Crescendo's Web Application Performance Blog

Here at Crescendo, we are actually asking you to pay less for your ADC solution - so it meets your needs and budget TODAY. Our future proof offering allows you to pay as you grow - eliminating the need for expensive forklift upgrades or hardware refresh cycles. HyperScale allows you to cascade up to ten Crescendo ADC controllers together to be managed as one logical unit - all the way up to 100 Gbps! We are doing live demos here at Interop Las Vegas and the response has been overwhelming...

Learn more about Hyperscale>

We wrote about Google adding a performance factor to its page rank algorithm a few months back when it hit the web rumor mill. Now Google has officially announced the news on the Google Webmaster blog.

Google backs up its decision to include performance with links to its own research showing that people spend less time on low-performing sites. Interestingly, their research indicates that the dampening effect of slower performance continues long after the delays disappear:

"Users exposed to the 400 ms delay for six weeks did 0.21% fewer searches on average during the five week period after we stopped injecting the delay."

From this time forward, a poor performing site not only costs you customer loyalty, it can lower your standing in Google search results, costing you additional 'organic' search results.

If you're already spending time and effort on search engine optimization, consider the benefits of performance optimization using an application delivery controller. And if you're not sure what kind of performance gains you can achieve, you can get a fast answer using Crescendo's Performance Calculator.

The overall agreement on the panel was that the network part in a cloud environment is a critical enabler that just has to work. The premise of cloud computing is the ability to achieve an order of magnitude savings in running your operations and at the same time gaining greater flexibility in resource usage and deployments. The risks if not implemented correctly are disruptions to your service, downtime, unpredictable service quality, difficulty to troubleshoot events, security, and the list goes on. All of these have to be tackled on the system architecture side to be able to seamlessly work together and address well all of the possible pitfalls. The challenge in getting a successful recipe here is in orchestrating all the pieces to perform exceptionally well together.

One option to reduce the risks is to remove performance dependencies between the various layers in the system. If the network layer just works no matter what, you can focus on top performance in your application layer without having to worry about the network part. If you run into issues you have to troubleshoot, the lack of dependence between the layers makes troubleshooting each layer separately simple and significantly reduces the overall complexity. This is possible if you can build a network that responds in a highly predictable way even when network traffic conditions change. This is already achievable today when using dedicated hardware like Crescendo Networks' AppBeat DC with its ability to handle traffic under varying conditions with low variance and guaranteed SLAs.

The other challenge when going into cloud is to actually gain the operational efficiencies and cost savings it promises.

The ways to achieve this are through:

• Sharing resources between multiple services
• Spinning up and down new resources when needed and being able to use them at other times for other services
• Spending the same management time and resources on large systems as on small systems - thus enjoying economies of scale
• Growing your needed resource pool in an incremental and economical way - spend on new resources only when there is demand for them without having to pre-build your system with dormant unused capacity

At Crescendo Networks, we know these challenges are critical to the success of cloud services as well as for today's hosting service providers. To address the economical "grow as you need" requirement we are developing functionality that will allow you to grow your system over time. With it, you'll be able to purchase one of our ADCs to fit your exact demand profile today while being able to add more capacity to the same system as demand expands and new capacity is needed. Using this functionality will allow incremental and economical growing of an ADC system. It will also make redundant the demand guessing game IT managers have to do today. Instead of trying to forecast your demand, just get what you need today and worry about extra capacity only when you need it.

We call this functionality - HyperScale.

Come visit our booth #2431 at Interop 2010 in Las Vegas to see a demo of how it works.