Chris Gale, EMEA Partner Director, A10 Networks, suggests an array of questions centred around ensuring you pick the best application delivery controller (ADC) to suit your needs.
Is it time to refresh your application delivery controller? Maybe your current box is at the end of its life or you’re looking for more functionality or better price-per-performance? Or perhaps your application landscape has evolved and you’re examining ADC providers to help optimise app delivery, or to bridge your cloud and traditional on-premises application environments? Here are the 10 most important questions to ask an ADC provider before you buy:
Can I run all ADC features simultaneously?
You wouldn’t buy a car if you couldn’t use every feature when you drive it. Imagine having to shut down the steering wheel to use the stereo, or having to stop using the gas pedal in order to turn on the air conditioner. You wouldn’t feel like you got your money’s worth, and it’d be grossly inefficient.
What is the TCO?
You deserve to know how much your ADC is going to cost you in the long run. You don’t need sneaky licensing fees and upgrades popping up at every turn.
How do you support multi-tenancy?
When it comes to ADCs, app delivery has to be optimised and secure, with few headaches. Often, companies run hundreds of apps, each of which requires a specific set of policies that can provide better levels of service to certain customers. Businesses need the granularity to provide app-specific ADC policies to the majority of their applications and user groups. These policies must be tailored to each individual application, but having one ADC per app is not always feasible.
Is the ADC easy to use?
Ease of use and integration are huge factors in the purchasing decision.ADC products must be completely programmable and interoperate with other complementary infrastructure gear. Difficult-to-use APIs, or a CLI that is not intuitive and doesn’t adhere to industry norms, make operation all the more challenging and cumbersome, which can delay getting boxes up and running and require extra training for IT staff.
What’s your cloud strategy?
Your ADC vendor should have a finely-tuned cloud strategy that will help you bridge the physical and cloud-native worlds. This is especially true for service providers. If your ADC vendor lacks solutions for cloud-native applications, multi-cloud environments and ADC-as-a-Service, are they the right partner to invest in for your business’s future?
What sets your operating system apart?
If your box is running a legacy operating system or one that hasn’t been updated or optimised in a few years, your apps may feel like they perform as if they’re running over dial-up.
How do your ADCs scale?
There’s nothing more frustrating than a box that doesn’t scale. Don’t get burned by limited scaling, or by a forced upgrades or additional purchases to achieve the scalability your applications require.
What do your customers say?
Before you take the plunge and side with an ADC vendor, learn about what their customer base thinks about them and their service. Due diligence requires close examination of case studies, reviews, and references.
How stable is the executive leadership team?
Turmoil and turnover in the executive ranks can directly impact customers. It impacts productivity, decisions, and product direction and availability.
What’s in your trophy case?
Finally, tech awards are a great validation of the product.
