Award-winning Array AVX3600 lowers the barrier to entry for cloud providers and enterprises seeking guaranteed performance in shared environments
Array Networks has announced the immediate availability of its new entry-level AVX3600 virtualized appliance. The AVX Series is a line of purpose-built Array hardware appliances that is designed for multi-tenancy and engineered to host multiple application delivery and security functions while maintaining guaranteed performance, as per the press release.
New for the AVX3600 is the ability to support virtualized networking and security functions – such as load balancing (ADC), SSL VPN and Web application firewall (WAF) – with either guaranteed or best-effort performance. For instance, the AVX3600 can support one large, two medium, four small or eight entry-level virtual appliances with guaranteed performance, or it can support 16 shared-entry virtual appliances with best-effort performance. This new capability, along with a lower cost of entry, gives service providers and enterprises increased flexibility in supporting a larger number of customers and applications.
By allocating dedicated CPU, SSL, memory and I/O to each instance and by separating dedicated resources to management functions, IaaS providers can guarantee performance for each customer and enterprises can guarantee performance for each application workload. For example, dividing the AVX3600 into four small ADC virtual appliances, each instance guarantees 7Gbps throughput; and divided into eight entry ADC virtual appliances, each instance guarantees 3.5Gbps throughput.
The AVX Series gives IaaS cloud providers several advantages. First, unlike other multi-tenant application networking solutions on the market, Array’s virtualized instances do not compete for shared hardware resources. As a result, cloud service providers can offer load balancing or secure access as infrastructure services with guaranteed high-performance SLAs. In addition, service providers do not need to rack and stack and manually configure stand-alone appliances for each new customer. New customers or workloads can instead be seamlessly spun up from an automated cloud management system.
For enterprises that rely on applications from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others, it is common practice to deploy a pair of ADCs for each application for high availability, as well as separate VPN solutions for secure access. By contrast, Array’s new virtualized appliance allows enterprises to assign virtual ADC instances to load balance multiple applications and assign virtual SSL VPN instances to provide secure remote and mobile access – all from a single system. In conjunction with support for VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) and Microsoft System Center, AVX Series virtualized appliances give enterprises a more streamlined, cost-efficient and agile path to ensuring availability, performance and security for business-critical applications.
Paul Andersen, Director of Marketing for Array Networks remarked, “Service providers and enterprises are moving toward cloud and virtualization technologies, but are faced with challenges in maintaining performance and cost-efficiency for application delivery and security functions. With the AVX3600, these customers get the best of all worlds – the agility and management efficiency of virtual appliances, the guaranteed performance of dedicated appliances and the ability to cost-effectively support a larger number of smaller customers or applications where performance is a secondary consideration.”
