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Application Availability and Scalability

As total cost of ownership for servers increases and the cost of service downtime grows exponentially, organizations need IP application infrastructure solutions that leverage multiple commodity servers to deliver always-on applications at low cost and with low risk of downtime. Brocade ServerIron Layer 4-7 switches are ideally suited to maximize service uptime while helping organizations scale their server infrastructures on-demand by incrementally adding low-cost commodity servers.

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Today, IP applications are at the heart of business operations, and these applications are used for various business-critical services that help reduce cost, increase productivity, and grow profitability. Downtime associated with these critical applications has a direct negative financial impact on the organizations. The cost of downtime keeps growing as reliance on mission-critical applications grows. Many mission-critical application transactions are time sensitive, and even poor response time, if not downright failures, could have severe negative impact on the end users of these applications and the business operations. For example, imagine a financial trade getting executed few seconds late because of poor application performance, or a request for patient information delayed during a medical emergency. Maximum uptime and peak performance are the critical requirements that must be met.

Increased demand for application resources results from growing number of users, increased volume of application transactions, changes in the nature of application usage, and implementation of new services. And, there is no indication that the need to scale applications to meet growing demands will ease soon. Accommodating growth and never-ending changes to applications requires flexible application and server farm infrastructure that can scale on demand. A critical component to growth is growing transparently to existing application users. Virtual infrastructure decouples physical resources from application availability and user capacity. It eliminates the need for forklift upgrades that destroy invested capital as business requirements change. Protecting invested capital is the first step to maximizing Return on Investment (ROI), and growing on demand conserves capital, which further maximizes the ROI. The virtual infrastructure also keeps application availability at a maximum independent of the physical changes to the infrastructure.

Brocade ServerIron high-performance application switches provide maximum availability to applications by intelligently distributing traffic among all available servers, and dynamically monitoring the ability of servers and applications running on the servers to deliver optimal performance. Using customizable health checks at various levels of granularity like host, port, application and transaction levels, load balancers transparently react in real time to increases and decreases in available server capacity by redistributing client traffic. Failures of servers and applications running on the servers do not cause disruption to the end clients. The failed resources are simply set aside until they come back online, and client connections are re-directed to other available servers. ServerIron switches can be deployed in multiple high-availability modes with stateful session synchronization and failover to preserve client connections during catastrophic failures. Applications are transparent to the presence and failures of load balancers, and function uninterrupted.

Scaling applications and server farms is a fundamental requirement for continued business growth, and is cost-effectively and transparently met by the ServerIron application switching solution. ServerIron switches provide virtually unlimited scalability to IP-based applications by allowing the use of multiple servers with load balancing and failover. The switches allow businesses to leverage commodity servers to build highly sophisticated and secure application infrastructure. As demand grows, simply slide in new server resources and configure the ServerIron switch to use the new resources. There is no need for forklift upgrades to the server farms and disruption to applications. With the fine-grain content switching intelligence of these switches, there is no longer the need to scale the entire server farm simultaneously. Growth can be targeted to specific application functions and content servers, which allows even higher levels of scalability. Additionally, existing resources can be more efficiently used by implementing content switching rules that maximize overall utilization.

Application Availability and Scalability Resources

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Abstract:

The Brocade ADX 1000 Series can be quickly upgraded in the field using software keys. This allows organizations to enable a full suite of hardware and software options when needed without disabling the system, which can disrupt service.

Abstract:

Brocade’s ServerIron ADX with Application Resource Broker (ARB) automates on-demand resource provisioning with visibility into application traffic and load level. To demonstrate the on-demand computing services provided by ARB, Brocade, SAP, and VMware have jointly defined a virtualized application reference architecture for the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform that closely models the customer deployment environment.

Abstract:

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) adoption has resulted in the increased service-enabling of IT systems. Now, Brocade® and Oracle offer a complete solution for the rapid deployment of business applications on an SOA foundation. Brocade® ServerIron® ADX has been validated with Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) SOA Suite 11g to deliver scalability and resiliancy, ensuring the highest availability of business application services.

Abstract:

The flexibility and simplified high availability of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 come from innovations to the core Exchange Server 2010 platform, enhancing performance, scalability, and reliability, while reducing TCO.

Abstract:

The combination of Brocade ServerIron Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) and Nominum Caching/Authoritative Name Servers (CNS/ANS) provides the solution of choice for highly resilient and scalable DNS service infrastructures used by the largest service providers.

Abstract:

Brocade® ServerIron® ADX delivers EMC RSA Key Manager scalability and resiliancy, ensuring high availability of key management services for data encryption applications.

Abstract:

Provides best-practice guidance for mission-critical enterprise application delivery, showing how to improve network access performance for WAN deployments of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 using Brocade ServerIron and Blue Coat ProxySG.

Abstract:

The ServerIron EM Plug-in significantly reduces the cost and complexity of managing applications that rely on ServerIron ADX and Oracle technologies

Abstract:

Discusses joint implementation of Brocade ServerIron application delivery switches with IBM WebSphere SIP servers. It provides guidelines for installations and step-by-step instructions for configuring Brocade ServerIron switches for load balancing of SIP servers.

Abstract:

Brocade and SAP jointly present how modern application and network technologies could be combined to form productive SAP business application landscapes, which perform well and securely when used globally.

Abstract:

Highlights the value of highly available and scalable application switching and details the specialized capabilities required in the application switches for deployment in a SIP service infrastructure for maximum benefit.

Abstract:

Brocade’s ServerIron ADX with Application Resource Broker (ARB) automates on-demand resource provisioning with visibility into application traffic and load level. To demonstrate the on-demand computing services provided by ARB, Brocade, SAP, and VMware have jointly defined a virtualized application reference architecture for the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform that closely models the customer deployment environment.

Abstract:

The transition from the IPv4 protocol to the IPv6 protocol represents a significant challenge to service providers, hosting services, and other companies. They must find ways to accommodate end users and Customer-Premises Equipment (CPE) devices that may be using either protocol. This white paper examines four transition technologies. Brocade is offering its customers a transition path to the new wave of Internet technologies while continuing to utilize customers’ existing infrastructure.