So this is my first post here at WhatMatrix.com. My name is Marius Sandbu and I am the category consultant for the upcoming ‘ADC’ category (ADC=Application Delivery Controllers) – which will be posted soon!
I’ve been working with load-balancing solutions and different vendors for several years now. When I first came across WhatMatrix I liked the idea of being able to quickly compare different technical products to e.g. quickly find out what the supported features are, instead of googling through a lot of different whitepapers and datasheets to get that particular piece of information you need. Also since I have spent a great deal of time comparing different ADC vendors myself I wanted to share that information which might just help some people navigating in that jungle of information that is out there.
The largest web sites in the world are powered by some form of ADC today – Visa runs F5 BIG-IP, Ebay runs Citrix NetScaler
So what is an ‘ADC’? The term originates from the ‘load-balancing’ feature, which is a pretty simple solution, but an ADC can do so much more, optimize traffic, perform analytics, add security, content based filtering, geo-based load balancing and such. Think about it – the largest sites on the web are powered by some form of ADC today, Visa for instance runs F5 BIG-IP, Ebay runs Citrix NetScaler, they need all the type of features to process high amounts of traffic that constantly hammer their websites while still maintaining a high amount of security.
Moving forward there will be alot of change in this space because of the proliferation of containers and microservices, which will impact the traffic pattern inside a datacenter and introduce the need for more control for east-west traffic (e.g. load-balancing between hosts). Some vendors are also introducing container-based appliances to help shape the traffic in a containerized enviroment and also combine this with cloud-based services, which makes load balancing even more complex … .
Now a bit about the comparison that is coming out soon. I’ve decided to feature five different vendors in this space (while not all 5 vendors straight away). 
- From personal experience F5 is considered to be (one of) the leading vendors in this space (BIG-IP, VIPRION), which is makes it a vendor I have included in the list.
- Radware and Citrix are also part of the comparison with their NetScaler and Alteon product ranges respectively.
- I’ve also decided to include KEMP as part of the category and even though their market-share is not as large as that of the other vendor’s, they focus heavily on cloud-based solutions (a trend for other vendors as well).
- Lastly I’ve also included AVI Networks, which is a different vendor in this space and has recently been recognised as “cool” vendor by other analysts. AVI Networks differ from the others in terms of architecture (I’ll cover more on that later) which is why I wanted to add them to the list.
There are other player in the market that I’d like to keep an eye on like Barracuda networks, Brocade, Array Networks and others – if you are one of those vendors and would like to work with me on the inclusion in this matrix then please get in touch! (all listings on WhatMatrix are provided free by our community – they educate potential and existing users and help them make the right product decisions)
So this has been quick introduction to myself and I am looking forward to any feedback you might have on the category when it is published, so stay tuned ! 🙂
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Marius
WhatMatrix Category Consultant
(also visit me at https://msandbu.wordpress.com/)
buzz
