By Riverbed Technology Guest Blog 1_2

There is a common misconception when it comes to load balancers and application delivery controllers. “Oh, it’s a load balancer! You need to talk to John in the network team.” It may not always be, “John in the network team,” but we sometimes get that kind of response when we talk to prospective customers.

So, what’s the difference, and what does your business you really need? I quite like motor sports, and I have been asked about traffic lights when I’ve mentioned traffic management, so let’s start there.

Simple Requirements Mean a Simple Solution

When you bought your car, most likely you bought it based on how you would use it and what needs it would fulfill. You have a daily commute to and from work. If your selection parameters stop there, you have a wide choice of cars to choose from, with quite a few price points and little differentiation based on features. There is, however, a good chance the steering wheel—the key control over the success of your journey—will be really basic. It likely won’t have buttons, paddles or dials—simple and straightforward. It will help you get from A to B. We can compare this to a load balancer, as it provides a simple service to support an application when demand is predictable and the customer/traffic behavior is known.

Competition Can Bring Complexity

What if you want your car to do more than get you from point A to B? Do you want to use it competitively? Do you want to win? You are going to want to tailor the performance of the car to match the rules and regulations of the race series. You have a much greater need to gain granular control of every aspect of the car’s behavior, quite often, even as you are racing from point A to B and beyond.

Expect to be holding onto something like the steering wheel that Lewis Hamilton from F1 uses. Many of the controls and dials give him the ability to fine-tune performance instead of simply switching things on or off. This is the granularity you need when you are racing a car full speed round a race track.

Now you are heading into application delivery controller (ADC) territory. As with the capabilities of the race car steering wheel, the value of an ADC becomes apparent when you want to be competitive. You have SLAs to adhere to, and you need to adapt, in real time, to the market conditions you are operating under to ensure the applications you are managing are delivered no matter what the demand.

Just as the race car steering wheel provides fine-tuned performance for a race, an effective ADC (vs. a load balancer) provides caching, compression, rate shaping and auto-scaling capabilities—and that can significantly improve the performance of your applications.

But complexity doesn’t have to mean complicated to use. What’s the point if you get granular control with an ADC, but only if you spend days setting it up? Ease of use has to be there, too.

There Is More Than One Type of Track

But there is one more aspect to consider: While racing cars are typically built for one type of race track, ADCs need to be built for the quickly changing IT landscape and continuously changing needs of the business.

What if, for example, you need to consider a physical data center and a virtual or cloud platform? There is no longer “one track” for application deployments. You need an ADC that gives you the same control and the ability to deliver applications in the competitive environment while being flexible enough to adapt to any type of deployment. If we were still talking about cars, you would need that amazing vehicle driven by Professor Pat Pending from Wacky Races!

ADCs, like racing cars, are more complex than your simple load balancer, but worth investing in if you want to win the race you are in. Like many IT purchases you make, it’s not the typical point A to B functionality you need to consider; it’s the value that the purchase will bring to your business while looking at the whole picture.

Nick Vale is senior manager, SteelApp Product Marketing, at Riverbed Technology. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of Talkin’ Cloud’s annual platinum sponsorships.