Top Ten Reasons why Stingray is better for your environment than a legacy hardware ADC

Since joining Riverbed 3 months ago to be their Lead ADC Systems Engineer here in Australia and New Zealand, I have been overwhelmed with the interest in the Stingray offerings.  For many, they are able to see straight away how a purely software or virtual ADC offering will fit perfectly into their environment.  Some customers that are currently using other vendors ADC products have been asking me to clarify for them the key reasons that we feel the Stingray virtual ADC offerings are better than what the others are offering.  So here it is, my "Top Ten Reasons why Stingray is better for your environment than a legacy hardware ADC":

10:      Virtual / Software ADC is in our blood:

Stingray has thousands of software ADC / virtual customers globally and pioneered this market many years ago.  The Stingray family has both enterprise grade virtual appliances and pure software deployment models, serving some of the largest telco hosting providers, massive clouds and major Financial Services Industry (FSI) providers.  Stingray supports enterprise applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2010 in *massive* environments with a level of flexibility that leaves legacy physical ADCs seem like they are standing still! (No pun intended…)  Gartner reports that the virtual ADC market is growing at 3x the physical one - the world is moving to "Tidal Data Centres", Private, public, and hybrid clouds. Simply put, the last generation was about racking and stacking boxes. But in the next gen of data centers, it's software that wins the day because of its flexibility, scalability, and responsiveness.  Other vendor's ADC virtual appliances are an afterthought to their legacy hardware platforms.

9:        Simplification:

Stingray provides simplification for customers, removing another physical layer of static physical technology and leveraging the virtual server platform you have already invested in for compute power. It is one less hardware platform to manage and one less capex item to refresh every three years.

8:        Performance:

Stingray offers the full throughput – whether it be 4Gbps or 40Gbps for example – regardless of security and other L7 functionality being used.  If you are licensed for 4gbps throughput with Stingray, you will get that full throughput. All you need to do is resource the virtual instance(s) appropriately with your commodity compute.  This is a huge differentiator in any customer looking to do L7 for CPU bound actions like Web Application Firewall (WAF) or complex traffic rules.  I have seen 10Gbps hardware ADC's that could not push more than 1Gbps once the system was doing complex Layer 7 content manipulation, and 40Gbps Solutions that could only do 140Mbps of throughput once the application firewall was turned on!  I don't know about you but if I was getting a 10:1 or 285:1 *reduction* in the throughput I had paid for, I would be pretty unhappy.

7:        Product Packaging vs. Performance/Price:

Our key competitors do not do a virtual appliance higher than 1Gbps throughput.  Customers who start down the virtual ADC path with other vendors will need to move to physical ADCs, or look at a capex heavy physical chassis solution with the same cpu bound performance degradation when using L7 activities like WAF.

6:        Real L7 Application Firewall Throughput:

Stingray Web App Firewall (WAF) is an enterprise grade Application Firewall, used in large clusters by organisations with serious throughput requirements like banks and massive online content providers.  The major differences to physical WAF vendors is the scalability.  Stingray's WAF scales in a totally unique way.  Stingray WAF has 'distributed' deployment models and a solution to the major 'degradation of throughput' issue experienced with physical ADCs that are 'CPU bound in a box'.  Even if you move to carving up a large chassis physical ADC, aside from the major “Cap-Ex” heavy model, you still are performance bound to CPU within the system.

5:        Agile application development/Dev-Ops

Stingray has an all software L7 application history (as oppose to a L4 network origin), which manifests itself in the ability to run in extremely automated deployments.  Because we are software we can be provisioned dynamically the same way that all your other server / virtual servers are.  In addition to this, Stingray is unbelievably application developer friendly.  Whether it is using the built in Rule Builder or Traffic Script capacities, or leveraging existing investments by being able to call custom authentication libraries that can live on box in the built in J2EE environment.  Incidentally, Stingray is already available in Amazon EC2 for example.. How would you like your ADC by the hour?!?!

4:        L7 Acceleration

Stingray Aptimizer provides market leading L7 Web Content Optimisation for Microsoft SharePoint and websites.  There is no better reference than Microsoft themselves using this visionary technology to accelerate http://sharepoint.microsoft.com to reduce page download times.   Who else has a Web Content Optimisation solution the can scale to literally thousands of web servers?

3:        Commercial:

Stingray is either procured 1) as a perpetual license only bought once, not refreshed every 4 years like HW, and is built to provide a 30% or better cost advantage against traditional physical ADC vendors  or 2) As a monthly subscription model for utility compute in a cloud environment. Oh: and our developer licenses are free…  as in beer...

2:        Scale:

Stingray will scale right up all with incremental soft upgrades, no new plumbing, network replacement, new hardware or massive “Cap-Ex” outlay etc.  This provides an unparalleled price/performance model.  In Stingray’s unique horizontal clustering technology, all configs are synced and Stingray can scale up and out active/active to 64 active nodes.   This is how Stingray is able to scale to massive sustained throughputs for media hosting companies while performing heavy duty traffic management.

1:         Automation:

Stingray is the only ADC to provide autoscaling functionality on box to dynamically scale your back end nodes when your application needs it, both on premise and into cloud environments like Amazon EC2 and Rackspace.