In this technology driven business environment, data centers have become the lifeline of every organization, irrespective of its size. The concept of electronic data storage and transfer has been prevalent since the birth of the computers. However, with the advent of technology, the size of the machines reduced drastically with an increase in computing powers.

1. Application Delivery Networking: Functions of application delivery controller
In this technology driven business environment, data centers have become the lifeline of every
organization, irrespective of its size. The concept of electronic data storage and transfer has been
prevalent since the birth of the computers. However, with the advent of technology, the size of the
machines reduced drastically with an increase in computing powers. These developments like a chain
reaction led to the wider use of the technology in the everyday functioning of large business houses and
global organization, leading to use of technology driven machines in a networked environment.
Data centers, with their efficient computing services in a networked environment and a safe and secure
storage system for the mission critical data were made up of large rooms or multiple floors of a building
and housed servers, storage devices, telecom and application delivery networking systems. The
application delivery network is nothing but a suit of technologies that ensures application availability,
security and visibility throughout the network, irrespective of the location or device. Prevalent in most data
centers catering to a global organization, such networking systems are a combination of wide area
networking and application delivery controllers.
Application delivery controller also known as web switch or a content switch is loaded with a number of
useful functions. As an advanced traffic management device in a networked environment, this helps to
distribute specific applications to a number of geographically distant servers and sites. Being placed
between the router or firewall and a web farm it also facilitates load balancing of the website traffic at
times when there is a mix of applications over a wider network. Having evolved from layer 4-7 switches,
the application delivery controllers facilitates content manipulation, advanced routing strategies and also
monitors the configurable server health.
Though application delivery controller in all networking systems offer a number of features like
compression, cache, connection multiplexing, application layer security, SSL offload, content switching
along with server load balancing, the application delivery networking is being separated for a general
network optimization and application specific optimization. Other functions that the ADC’s are capable of
are TCP offload and acceleration capabilities in branch networks and integration of malware and DDOS
protection on web application through firewall protection.
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