Comments

1. Lori MacVittie says:

   22 August 2008 at 11:47

   Hi Greg,

   I’m going to have to beg to dif­fer with you on your defin­i­tion. An applic­a­tion deliv­ery con­trol­ler is not just a “new mar­ket­ing name” for an old tech­no­logy. There are sig­ni­fic­ant dif­fer­ences between load-​​balancers and applic­a­tion deliv­ery con­trol­lers that go much deeper than secur­ity and accel­er­a­tion add-​​ons.

   Layer 7 switch­ing is one very big dif­fer­ence, as well as Content based rout­ing.

   An ADC is a plat­form, a load-​​balancer is not. And as a plat­form, an ADC offers a great deal more flex­ib­il­ity and func­tion­al­ity than a load-​​balancer.

   Thanks,
   Lori

   Reply
   • Greg Ferro says:

     22 August 2008 at 12:08

     No need to beg , and, please, feel free to dis­agree, but don’t expect me to fall down in mar­ket­ing rap­ture at F5’s marki­tec­ture for load balancers.

     For example, mod­ern routers not only for­ward IP pack­ets, they also do QoS, Filtering, Network Monitoring and Reporting, vir­tu­al­isa­tion and so on. Has the mar­ket renamed them Advanced Packet Controllers ? Packet Service Engines ? (actu­ally, not for lack of try­ing either now that I think about it.)

     ADC is just a name to try and dif­fer­en­ti­ate your product from com­pet­it­ors. Sure you do all those things, and more, but lets not overdo the hype.

     Keep it real.

     Reply
     • Lori MacVittie says:

       22 August 2008 at 12:18

       Good point on the routers. The ter­min­o­logy isn’t to dif­fer­en­ti­ate from com­pet­it­ors, how­ever, as every “load bal­an­cer” in the mar­ket is gen­er­ally using the term ADC now. It is, in part, to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between load-​​balancing, which is a rudi­ment­ary method of hand­ling applic­a­tion scalab­il­ity and reli­ab­il­ity, and applic­a­tion deliv­ery, which takes a more intel­li­gent, inter­act­ive approach to the problem.

       I do see where you’re com­ing from, though, and under­stand the frus­tra­tion with ter­min­o­logy and what you see as mar­ket­ing over sub­stance. But gen­er­ally speak­ing when we start talk­ing to folks about things other than basic load-​​balancing they’re sur­prised by what else they can do — because they think the products are just “load-​​balancers”. That’s a good reason to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the two products because there are “just load-​​balancers” out there that don’t have the cap­ab­il­it­ies that an ADC does.

       Apologies if my pas­sion for the mar­ket in gen­eral comes across as hype. I’ve been involved in load-​​balancing and ADCs for much longer than I’ve been at F5 and the evol­u­tion and cap­ab­il­it­ies of all the products in the mar­ket have grown so much that some­times I get a little (okay a lot) excited about it.

       Lori

       Reply
       • Greg Ferro says:

         22 August 2008 at 12:35

         I think my point cuts both ways, as con­sumers we should under­stand what we are buy­ing so that fancy names don’t blind us to real­ity. Thats is mostly the point of my tongue in cheek approach.

         Love pas­sion, that’s what lets me do this too.

         Folks, go over to http://​www​.the​applic​a​tiondeliv​erynet​work​.com/ and keep up to date with Lori per­sonal site (skip the F5 one). I may not always agree but , respect!, she has got tons of it when it comes to this stuff.

         Reply
     • Sean says:

       7 March 2010 at 14:55

       Or “Integrated Services Routers” or “Aggregation Services Router”? I haven’t heard any­one without a suit and a Cisco badge use the term “uni­fied com­mu­nic­a­tions” in a ser­i­ous context.

       “Routers” weren’t called routers when they ori­gin­ally came out, we didn’t have “layer 3 switches” ori­gin­ally, and a “switch” is just a mul­ti­port bridge. But these are the terms we use now without thinking.

       F5 is doing exactly what Seth Godin would tell them to do — dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves. If they’re suc­cess­ful, the mar­ket will call ADCs ADCs and load bal­an­cers load bal­an­cers. If not, no one uses the term ADC.

       Call it load bal­an­cing, applic­a­tion ser­vices, whatever you want. The stuff that F5 calls “applic­a­tion deliv­ery” is amaz­ing. We’ve got our F5 split test­ing traffic between dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the applic­a­tion and fix­ing prob­lems in leg­acy code. From my chair, even if the term never sticks F5 has earned the right to try.

       Sean

       Reply
2. Charles says:

   7 March 2010 at 14:21

   Application Delivery Controllers are what all good load bal­an­cers grew up to be.

   Seriously though, a hard­ware load bal­an­cer is the aggreg­ate point of vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion across all applic­a­tions. ADCs also rep­res­ent advanced con­cepts like applic­a­tion depend­ency and dynamic provisioning.

   Reply
3. FrintonBoy says:

   8 March 2010 at 08:41

   Hi,

   I try not to agree with Lori too much , but I find myself hav­ing to do so here!

   I often talk about ADCs being the 3^rd gen­er­a­tion of the fam­ily of products that star­ted with Load Balancing.

   Gen 1. Load bal­an­cing — mess­ing about with IP addresses, in a net­work bridge
   Gen 2. Application Acceleration — become a proxy and add cach­ing etc
   Gen 3. ADC — take all that came before, then wrap it with intel­li­gence (script­ing lan­guage etc)

   Not every vendor, or product set has made it through all the gen­er­a­tions. That is why it is use­ful to dif­fer­en­ti­ate. Otherwise you end up com­par­ing apples with a dis­sim­ilar fruit of your choice…

   Nick

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