Riverbed's Stingray Moves to ADC-as-a-Service

Riverbed introduced the ability for cloud providers to deliver application delivery controller-as-a-service (ADCaaS) via its Stingray Services Controller.  The idea is to enable an "ADC per application" deployment model instead of today's network-centric model of "one application per ADC box."

In today's network architecture, applications and application objects may very well be distributed between data centers and application traffic flows dynamically to/from the cloud.  In this environment, Riverbed said it makes sense for the ADC to be near the app objects in the cloud and virtualized rather than dedicated so that they can spin up when demand rises in an elastic delivery model.

The new Stingray Services Controller, which is slated for release in Q3 2013, will enable enterprises and cloud providers to automatically provision, deploy, license, meter, and manage their ADC inventory in an as-a-service model.  The Stingray Services Controller handles on-demand licensing/provisioning of ADC instances, metering, billing/chargeback, monitoring, inventory and deployment.

The Stingray Services Controller enables Stingray Traffic Manager (STM) "micro" instances, which can range from small ADC instances to large Stingray instances all on commodity servers.  Linux containers are used to support up to 256 micro instances of the Stingray Traffic Manager per server platform.  These can be aggregated to support an infinite number of ADC host platforms.  The benefit is that customers do not have to guess their traffic and purchase ADC capacity in advance.  Riverbed said its design ensures full isolation and multi-tenancy scaling.

"With the emergence of the virtualized data center, legacy ADCs can be a bottleneck and were starting to be excluded from virtualization strategies and cloud deployments,” said Jeff Pancottine, senior vice president and general manager of the Riverbed Stingray application delivery business unit. “With Stingray Services Controller, customers will have a hyper-elastic ADC platform that can adapt to workload changes. This is a game changer – today we are introducing a software-defined application delivery fabric that enables Layer 7 services on top of any data center architecture."

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