. These employees have smartphones or other wireless devices that they routinely use to access business-critical applications. This introduces all of the performance and security issues associated with wireless networking into the mix of application delivery challenges.

While Network World seems to think we're entering a new era of Application Delivery, these issues seems to be the same ones we've already faced for some time now. Mobile workers doesn't sound like a new phenomenon to me, but maybe I'm missing something.

Survey highlights SAP performance problems

Proxies are well known for being web gateways in many organizations, but as we've discussed here on this blog, there's a shift of proxies moving towards Application Delivery. In that vein, I'm highlighting a survey done by Network World today on SAP performance in the enterprise. SAP is a critical application in many of the largest companies.

In Network World's survey 90% of firms queried, reported they had monthly SAP performance issues. Dimensional Research surveyed 695 professionals at SAP’s Sapphire 09 user conference in Orlando, Fla.

From the Network World article:

While 10% of respondents said they never have performance issues, the rest aren’t so fortunate. One-third said they have one or two incidents with SAP performance per month, and 35% reported three to five incidents per month. Another 14% said they experience between five and 15 incidents per month, and for 8% of respondents, performance incidents occur almost daily.

Such incidents take a toll on operations, respondents say. Among the ways that performance problems impact that business are: deterioration in customer satisfaction (cited by 46% of respondents), loss of productivity within corporate IT (38%), loss of non-IT employee productivity (33%), lost revenue (22%), and penalties for missing SLAs (12%).

Getting to the bottom of a bottleneck isn’t easy. Asked how long it takes the IT team to identify the cause of a typical SAP performance issue, the majority of survey respondents reported it can take hours (cited by 46% of respondents), days (22%) or weeks (8%). Those able to identify a problem in just minutes (22%) or seconds (2%) were the enviable exceptions.

All this points to some of the requirements around Application Delivery Networks (ADN). In addition to the traditional idea of proxying an application, there's also a need for visibility (to help determine the cause of the performance problem), as well as a need for optimization across the corporate WAN links to reduce not only bandwidth consumption, but round-trip times for applications across the WAN. The results of this survey, point to the buzzwords ADN is using. Maybe ADN is worth a second look.

When did Proxy become Application Delivery?

For those of you that use Blue Coat ProxySG devices as your proxy, you may have noticed the term "Application Delivery Network" appearing on their website. While this may not be a surprise to Blue Coat fans that have been following the Packeteer acquisition, it is a surprise if you've not been that concerned with PacketShaper and have been busily securing your enterprise network.

The term Application Delivery probably isn't that new sounding to most people as it's already been claimed by a number of other companies as well. F5 and Citrix both come to mind as companies that have in recent times used that terminology.

Is Blue Coat all that different or the same as those other vendors? Well, for starters, to us Blue Coat has always been the "proxy" company. F5 and Citrix aren't really known as proxy vendors, and of course here at "The Proxy Update" we have a certain affinity for proxy devices.

Blue Coat's proxy is of course more than just an HTTP proxy, having in recent years added additional protocol support as they added WAN Optimization functionality. Their claim is of course that with WAN Optimization and PacketShaper, they know have more visibility into the application layer, and what's happening with applications across the network, hence the new moniker, "Application Delivery Network". It fits and we can see where they're coming from. The interesting question will be what other companies try to use or fit into this terminology.