Riverbed promotes AD as the cloud’s `suspension’

“If the cloud was a car then Application Delivery would be the suspension,” said Paul Wallace, Director, Product Marketing for the Stingray Business Unit at Riverbed Technology. “There is a fundamental need to make everything get delivered as smoothly as possible.”

And with the cloud this starts to mean much more than just delivery to a known end-point client where the application or process will be run. Now the question for many users is how to get a good performance from their cloud delivered applications and services when they are being accesses everywhere and anywhere, in both a protected and deliverable form.

“Most importantly, the big issue now is how to do this without impeding the performance,” Wallace said.

Riverbed’s approach to this problem, in the latest version of Stingray, has been to build a tool that will automatically create an Application Delivery (AD) tool that spools up as an integrated part of the application to be delivered, as it is launched on a virtual machine.

This would make it a good complement to the resource provisioning tools such as Parallels Application Packaging Standard (APS), which allows ISVs to package up applications with all the additional tools and services needed to make it install and run on different Cloud Service Provider environments.

Stingray can already deliver AD as a distributed service, and is capable of running on a wide range of hypervisors, including VMware, Microsoft HyperV, Xen, and OracleVM.

The new implementation of Stingray has the same AD core as the existing distributed version. As Wallace put it, the new version just automates the deployment and delivery processes.

“This approach means we can layer AD in and between applications and services,” Wallace said. “From there they can work with policy management tools to give another point of control.”

As well as targeting end users, he sees the new Stingray version being a boon to the Cloud Service Provider community.

“It can be very good for the CSPs. It allows them to build and create virtual licences for users, and meter the actual use of applications and services. This means they can deliver and manage applications as a Pay-As-You- Go service.”