KEMP Unveils Faster Application Delivery Controller

Moving up in application delivery controller (ADC) weight class, KEMP Technologies is making use of the latest generation of Intel processors to launch an ADC appliance that can provide up to 30Gbps of application throughput and 30,000 SSL transactions per second.

Christopher Baker, product marketing manager for KEMP Technologies, says the LoadMaster 5000 and 8000 series ADCs make use of multiple 10G Ethernet interfaces to push KEMP Technologies into the higher end of the data center market for the first time.

“Most people think of us in terms of being able to support Windows workloads,” says Baker. “These offerings will move us into larger data center environments running Oracle and SAP software.”

Baker says the latest Intel Xeon processors enables KEMP to eliminate the need to invest in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to reduce costs, while at the same time being able to embed SSL encryption processing, high capacity intrusion protection and detection software, software defined networking (SDN) functionality and Web Application Firewall (WAF) software all on the same ADC.

The LoadMaster 5000 and 8000 series, claims Baker, is also the only ADC currently able to provide adaptive traffic steering capabilities via direct integration with SDN controllers. While there are not many SDN controllers deployed just yet, Baker notes that it’s just a matter of time before SDNs and ADCs become natural extensions of one another.

Baker says that the advent of faster Intel processors is making it possible for KEMP to add more functions on top of the ADC as part of an effort to consolidate the number of appliances that need to be deployed inside a data center. Of course, providers of ADCs are not the only providers of appliances with similar ambitions. Vendors that manufacture firewalls, for example, are taking advantage of faster processors to add more functionality to their platforms.

In the meantime, the data center is becoming home to a mix of physical and virtual ADC appliances. Baker says IT organizations will choose between the two depending on the amount of congestion and attributes of the application workloads being run inside any segment of the data center.

Clearly, ADCs have come a long way from when IT organizations primarily relied on previous generations of load balancers to distribute application workloads across the data center. While many data centers still rely on a basic load balancer, the rise of more sophisticated ADCs makes it possible to deploy application workload spanning hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of virtual machine and switches at true Web scale.