Application Delivery
Application delivery is the process of getting applications from the data center to the user as efficiently as possible. Application delivery infrastructure refers to the technology components that enable this efficiency across any network. A comprehensive application delivery infrastructure includes technologies that improve performance, availability, and security without compromising flexibility. Specifically, this includes components like application accelerators, desktop and application virtualization, application firewalls, secure remote access, WAN optimization, and performance monitoring.
From a desktop perspective, application delivery infrastructure provides:
Security: Application delivery provides users with applications and PC environments that are located on a central server in the data center. And, because the data follows the applications, the data benefits from the tightly controlled conditions of the data center
Manageability: Application delivery provides an infrastructure that simplifies the delivery and updating of the computing environment, regardless of underlying infrastructure.
Supportability: Application delivery addresses these challenges by providing a centralized, self-healing platform that adjusts on-demand to users’ needs.
Application delivery provides the infrastructure to easily maintain applications while also keeping corporate data under lock and key in the data center. Application delivery also encompasses technologies that can stream or virtualizes the desktop OS, providing users with on-demand PC environments that are easily configurable, updateable, and supportable. These centralized models give control back to desktop managers who can simply create, update, and remove entire computing environments in seconds — all while creating a more dynamic user environment.
Windows Application Delivery
Right Here. Right now. This is today’s business norm; anything less raises fear of less production, high operational costs and missed opportunities. The Windows Application Delivery solution can meet the norm that delivers applications and data to users in virtually any location on virtually any device. The savings continue with Windows Application Delivery software—by centralizing your applications and then virtualizing access to them, you can deliver applications as a service, providing on-demand access to users, while maintaining the flexibility to leverage future application architectures. This approach not only cuts management and support costs, but also increases data security and provides fast, reliable performance.
The software is also offering advanced tools for application load management, system-wide troubleshooting, and automated server failover and recovery. The software has just what it takes to accelerate your business growth and lower your operating costs while mitigating solution design and deployment risks.
Windows Desktop Delivery
Vinayak is creating a new approach for IT organizations to deliver and manage desktops. Desktop Server delivers Windows desktops from the datacenter as a secure on-demand service.
This new desktop delivery technology will enable IT organizations to efficiently concentrate resources in the datacenter, maintain a consistent, secure operating environment, and coordinate system-wide upgrades and migrations that are completely transparent to the end user.
Desktop Server addresses the most common and challenging scenarios that IT experiences with desktop delivery — security, costs, user experience, and management — by centralizing the desktops while still providing the full PC experience that end users expect.
Office workers, who occasionally work from an alternate location such as a home office, will especially benefit from the flexibility Desktop Server offers because their desktop is delivered as an on-demand service and is instantly on, always available, and accessible from any location.
IT can also perform proactive performance tuning on these virtual desktops to provide additional CPU allocation, memory, or storage, according to changing business and end-user needs.
This technology will connect the user to the right desktop and optimize it for their unique requirements, ensuring the best performance, best security and lowest cost of ownership.
Deployment to Delivery
The word "deploy" implies moving something large and complex from one location and physically entrenching it somewhere else. When you deploy something, it requires an enormous effort, takes a long time and almost always ends up costing more than expected. Once something is deployed, it’s hard to change, and most of the time you end up having to deploy more people to fix what didn’t work the first time. Deployment is unidirectional and generally implies a one-time event. Worse yet, when you operate with a deployment mindset, the process can be so rigid and slow, the experience of the people on the receiving end is often a distant afterthought. The moment any of the original assumptions change, the success of the application is compromised.
Delivery, by contrast, is a dynamic and fluid concept that far more accurately depicts the way successful companies think about getting applications to end users today. Unlike deployment, delivery is flexible, bi-directional, responsive and efficient. Instead of focusing on the unique deployment requirements of each new application at the time of rollout, your focus shifts to building a services-oriented application delivery infrastructure that assumes change by decoupling users, networks and applications, then dynamically re-coupling them on the fly in a way that can support an infinite number of application and user scenarios.
As you shift your focus from application deployment to application delivery, you also prepare your company for the significant future paradigm shifts that are inevitable in today’s rapidly changing business and technology climate. Most importantly, this approach to application delivery empowers you to be truly responsive to business change, delivering each new application with the best performance, security and cost, regardless of the application, user or location. In an increasingly volatile world where you face a dizzying array of changes to applications, users and business climates, making application delivery a strategic imperative is no longer an option. The good news is that making this shift now will enable your company to seize new opportunities and create an environment that is unparalleled in business productivity, efficiency and user experience.