infoTECH Feature

January 27, 2015

Radware Integrates Platforms with Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure

Radware (News - Alert) is known for its network load balancing and security software. As such, it has vested interest in the advancement of network infrastructures which can bridge the gap between platforms. Cisco (News - Alert), with its Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI), attempts to do just that by creating an object-oriented networking layer which will provide a central point for virtual and physical resource management.

Therefore, it is fitting that Radware's most recent announcement concerns the integration of its Alteon and DefensePro platforms into Cisco's ACI. The combination of these services will allow Radware's enterprise clients to use the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to manage their applications individually from remote locations. Soni Jiandani, the senior vice president of marketing at Cisco, spoke about the “micro-segmented” control that this pairing makes possible.

“With Cisco ACI, the agility of the datacenter is greatly increased without compromising application SLAs and performance,” Jiandani said. “Applications can move, scale-up or scale-out while retaining the associated services without any location specific constraints. Together with Radware attack mitigation security, our joint customers can now deploy a very secure micro-segmented data center.”

To make this clearer, it may be necessary to refer back to a Cisco blog post on the launch of ACI. In that post, Padmasree Warrior (News - Alert), Cisco's chief technology and strategy officer, compared the traditional and ACI networking models to the installation of an Android app. When a user installs an app onto his or her Android (News - Alert) phone, he or she expects it to understand how the graphics engine works, the resolution of the screen, and other operating system-specific details. Developers made the app to work with the Android system, and because it understands the system, there is no need for intervention from individual users. That is representative of what the ACI hopes to achieve: complete understanding from applications to hardware as operating systems.

On the other hand, traditional networking suffers from the problem that there is no abstraction layer which allows data center applications to understand exactly how the physical servers want to use those applications. This creates the need for a lot of manual intervention to get applications to run efficiently. ACI attempts to solve this problem by unifying physical and virtual elements of the network.

Getting back to Radware, this means that enterprises can benefit from those advancements with respect to the security and management of their own networks. As David Aviv, the vice president of advanced services at Radware, puts it, “Radware with Cisco ACI delivers a true application aware network. Together, we can provide simplified automation so applications can be deployed faster and efficiently with scalable application service intelligence and integrated service security.”

Enterprises can more efficiently control their networks because the Cisco APIC will automate the insertion of services that enterprises demand of their Alteon and DefensePro-controlled networks. In addition, users can expect to meet SLA requirement of software packages with greater ease because of ACI's control over the entire network.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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