Radware Alteon NG 4408

Features and Benefits:

Alteon NG enables application delivery networking by providing safe and efficient distribution of business-critical applications across your company's network. Alteon NG is well suited for environments with growing SSL offloading needs.

Application SLA:

Alteon NG is our next-generation application delivery solution and the industry's only ADC built from the ground up to ensure application SLA at all times. It bundles FastView Web Performance Optimization (WPO), Authentication Gateway, Advanced Denial of Services (ADoS), ITM/bandwidth management as well as maximum SSL and compression capacities.

Alteon NG can guarantee application SLA like no other ADC in the market:

• Architecturally designed to ensure application SLA by delivering resource reservation and full isolation per application
• Delivers application SLA monitoring capabilities, via the built-in application performance monitoring (APM) module, providing SLA visibility by application, transaction or location
• Accelerates application response time for higher conversion rates, revenues and productivity, by leveraging FastView, the industry's most advanced web performance optimization (WPO) technology
• Ensures application SLA even under attack by integrating Radware's Attack Mitigation System (AMS) and signaling attack information upon detection to mitigate it at the perimeter
• Alteon NG is part of a unique attack mitigation architecture, allowing accurate detection and mitigation of the most advanced cyber-attacks.

Engineered to Ensure Application SLA

Alteon NG enables companies to flexibly allocate a separate virtual ADC (vADC) instance per application, service or department. Each vADC instance is fully isolated from neighboring instances and has independent CPU cores, memory, network stack, management control and operating system versions. As a result, the Alteon NG ADC ensures complete fault isolation and predictable application SLA for all delivered Web applications at all times. In addition, next-generation services can be quickly and safely enabled without impacting the performance of other service applications.

Alteon NG is designed to dynamically scale when necessary, without hardware modifications. It can scale up ondemand, adding more throughput, services and vADCs, or out-of-the-box on-demand, leveraging an external extensible resource pool (such as server infrastructure) for computational intensive NG services. By eliminating the need to purchase additional ADC units, Alteon NG allows for cost-effective hardware consolidation. It provides easy, fast provisioning of additional vADC instances, without service interruption, at a fraction of the cost of buying a physical ADC.

	Full Application SLA Visibility with Radware's Application Performance Monitoring Radware's Application Performance Monitoring (APM) module provides real-time tracking of application SLA by measuring real-user transactions, including real errors. Embedded in Alteon NG, Radware's APM is an out-of-the-box solution which doesn't require synthetic transaction scripting or additional installation - reducing deployment time and costs. APM intuitively tracks SLA by location, user, application and transaction type to expedite root cause analysis. Additionally, it provides historical reports based on user defined SLA that feature granular analysis, allowing the measurement of the delay per transaction phase and including data center time, network latency and browser rendering time.
	Full Toolset for Web Application Performance Acceleration Alteon NG offers a full set of tools for providing the highest application performance acceleration, including caching, compression, SSL offloading and TCP optimization. Alteon NG enables faster communication between the client and server, while offloading CPU intensive tasks from the application server. Radware's FastView technology, embedded in Alteon NG, adds a second layer of acceleration by providing up to 40% faster web application response times for a variety of end-user devices and browser types/versions, and with specific optimization for mobile devices. FastView automatically adapts to new application versions and new modules, which eliminates manual code optimization work and allows organizations to focus on core business competence. Alteon NG offers an embedded HTTP/2 gateway, a third layer of acceleration that resolves many inherent HTTP 1.1 protocol performance bottlenecks, and thus enables additional acceleration of web applications. By leveraging the Alteon NG acceleration functionality and pairing it with FastView's content analysis algorithms, the HTTP/2 gateway can automate server pushes, even before the client requests the content, and provide an even faster application response time. Alteon NG offers a full set of acceleration tools that work in concert to deliver the fastest Web application optimization experience yet, for any type of browser, mobile or desktop device.
	Unique Attack Mitigation Architecture As a key component of Radware's Attack Mitigation Network (AMN), Alteon NG delivers best-in-class web application security coverage. It leverages a unique Defense Messaging mechanism that efficiently mitigates attacks by signaling attack information to Radware's DefensePipe cloud service and DefensePro, a data center attack mitigator located at the network perimeter. The integration of advanced web application firewall capabilities, such as a unique out-of-path WAF deployment mode and auto-policy generation features, enable risk free implementation. In addition, full instance isolation and resource reservation ensures ADC resources. Even when WAF policies are updated, there's no impact on application availability and performance. This results in secured web application with guaranteed SLA. Finally, Alteon NG features a built-in authentication gateway which provides single sign-on (SSO) capabilities by supporting Radius, Active Directory, LDAP and RSA SecurID and simplifies user experience without compromising application security.
	Advanced Multi-Homing and Enterprise Gateway Capabilities The integrated LinkProof NG module delivers an application-aware, cost-effective solution to guarantee enterprise Web application service levels and ensure Internet connectivity at all times. By detecting application downtime through full-path application health monitoring, LinkProof NG allows organizations to pinpoint issues in various networking nodes and enables instant recovery along the entire WAN path. By simultaneously load balancing and optimizing both inbound and outbound traffic of multiple WAN links, the solution serves as an advanced enterprise gateway which optimizes access to cloud applications by applying advanced TCP congestion control and selecting the best ISP link per service. LinkProof NG increases employee productivity and reduces costs at the branch office by supporting hybrid WAN architecture, aligning allocated WAN links by priority and accelerating employee access to SaaS applications.

Enterprise-Grade, Cloud-Ready ADC Full Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Alteon NG ensures absolute uptime and effective disaster recovery (DR) for local and globally dispersed applications at all times. By leveraging advanced health checks, traffic redirection, persistency and content modifications capabilities, it guarantees transaction completion through real-time identification and bypasses faulty elements along the transaction path. In addition, Radware's global server load balancing (GSLB) service ensures the global availability of geographically dispersed applications. Moreover, disaster recovery also takes place by leveraging a public cloud load balancing solution such as Alteon NG for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Alteon NG features Active-Active or Active-Passive Device redundancy to reduce service interruptions and guarantee service uptime. It is IPv6 ready, enabling load balancing of applications over IPv4 or IPv6 networks with no need to modify the applications.

Architecture:

Next-Generation, Multi-Service Architecture for Full SLA Assurance

For enterprises of any size, Alteon NG ADC provides the industry's first fault isolated instances, providing virtualization while locking in machine resources per virtual instance. This technology enables each Alteon NG platform to run multiple, completely autonomous ADC instances, each with its independent operating system versions, CPU cores, memory, network stack and management control.

The ability to create ADC instances and allocate dedicated system resources to each within the Alteon NG platform means that SLA requirements for each ADC instance can always be met and advanced Web services can run without an impact on performance.

Legacy ADCs with shared virtualized segmentation can result in resource contention between ADC instances – where one overloaded application will hog system resources from another. With Alteon NG, organizations that need to ensure the performance of critical applications can dedicate a virtual ADC instance to each application and be assured that the performance of the application will never be compromised. The unique ADC deployment model in Alteon NG provides fully fault isolated ADC instances for running multiple services.

The Alteon NG architecture was designed to dynamcially scale when necessary. On-demand scalability provides more throughput, services, and vADCs into existing Alteon platforms, without hardware modifications, causing any disturbance to running applications, or risking resource contention on any of the ADC services. Each Alteon NG instance can be allocated with capacity units as needed.

Moreover, next generation ADC services have the potential to be resource intensive with a resource requirement that may resource requirement may vary significantly in different scenarios (e.g. under cyber attack, or serving more complex pages) and across applications. Radware's Alteon NG solution offers a deployment model which not only locks resources per application, but also guarantees resources per NG ADC service such as FastView and WAF, allocating dedicated capacity units per NG service.

Should additional resources be required, Alteon NG also supports on-demand scaling out-of-the-box, leveraging external compute resources for those computational-intensive NG services.

Multi-service architecture for full SLA assurance

Technical Specifications:

Alteon 4408

• 5 Gbps high performance application delivery appliance
• On-demand service scalability
• 6 Gigabit Ethernet ports (copper) + 2 Gigabit fiber ports (SFP-GBIC Mini)
• RJ45 serial connection
• USB interface for software installation and recovery
• Suitable for small, medium and large datacenters
• Provides SSL acceleration, compression, and caching

Hosting and Cloud ADC Services Solution:

Radware's Application Delivery Controller (ADC) Technology enables cloud and hosting businesses to offer scale-out, high-availability, health-monitoring and application acceleration services to their customers.

Traditional hosting and cloud infrastructures are required to offer their customers solutions to overcome challenges associated with the offpremise hosting of business applications and the subsequent lack of control over the compute infrastructure hosting these applications. Radware's solution enables providers to offer scale-out services and highly available application hosting and additional application performance services to their customers. In addition, it offers cloud burst, cloud disaster recovery and cloud based application developing and testing services to enhance the enterprise application lifecycle options.

The Challenge

Cloud computing is quickly becoming a common option for offering cost effective hosting services, effectively making computational power available for a much greater number of use cases and applications. However, the need for highly reliable, high performance service guarantees is not going away, further more with cloud technologies organizations are looking to find a way and improve the economics of compute while retaining the level of service they have gotten used to in their internal data centers. Cloud and hosting providers are challenged to offer their customers a hybrid approach in which high assurance and high economics merge.

Application Delivery in general and load balancing in particular are fundamental components of the hosted virtual application. Effectively, the systems composition that constructs applications running in virtually hosted or cloud infrastructures must use the load balancer as an integral component of the solution. Load balancers enable scaling out of cloud applications by adding virtual machines to an application, and build high-availability into applications by continuously healthmonitoring the virtual machines and forwarding traffic only to healthy ones. That being the case, it is a basic requirement for cloud providers to offer load balancing services as part of their overall infrastructure.

For Enterprise Applications, basic load balancing is not sufficient. Enterprise applications and web applications in particular, are typically not designed out of the box to cope with today's QoE requirements. End users connect from a variety of locations globally with a variety of devices over a variety of networks. Controlling the experience resulting from the variety of application usage patterns as well as dealing with application lifecycle related changes, requires advanced application level capabilities. Some of these capabilities are application acceleration, caching of static content, application L7 policy enforcement, and security functionality. Enterprise applications are commonly built with these capabilities implemented on an ADC front ending the application.

Cloud and hosting providers are required to offer solutions that meet the capability and price requirements of business customer's at large scale with native multi-tenant support and very operationally efficient management systems. Consequently the ability to add advanced ADC functionality into existing load balancing services, potentially as a premium service offering, is valuable in creating additional revenue streams and building differentiated solutions to better fit the provider customers. Radware's Application Delivery Fabric uniquely addresses the cloud and hosting provider requirements by presenting an opportunity to increase revenues and attract more customers.

The Radware ADC Fabric Cloud and Hosting Solution

The solution enables providers to build their own basic load balancing farm supporting scale-out and high availability for hosted applications. Additionally, the solution offers a service level continuum allowing providers to move tenants from basic load balancing services on to advanced application delivery services with a variety of capabilities. At the heart of the Radware cloud and hosting application delivery solution is the ability to rollout application delivery services, based on profiles which comprehensively represent the specific capabilities and capacity provided to the end users over multi-tenant, fully isolated, purpose built hardware, ADC-VX, and over commodity off –the- shelf virtualized hardware. The solution easily integrates into OSS and BSS tools with a RESTful API and plug-ins available for leading commercial cloud platforms. This integration makes the application delivery service operations, the management of all ADC resources, and server resources available for ADC services, very straightforward and intuitive. Cloud and hosting providers can easily scale their ADC service capacity by adding additional purpose built ADC-VX systems or by allocating additional general purpose, x86 based resource pools. Through Radware's Application Delivery Service Automation Plugin, vDirect, providers are relieved from managing all application delivery resources and interface only with an abstraction layer that natively responds to cloud and datacenter service requests and workflows.

The solution is comprised of the following Radware products:

1. Radware Alteon ADC-VX – Industry leading ADC Virtualization technology running the industry's highest number of virtual ADC instances on a single platform. The ADC-VX platform offers full resource isolation, network isolation, fault isolation and management isolation between all virtual ADC instances best suiting the multi-tenant operation in a cloud environment. ADC VX is a core resource of the Radware ADC Fabric solution.
2. Radware Alteon VA – fully capable enterprise grade Virtual ADC Appliance running over all major hypervisor platforms such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Open XEN, and RedHat KVM. The product runs the exact same firmware as the hardware versions of the Alteon ADC, providing a unified interface for management, operation and automation across the complete ADC fabric. Alteon VA is a resource in the Alteon ADC Fabric.
3. Radware vDirect – Automating the processes related to the ADC services in the hosting and cloud infrastructure. ADC services include adding tenants using predefined application optimized templates or provider customized templates, in any deployment model onto the ADC fabric, activating services for tenants and migrating services or tenants across resources of the ADC fabric. vDirect simplifies the ongoing operations while flexibly integrating into the cloud & hosting provider management systems.

The following image illustrates the Radware ADC Fabric components in the cloud and Hosting datacenter.

According to the above service models, Radware has developed a unique business model by which more flexible pricing, billing and licensing options, offering better alignment with end user billing, is available for cloud and hosting providers. Additionally, according to the specific service offerings of the cloud and hosting provider, Radware offers joining the Cloud partner program which provides further benefits.

Features and Benefits

The key benefits of the Radware ADC Fabric Solution for Cloud and Hosting Providers are the ability to offer a very broad spectrum of load balancing and application delivery services to its customer while maintaining the ability to very specifically define the solution sets that make most sense to the specific cloud and hosting business. Such flexibility enables better addressing end user requirements, better alignment of services to the requirements and the potential to create additional revenues through offering high SLA services at a very economical price point.

Some of the solution features are listed as follows:

• Granular, operator defined Application Delivery Service definition
• Highly scalable Application Delivery Controller Fabric
  • T hroughput Capacity
  • T enant Support
  • N etwork Services
• Intuitive integration and Service Automation in Cloud and Hosting Infrastructure
• Highly Scalable, Dense multi-tenant ADC Appliances
• Very broad hypervisor technology support to suit your cloud platform
• Identical functionality and operations model across form factors and service delivery models

Summary

Understanding the close relationship between cloud infrastructure services and managed hosting services with regards to how they apply to enterprise customers that are considering adopting cloud services, Radware offers the most scalable high assurance multi-tenant application delivery services platform in the market. With Radware's ADC Fabric solutions, providers can offer a broad variety of load balancing and Application delivery services custom defined to address their customers' requirements. Radware's solution supports easy migration of customer service levels with a minimal operational overhead on the provider operation. By offering a variety of services, the providers can increase the revenue per customer and the commitment level of their customers.

In alignment with the hosting and cloud infrastructure markets, Radware extends special partnership programs and uses a special business model with cloud and hosting providers. Radware's cloud and hosting business model reduces risk and upfront investment by providers while enabling creation of custom and granular application delivery service profile offerings to the provider customers.

Documentation:

Download the Radware Alteon NG Series Datasheet (PDF).

Download the Radware Alteon Technical Specifications Datasheet (PDF).