Businesses looking to improve the performance of business applications like MicrosoftSharePoint 2013, increase reliability and scalability on Amazon Web Services (AWS), deliver enhanced visibility of an Application Delivery Controller-as-a-Service deployment, and enable enterprise and service provider customers to quickly and easily deploy application delivery services on demand and with better security may find the latest version of Riverbed’s Stingray of interest.
The Stingray Application Delivery Controller (ADC) product family provides scalable, secure and elastic delivery of enterprise, cloud and e-commerce applications. Stingray also controls and optimises end-user services by inspecting, transforming, prioritising and routing application traffic across the widest range of environments, from physical and virtual datacentres to public and hybrid clouds.
Riverbed’s approach automates the deployment, licensing and metering of application delivery services, making possible an `ADC per application’ delivery model in which costs for ADC-as-a-Service can be allocated to each client application. This reduces costs and time to production while enabling rapid change and scale for datacentre applications.
The primary enhancements are to the Stingray Traffic Manager and Services Controller components. With Traffic Manager there is now active-active load balancing for high-availability and scalability on Amazon AWS, minimising or eliminating points of failure within IT environments to deliver the highest level of availability and scalability for cloud-based applications.
It also includes a number of interoperability features, easy-to-use Web Content Optimisation and a key security enhancement with a new cryptographic module. This enhancement is in process for validation for Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Level 1.
The enhanced Traffic Manager improves SharePoint 2013 performance with support for intranet and Internet using the latest Web Content Optimisation techniques. This requires no changes to the application or web browsers.
The Services Controller enhancements include a new operations Graphical User Interface (GUI) to help administrators support service deployment and monitor ADC deployments, and a virtual appliance form factor and micro instance host to simplify deployment by freeing customers from the need to maintain the underlying operating system
It also now features simplified licencing and billing reports for chargeback purposes, and enhanced visibility of an ADC-as-a-Service deployment with a comprehensive suite of reports that provide customers feedback on utilisation of multiple resources.
“The static nature of traditional ADC architectures hasn’t evolved to meet today’s complex IT environments, including the rapidly expanding number of applications and the way end users consume and use these applications today,” said Jeff Pancottine, Senior Vice President and General Manager of ADC/Stingray team at Riverbed. “With the new Stingray ADC features announced today, Riverbed continues to help customers avoid common cloud configuration-related pitfalls and enables them to launch ADCs as they need them, accelerating the delivery and performance of applications.”
