IDC ANALYZE White Paper The business value of vmware nsX advanced load balancer. a Study of Enterprises Using Next-Generation Application Delivery ponsored by: VMware Brad Casemore Matthew Marden October 2020 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Driven by the acute imperative of digital transformation, enterprises and other organizations worldwide have adopted multicloud strategies as springboards to increase business agility and competitive differentiation. At the same time, monolithic application development has been superseded by cloud-native microservices, which entail the decomposition of previously complex applications into independent, modular processes that communicate with each other using language-agnostic APIs Unfortunately, existing application delivery infrastructure was designed for the client/server era, not for the cloud era, in which microservices are proliferating and application environments are becoming increasingly distributed across clouds. Physical application delivery controller(ADC)appliances were logical choices when there was a one-to-one relationship between applications and servers in an enterprise datacenter, but they are less tenable in cloud environments, where they often are unable to scale up and down elastically to accommodate changing application requirements and Business value highlights traffic patterns. Even the advent of virtual ADCs(VADCs)-which architecturally, are still appliances- doesn t fully address these 573% three-year challenges, failing to provide the agility flexibility, and elastic scale that are require Five months to As such, there is a need for application delivery to become more 47% Lower cost of agile, more elastic, more distributed, and more orchestrated. We operating have entered a period where aDC functionality must be recast as 52% Lower ADC application services-elastic pools of network and security services solution cost (often referred to as Layer 4-7 services) that ensure optimal 43% more efficient application deployment and that also dynamically support the ADC management availability, performance, and security of applications. Typical 97% faster to scale application services address load balancing, application capacity analytics/monitoring, application acceleration, auto-scaling 8% higher microsegmentation, and application security and also function as application service proxies and enable service discovery developer productivity October 2020. IDC #US43643418RF
October 2020, IDC #US43643418RF White Paper The Business Value of VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer: A Study of Enterprises Using Next-Generation Application Delivery Sponsored by: VMware Brad Casemore Matthew Marden October 2020 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Driven by the acute imperative of digital transformation, enterprises and other organizations worldwide have adopted multicloud strategies as springboards to increase business agility and competitive differentiation. At the same time, monolithic application development has been superseded by cloud-native microservices, which entail the decomposition of previously complex applications into independent, modular processes that communicate with each other using language-agnostic APIs. Unfortunately, existing application delivery infrastructure was designed for the client/server era, not for the cloud era, in which microservices are proliferating and application environments are becoming increasingly distributed across clouds. Physical application delivery controller (ADC) appliances were logical choices when there was a one-to-one relationship between applications and servers in an enterprise datacenter, but they are less tenable in cloud environments, where they often are unable to scale up and down elastically to accommodate changing application requirements and traffic patterns. Even the advent of virtual ADCs (vADCs) — which, architecturally, are still appliances — doesn't fully address these challenges, failing to provide the agility, flexibility, and elastic scale that are required. As such, there is a need for application delivery to become more agile, more elastic, more distributed, and more orchestrated. We have entered a period where ADC functionality must be recast as application services — elastic pools of network and security services (often referred to as Layer 4–7 services) that ensure optimal application deployment and that also dynamically support the availability, performance, and security of applications. Typical application services address load balancing, application analytics/monitoring, application acceleration, auto-scaling, microsegmentation, and application security and also function as service proxies and enable service discovery. Business Value Highlights 573% three-year ROI Five months to payback 47% lower cost of operating 52% lower ADC solution cost 43% more efficient ADC management 97% faster to scale capacity 8% higher application developer productivity
VMware's NSX Advanced Load Balancer, known as Avi vantage prior to VMware' s acquisition of Avi Networks in 2019, adapts application services to adhere to the principles of software- define networking (SDN), including the decoupling of the control plane from the data plane. Accordingly, VMware says it is in the business of providing"software-defined application services, "though we wil refer to them as application services for the remainder of this white paper IDC interviewed organizations using NSX Advanced Load Balancer to deploy application services to understand how they are using the product to support their business operations. Study participants explained that moving to NsX Advanced Load Balancer has changed how they pay for and consume application services. With NSX Advanced Load Balancer, they no longer must choose between overprovisioning and potentially having insufficient load-balancing capacity, while having virtualize application delivery resources with NSX Advanced Load Balancer ensures that their application levelopment efforts and business operations are not slowed by manual provisioning processes IDCs analysis shows that study participants are achieving significant value with NSX Advanced Load Balancer worth an annual average of $4. 11 million per organization($230, 891 per Avi Service Engine)by Reducing the cost of providing application delivery and load-balancing resources through software-defined principles and use of commodity hardware Providing real agility by sharply reducing the time needed to deliver new load-balancing capacity, thereby enabling development teams and opening up new ways of serving Supporting the business with elastic scalability and improved network performance, thus better addressing business opportunities and serving customers and internal application users SITUATION OVERVIEW Digital transformation on the 3rd Platform continues to engender sweeping change to business processes and business models. Enterprise IT must respond by ensuring that network infrastructure can support not only legacy applications that function as systems or record but also the new wave of cloud-native applications that function as systems of engagement In the context of digital transformation, these applications have gained unprecedented importance-delivering content and digital experiences, facilitating communication, enhancing employee productivity, and supporting business transactions. This change places ever-increasing pressure on the network, and those who operate it, to provide for cloud applications that are integral to digital transformation Consequently, application services are required to accommodate enterprise requirements for hybrid and multicloud application delivery, in addition to the needs occasioned by increasing mobility, data analytics, and the expansion of the Internet of Things(loT) As legacy application workloads migrate to the cloud, and as new workloads are born in the cloud ADCs and other network infrastructure dedicated to application delivery must adapt to the requirements of hybrid IT, ensuring that applications are delivered consistently, reliably, and securely, not only from on-premises datacenters and private clouds but increasingly from multiple public clouds Hence the need for a more agile, distributed, and orchestrated approach to application delivery as represented by application services nat's more, as developers and Devops teams increasingly embrace distributed, cloud-native environments predicated on containers and microservices, the demand for application services will continue to grow. That's because of the increasing pressure on network and other IT operations teams 2020|DC #US43643418RF
©2020 IDC #US43643418RF 2 VMware's NSX Advanced Load Balancer, known as Avi Vantage prior to VMware's acquisition of Avi Networks in 2019, adapts application services to adhere to the principles of software-defined networking (SDN), including the decoupling of the control plane from the data plane. Accordingly, VMware says it is in the business of providing "software-defined application services," though we will refer to them as application services for the remainder of this white paper. IDC interviewed organizations using NSX Advanced Load Balancer to deploy application services to understand how they are using the product to support their business operations. Study participants explained that moving to NSX Advanced Load Balancer has changed how they pay for and consume application services. With NSX Advanced Load Balancer, they no longer must choose between overprovisioning and potentially having insufficient load-balancing capacity, while having virtualized application delivery resources with NSX Advanced Load Balancer ensures that their application development efforts and business operations are not slowed by manual provisioning processes. IDC's analysis shows that study participants are achieving significant value with NSX Advanced Load Balancer worth an annual average of $4.11 million per organization ($230,891 per Avi Service Engine) by: ▪ Reducing the cost of providing application delivery and load-balancing resources through software-defined principles and use of commodity hardware ▪ Providing real agility by sharply reducing the time needed to deliver new load-balancing capacity, thereby enabling development teams and opening up new ways of serving customers including self-service offerings ▪ Supporting the business with elastic scalability and improved network performance, thus better addressing business opportunities and serving customers and internal application users SITUATION OVERVIEW Digital transformation on the 3rd Platform continues to engender sweeping change to business processes and business models. Enterprise IT must respond by ensuring that network infrastructure can support not only legacy applications that function as systems or record but also the new wave of cloud-native applications that function as systems of engagement. In the context of digital transformation, these applications have gained unprecedented importance — delivering content and digital experiences, facilitating communication, enhancing employee productivity, and supporting business transactions. This change places ever-increasing pressure on the network, and those who operate it, to provide for cloud applications that are integral to digital transformation. Consequently, application services are required to accommodate enterprise requirements for hybrid and multicloud application delivery, in addition to the needs occasioned by increasing mobility, data analytics, and the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). As legacy application workloads migrate to the cloud, and as new workloads are born in the cloud, ADCs and other network infrastructure dedicated to application delivery must adapt to the requirements of hybrid IT, ensuring that applications are delivered consistently, reliably, and securely, not only from on-premises datacenters and private clouds but increasingly from multiple public clouds. Hence the need for a more agile, distributed, and orchestrated approach to application delivery as represented by application services. What's more, as developers and DevOps teams increasingly embrace distributed, cloud-native environments predicated on containers and microservices, the demand for application services will continue to grow. That's because of the increasing pressure on network and other IT operations teams
to keep pace with advances in application architectures and cloud environments with DevOps and Cl/CD processes setting an ever-faster cadence that infrastructure must have the agility and responsiveness to support. That is why intelligent automation and self-service models are a necessity for every enterprise that relies on applications for its business success As such, application services not only align well with the requirements of multicloud, but they also offer business and operational benefits such as agility, increased productivity, and reduced capex and opex costs NSX ADVANCED LOAD BALANCER NSX Advanced Load Balancer is entirely software based, providing application services that can be deployed on bare metal, virtual machines(VMs), and containers, as well as in datacenters and NSX Advanced load balancer is clo entirely software based, providing application services The solution addresses the application delivery requirements of a that can be deployed on bare wide range of customer organizations, including(but not limited to) those in the retail, financial services, and technology sectors, and metal, virtual machines(VMs) service providers. NSX Advanced Load Balancer is particularly suited and containers as well as in to organizations that need an automated and orchestrated approach datacenters and public clouds. to application delivery, with the ability to elastically scale application services up or down dynamically based on demand As such, it enables customers to obtain optimal load-balancing capacity and other application services when needed, and then scale back down as application traffic decreases NsX Advanced Load Balancer also features REST APl-driven automation and provides application performance visibility that can aid reactive troubleshooting as well as proactive capacity planning Despite the name, NSX Advanced Load Balancer can be deployed to address application delivery challenges and deliver business value in non-VMware Despite the name, application environments, including those that do not contain VMware NSX Data Center or VMware vSphere. While NsX Advanced Load Balancer is NSX Advanced load Balancer can be ntegrated with NSX Data Center to create a complete, declaratively Load Balancer is also widely deployed without NSX, where it provides all the application delivery features and benefits discussed in this paper. challenges and deliver business value in In addition, NSX Advanced Load Balancer functions as an ingress controller non-VMware application for Kubernetes-based container environments and provides ingress services environments such as traffic management, application security, and observability for Kubernetes clusters. It also integrates with VMware's Tanzu portfolio, including the Tanzu Service Mesh, which is based on the Isto open source project, and similarly integrates with other Kubernetes-based platforms, including Red Hat Open Shift These integrations allow enterprise customers to extend cloud-native container networking and application services across traditional applications in on-premises datacenters as well as across container-based microservices 2020|DC #US43643418RF
©2020 IDC #US43643418RF 3 to keep pace with advances in application architectures and cloud environments, with DevOps and CI/CD processes setting an ever-faster cadence that infrastructure must have the agility and responsiveness to support. That is why intelligent automation and self-service models are a necessity for every enterprise that relies on applications for its business success. As such, application services not only align well with the requirements of multicloud, but they also offer business and operational benefits such as agility, increased productivity, and reduced capex and opex costs. NSX ADVANCED LOAD BALANCER NSX Advanced Load Balancer is entirely software based, providing application services that can be deployed on bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), and containers, as well as in datacenters and public clouds. The solution addresses the application delivery requirements of a wide range of customer organizations, including (but not limited to) those in the retail, financial services, and technology sectors, and service providers. NSX Advanced Load Balancer is particularly suited to organizations that need an automated and orchestrated approach to application delivery, with the ability to elastically scale application services up or down dynamically based on demand. As such, it enables customers to obtain optimal load-balancing capacity and other application services when needed, and then scale back down as application traffic decreases. NSX Advanced Load Balancer also features REST API–driven automation and provides application performance visibility that can aid reactive troubleshooting as well as proactive capacity planning. Despite the name, NSX Advanced Load Balancer can be deployed to address application delivery challenges and deliver business value in non-VMware application environments, including those that do not contain VMware NSX Data Center or VMware vSphere. While NSX Advanced Load Balancer is integrated with NSX Data Center to create a complete, declaratively managed, policy-based Layer 2–7 network virtualization fabric, NSX Advanced Load Balancer is also widely deployed without NSX, where it provides all the features and benefits discussed in this paper. In addition, NSX Advanced Load Balancer functions as an ingress controller for Kubernetes-based container environments and provides ingress services such as traffic management, application security, and observability for Kubernetes clusters. It also integrates with VMware's Tanzu portfolio, including the Tanzu Service Mesh, which is based on the Istio open source project, and similarly integrates with other Kubernetes-based platforms, including Red Hat OpenShift. These integrations allow enterprise customers to extend cloud-native container networking and application services across traditional applications in on-premises datacenters as well as across container-based microservices. NSX Advanced Load Balancer is entirely software based, providing application services that can be deployed on bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), and containers, as well as in datacenters and public clouds. Despite the name, NSX Advanced Load Balancer can be deployed to address application delivery challenges and deliver business value in non-VMware application environments
This allows NSX Advanced Load Balancer to serve as application delivery infrastructure that can address a comprehensive array of application environments, heterogeneous infrastructure, and multiple clouds. This includes the on-premises datacenter, traditional monolithic applications, cloud and multicloud use cases, container and microservices use cases, and end-user compute(EUC) requirements that involve support for virtual desktops and vDI workloads. In this latter scenario, NSX Advanced Load Balancer integrates with and provides load balancing and other application services for VMware's Horizon EUC platform As mentioned previously, NSX Advanced Load Balancer is architected on software-defined principles decoupling the data and control planes. As a result, it centrally manages and dynamically provisions pools of application services, including load balancing, across multicloud environments(including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform [GCP], VMware Cloud Foundation [vCF], and VMware Cloud on AWS [VMC]) Architecturally, NSX Advanced Load Balancer comprises three core elements: the Avi Service Engines, the Avi Controller, and the Avi Console Avi Service Engines take the form of distributed software that runs on bare metal servers, virtual machines, and containers. They implement application services across on-premises datacenters colocation datacenters, and public clouds. They also collect data relating to application performance, security, and clients. As distributed software, Avi Service Engines are capable of horizontal auto- scaling within minutes while functioning as service proxies for microservices The Avi Controller provides central control and management of the Avi Service Engines. It orchestrates policy-driven application services, monitors real-time application performance(leveraging data provided by the Avi Service Engines), and provides for predictive auto-scaling of load balancing and other application services. Furthermore, it is capable of delivering per-tenant or per-application load balancing increasingly in demand in multicloud contexts-and also facilitates troubleshooting with traffic analytics of application services, delivers visualization of network configurations and virtual IPs (IPs), anrration Finally, the Avi Console provides web-based administration and monitoring. It offers a Ul for config displays application health scores and transaction round-trip times. It's also where customers can view performance, security, and client insights, as well as where they can view service interactions THE BUSINESS VALUE OF NSX ADVANCED LOAD BALANCER Study demographics and NsX Advanced load Balancer Use IDC interviewed six organizations for this study asking a variety of quantitative and qualitative questions about the impact of deploying NSX Advanced Load Balancer on their network and IT operations, businesses, and costs. These companies ranged from large enterprises to smaller IT service providers, with an average employee base of 25, 343 and revenue of $13.09 billion per year The sample of companies involved in the study represented a good mix by geography and by vertical industry. Two companies were United States-based, with the other four based in EMEA markets Similarly, there was diversity among vertical industries represented, including financial services(2 IT services(2), software, and telecommunications. Table 1 summarizes this information along with other relevant demographic attributes 2020|DC #US43643418RF
©2020 IDC #US43643418RF 4 This allows NSX Advanced Load Balancer to serve as application delivery infrastructure that can address a comprehensive array of application environments, heterogeneous infrastructure, and multiple clouds. This includes the on-premises datacenter, traditional monolithic applications, cloud and multicloud use cases, container and microservices use cases, and end-user compute (EUC) requirements that involve support for virtual desktops and VDI workloads. In this latter scenario, NSX Advanced Load Balancer integrates with and provides load balancing and other application services for VMware's Horizon EUC platform. As mentioned previously, NSX Advanced Load Balancer is architected on software-defined principles, decoupling the data and control planes. As a result, it centrally manages and dynamically provisions pools of application services, including load balancing, across multicloud environments (including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform [GCP], VMware Cloud Foundation [VCF], and VMware Cloud on AWS [VMC]). Architecturally, NSX Advanced Load Balancer comprises three core elements: the Avi Service Engines, the Avi Controller, and the Avi Console. Avi Service Engines take the form of distributed software that runs on bare metal servers, virtual machines, and containers. They implement application services across on-premises datacenters, colocation datacenters, and public clouds. They also collect data relating to application performance, security, and clients. As distributed software, Avi Service Engines are capable of horizontal autoscaling within minutes while functioning as service proxies for microservices. The Avi Controller provides central control and management of the Avi Service Engines. It orchestrates policy-driven application services, monitors real-time application performance (leveraging data provided by the Avi Service Engines), and provides for predictive auto-scaling of load balancing and other application services. Furthermore, it is capable of delivering per-tenant or per-application load balancing — increasingly in demand in multicloud contexts — and also facilitates troubleshooting with traffic analytics. Finally, the Avi Console provides web-based administration and monitoring. It offers a UI for configuration of application services, delivers visualization of network configurations and virtual IPs (VIPs), and displays application health scores and transaction round-trip times. It's also where customers can view performance, security, and client insights, as well as where they can view service interactions. THE BUSINESS VALUE OF NSX ADVANCED LOAD BALANCER Study Demographics and NSX Advanced Load Balancer Use IDC interviewed six organizations for this study asking a variety of quantitative and qualitative questions about the impact of deploying NSX Advanced Load Balancer on their network and IT operations, businesses, and costs. These companies ranged from large enterprises to smaller IT service providers, with an average employee base of 25,343 and revenue of $13.09 billion per year. The sample of companies involved in the study represented a good mix by geography and by vertical industry. Two companies were United States–based, with the other four based in EMEA markets. Similarly, there was diversity among vertical industries represented, including financial services (2), IT services (2), software, and telecommunications. Table 1 summarizes this information along with other relevant demographic attributes
TABLE 1 Demographics of Interviewed Organizations Number of employees 25,343 12500 Number of it staff 2.914 Number of external customers 14.5 million 5 million Number of business applications1,688 Revenue per year S13.09 billion S8. 62 billion United States(2), Lithuania, Netherlands, Switzerland, and United Kingdom Industries Financial services(2), IT services(2), software, and telecommunications Source: IDC. 2018 Interviewed organizations' criteria for choosing to deploy NsX Advanced Load Balancer for application ices focused on cost, agility, and scalability Much lower costs when compared with hardware-based approaches. One NSX Advanced Load Balancer customer noted: The key factors for us in selecting NSX Advanced The key factors for us in Load Balancer were the inflexibility of having a hardware selecting NSX Advanced Load based solution and the cost of adding hardware. The software. Balancer were the inflexibility based solution with VMware also made sense financially and of having a hardware-based that is what we were trying to address. solution and the cost of Agility and elastic scalability in terms of application delivery adding hardware. The and load-balancing capacity. According to one customer, "We software-based solution with chose NSX Advanced Load Balancer because we needed an VMware also made sense ADC platform that gave us more agility and visibility into what financially and that is what was going on using analytics. We needed something that was we were trying to address AP/ managed rather than manually operated. We also needed thing that would scale out as our Paas scales out and that was not bound by physical devices To achieve these objectives, interviewed organizations have deployed an average of 18 Avi Service Engines at 3-4 datacenters across their operations. The number of business applications supported by NSX Advanced Load Balancer averaged 507, including varied applications and projects. One organization specified that it is supporting"groundbreaking, digital applications"with NSX Advanced Load Balancer while another is creating an internal platform-as-a-service(PaaS)offering as part of a broader IT modernization initiative For the most part, these organizations are running NSX Advanced Load Balancer with on-premises virtualized environments, but two organizations have made NsX Advanced Load 2020|DC #US43643418RF
©2020 IDC #US43643418RF 5 TABLE 1 Demographics of Interviewed Organizations Average Median Number of employees 25,343 12,500 Number of IT staff 2,914 800 Number of external customers 14.5 million 5 million Number of business applications 1,688 650 Revenue per year $13.09 billion $8.62 billion Countries United States (2), Lithuania, Netherlands, Switzerland, and United Kingdom Industries Financial services (2), IT services (2), software, and telecommunications n = 6 Source: IDC, 2018 Interviewed organizations' criteria for choosing to deploy NSX Advanced Load Balancer for application services focused on cost, agility, and scalability: ▪ Much lower costs when compared with hardware-based approaches. One NSX Advanced Load Balancer customer noted: "The key factors for us in selecting NSX Advanced Load Balancer were the inflexibility of having a hardwarebased solution and the cost of adding hardware. The softwarebased solution with VMware also made sense financially and that is what we were trying to address." ▪ Agility and elastic scalability in terms of application delivery and load-balancing capacity. According to one customer, "We chose NSX Advanced Load Balancer because we needed an ADC platform that gave us more agility and visibility into what was going on using analytics. We needed something that was API managed rather than manually operated. We also needed something that would scale out as our PaaS scales out and that was not bound by physical devices." To achieve these objectives, interviewed organizations have deployed an average of 18 Avi Service Engines at 3–4 datacenters across their operations. The number of business applications supported by NSX Advanced Load Balancer averaged 507, including varied applications and projects. One organization specified that it is supporting "groundbreaking, digital applications" with NSX Advanced Load Balancer, while another is creating an internal platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering as part of a broader IT modernization initiative. For the most part, these organizations are running NSX Advanced Load Balancer with on-premises virtualized environments, but two organizations have made NSX Advanced Load "The key factors for us in selecting NSX Advanced Load Balancer were the inflexibility of having a hardware-based solution and the cost of adding hardware. The software-based solution with VMware also made sense financially and that is what we were trying to address