Today more then ever datacenters need a network architecture that can meet the needs of adapting to business requirements. To fully leverage the benefits of hosting datacenters, cloud services and a global workforce, IT will need to invest in a robust, resilient datacenter network with Layer 4-7 switching that can be easily provisioned, managed and secured. In effect, many datacenters need to extend datacenters from the server to the switch. As organizations seek to improve application performance and load balancing across multiple servers in an increasingly distributed network, the flexibility and the consolidation that virtualziation affords makes both operational and financial sense. With the shift to virtualization infastructure in the datacenter, the importance of the network increases and the ways in which the organization depend on the network expands as well.
Like other virtualization use cases, virtualized load balancers can provide organizations with benefits related to consolidation, security, costs savings, flexibility and ease of management.
Specifically virtualized load balancing can provide organizations with the following capabilities:
- Higher resiliency, security and control without appliance sprawl -Virtual devices per application
- Ability to deploy a new services application faster (in a virtual environment new applications and workloads can be added efficiently)
- Reduced operational costs associated with fewer physical appliances; lower power and cooling requirements; fewer staff needed for administration
