Application delivery controller

An application delivery controller (ADC) is a network device in the datacenter that helps perform common tasks done by web sites in an effort to remove load from the web servers themselves. Many also provide load balancing. They usually sit between the firewall/router and the web farm. The ADC is in many cases described as the next generation load balancer. They tend to offer more advanced features such as content manipulation, advanced routing strategies as well as highly configurable server health monitoring. ADCs tend to offer features like compression, cache, connection multiplexing, application layer security, SSL offload, content switching combined with basic server load balancing.

Application acceleration products are available from many companies. This market segment is now becoming fragmented into two general areas: 1) general network optimization and 2) application/framework specific optimization. Both types of devices improve performance, but the latter is usually much more aware of optimization strategies that work best with a particular application framework, focusing on ASP.NET application performance tuning, or AJAX application performance tuning, for example.

There is growing consensus that the application acceleration market is moving towards more convergence between the network and the application layers

See also

• Application Delivery Network

External links

• Application Acceleration Market Hits $1.2B eWeek. Retrieved 10/27/2007.