Cloud Delivery

Array cloud service delivery solutions provide the security, acceleration, availability, virtualization and integration cloud providers need to cost-effectively scale services, maintain profitability and meet customer requirements for cost, performance, data integrity and end-user experience.

Today’s enterprise data centers are highly complex, expensive to maintain and challenged to keep up with growing demand, new applications and fast moving Internet trends. As a result, cloud service providers that offer on-demand services and capacity are becoming a go-to solution for many businesses. To help cloud providers meet enterprise requirements for security, reliability, performance and control while maintaining the business agility and margins needed to remain profitable, Array cloud service delivery solutions:

  • Enable high-availability, high-performance services with massive scalability
  • Create private networks for cloud providers and their customers, complete with out-of-band secure remote access for control that does not impact services
  • Provide agile control over cloud infrastructure to create differentiated services and to automate operations for maximum efficiency
  • Dramatically reduce networking costs for application delivery and secure access by offering superior features and performance at 40% the cost of competing solutions
  • Significantly reduce capital expenditures by reducing server infrastructure by over 40% and maximizing use of virtualized infrastructure
  • Decrease operational expenditures by reducing staff needed for service delivery and by utilizing efficient designs that reduce costs associated with space and power
  • Accelerate time-to-revenue for service offerings by leveraging replicable, automated solutions that are both IT and customer friendly

Scale to the Clouds

Because offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) is extremely cost-sensitive, cloud providers commonly deploy replicable points-of-delivery that are highly-optimized for specific capabilities and are ultra-efficient in terms of space, power and equipment and support costs.

Array cloud service delivery solutions are engineered for the point-of-delivery, providing a set of security, availability, acceleration, virtualization and integration capabilities designed to keep traffic moving smoothly, meet customer SLAs and security requirements, accelerate time-to-revenue, lower support and infrastructure costs and affordably scale services to meet the requirements of a growing customer base.


Security


Array SPX Series appliances allow cloud providers to create secure private networks within their points-of-delivery from which customers can be offered control of purchased services and from which the provider can manage core systems. By creating private networks separate from the public network that allows access for out-of-band administration, cloud providers can gain competitive advantages in accessibility and bandwidth efficiency while maintaining data separation.

Because cloud providers often need to manage and support thousands of customers, Array SPX Series appliances are engineered and field-proven to support over 4000 fully-partitioned customers per point-of-delivery. For each private customer network, the SPX supports custom management interfaces with advanced end-point security mechanisms – giving customers superior control and a superior experience while enabling cloud providers to offer revenue-generating differentiated services.

Availability


Points-of-delivery may consist of hundreds of physical servers and thousands of virtual servers. Array APV Series appliances provide the traffic management functionality, scalability, performance and reliability to keep software and  infrastructure services running at their maximum potential to meet SLAs and deliver a premium end-user experience.

Located in front of application servers and Web services, APV Series appliances provide Layer 2-7 server load balancing, content routing and application switching, TCP offload and connection multiplexing, application virtualization, hardware SSL acceleration, dynamic caching and adaptive compression.

Deployed under the cloud, APV Series appliances can improve the performance, scalability and availability of both software and infrastructure services – for instance, offloading process intensive SSL encryption and serving as a guard dog for virtual load balancing services. Deployed above the cloud, APV Series appliances can be virtualized to offer basic load balancing services – managed by the customer via SPX Series appliances – for up to 4000 customers on a single system.

Engineered to operate in modern cloud provider environments, APV Series appliances support next-generation capabilities including load balancing for virtual servers, integration with virtual server management systems and support for forward-looking standards including IPv6 and 2048-bit SSL encryption and 10-Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. Leveraging a 64-bit multi-core architecture that delivers linear scalability up to 60Gbps per system, Array APV Series appliances deliver measurable performance improvements in cloud provider environments, including:

  • Increased application performance by as much as 10x or more
  • Lowered server and infrastructure costs totaling 40% or more
  • Reduced WAN and local bandwidth utilization totaling 30% or more
  • 99.999% service availability

Virtualization


Array’s cloud service delivery solutions support multiple virtualization capabilities essential for delivering cloud services, from the creation of virtual customer portals on the front end to back-end functions including network and application virtualization and virtual server integration.

On the front end, Array SPX Series appliances enable highly-customizable virtual portals that allow customers to manage software or infrastructure services. Virtual portals are associated with private VLANs and unique VIPs to create fully-integrated, fully-partitioned services that securely extend from the customer through to back-end infrastructure.

In addition to separating customers, Array SPX Series appliances separate customer and service provider networks and fully segregate public and private traffic, allowing customers to perform management tasks and securely transfer data without sacrificing public bandwidth to their services.

APV Series appliances support multiple VIPs on the same physical APV appliance that can be logically linked to virtual portals and VLANs created on Array SPX Series appliances. Each VIP can independently support all APV Series functions, giving cloud providers an ideal platform for cost-effectively offering infrastructure and software services tuned to the needs of their customers.

Each VIP allows applications to be virtualized across multiple physical and virtual servers based on flexible routing policies, giving cloud providers the ability to leverage server resources based on CPU, memory, traffic load, application type and user type for optimal performance and infrastructure utilization. In addition, mapping VIPs to multiple physical and virtual servers ensures customers are not affected in the event that a server fails or needs to be taken offline for maintenance. 

Further ensuring application availability, the APV Series appliances support current trends in server consolidation and virtualization – doing today for virtual servers what it once did for physical infrastructure. Integrating with virtual server management infrastructure, APV Series appliances can load balance virtual machines distributed across multiple physical servers and support advanced health checks and advanced traffic management algorithms to ensure optimal use of data center infrastructure and an always-on end user experience.

Integration


Many cloud providers are leveraging open application protocol interfaces (APIs) that provide system-to-system access to hundreds of automated backend functions. For many providers, anything that can’t be automated won’t go in the network. By directly integrating third-party systems with cloud provider management systems, layers of management can be eliminated to dramatically streamline service management and reduce cost of IT operations.

Service Automation Array cloud service delivery solutions enable cloud providers to integrate and automate all secure access and application delivery elements and provide customers with self-service management, security and scalability for a wide range of on-demand services.

Extensible XML-RPC interfaces integrate with cloud provider APIs to deliver on-demand provisioning that enables customers to provision services such as firewall rules, VPN access and server load balancing. After initial deployment, automated management of various functions allows customer administrators to self-manage many tasks, such as rebooting servers, reloading OSs, handling software upgrades and migrations, managing firewall and storage, enhancing load balancing functions, and much more. For many IaaS providers, these important services are not typically offered without costly, manually-operated service plans. After customers are provisioned with basic services, subsequent additional provisioning is automated and does not require the involvement of the cloud provider IT staff.

In addition, Array cloud service delivery solutions make customer provisioning fast and easy. For example, APV application delivery controllers can be enabled and available for customers to configure within five minutes of purchase, with customers able to easily update load balancing services from within secure Array virtual portals.

Management Automation Array’s robust and highly-extensible XML-RPC implementation is perfectly aligned with the cloud provider’s need to deploy data centers and services that are highly automated, require fewer IT managers and allow customers to purchase and self-configure additional features on-demand. All security, acceleration and virtualization elements are integrated with the cloud provider’s management and automation infrastructure, so the provider can manage their infrastructure from a single interface. Maximizing the potential of integration, support staff can be reduced by as much as half and time-to-revenue can be reduced from weeks to a matter of days.

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