Cisco ACI and Radware - From Point Solutions to Application Centric Services

Radware’s Alteon ADC and DefensePro integrated with Cisco ACI fabric enable IT managers drive greater value from their Cisco ACI deployment with automated tenant-based application delivery and security services.

For decades, IT managers were deploying application delivery (L4-7) and security services as point solutions; the network provided the basic connectivity, and each L4-7 had to be configured manually per each application. Virtualizing the compute fabric enabled to automate the configuration stage; however L4-7 and security are still deployed as point solutions – each application infrastructure change still requires intervention in rewiring the physical network, reconfigure network nodes and of course test the application integrity end-to-end and its performance.

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) in the data center introduces a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles. ACI delivers automation from the network layer and up to the compute fabric. Radware, by integrating Alteon and DefensePro with Cisco ACI fabric, enable automated tenant-based application delivery and security services.

What is the Radware offering?

Radware offers Best of breed Application Delivery and DoS Protection services. In today’s growing threats to your application service SLA you need a vendor you can rely on to maintain your SLA and eliminate the ‘noisy neighbor’ impact:

Radware Alteon NG application delivery controller (ADC) is a leading load balancer that guarantees application SLA for all Web, cloud and mobile applications.
Radware AMS offers most accurate real-time DoS/DDoS attacks detection and mitigation without blocking legitimate user traffic.

How does it work?

Radware’s developed ‘Device Packages’ for Cisco ACI that enable to insert ADC and DoS Protection services per application and/or per network tenant.
Cisco APIC automates the service insertion process while acting as a central point of policy control.

What’s in it for me?

You can now increase your data center agility without compromising application SLA:

Benefit from deploying Cisco ACI as a dynamic and automated datacenter infrastructure while continuously delivering applications without any adverse application SLA impact.
Applications can move, scale-up or scale-out while retaining the associated L4-7 and security services without any location specific constraints.
Error-free deployment thanks to automated processes running Radware-certified use cases

Use Case Example: Web application service profile

Using Cisco APIC the user can automate the creation and provisioning of a Web application profile. Cisco APIC offers a drag-and-drop UI to easily insert a Firewall, Load Balancer and other L4-L7 network services into a Web application profile. This, in turn, creates a service graph in which a L4-L7 service such as load-balancing, becomes an integral part of the tenant’s web application and can become operational by APIC in minutes.

Together Cisco ACI and Radware can automate the workflow between your application, networking, and security teams and provide a simpler, more efficient, policy driven operational model that will save on OpEx.

Blog Authored by Ron Meyran Radware, Edited and Posted by Cisco