Application Delivery: Application delivery: pros and cons both virtual and real

The client-server model is currently in decline, giving way to the application delivery (AD) paradigm. AD is now a well-established need in high-level organisations. However, there is a latent risk that certain fundamental aspects may be overlooked. This risk is associated with various factors, including the ever-present quest to cut costs and the need to speed up the rollout of business support solutions. There are some important issues to keep in mind in order to prevent potential problems. Dario Forte discusses some of them. In terms of delivery, demand for applications is characterised by an approach based on three primary objectives: inspection, transformation and routing. These might appear to be easy things to ensure, but there are actually numerous unknowns. The basic topology of the internet may not be suitable for handling delivery of content to customers. With application delivery (AD) it is no longer fully possible, since the inevitable shift is being made toward distributed objects based on an application delivery network (ADN). This is necessary because it is not possible to guarantee acceptable performance levels without using an ad hoc network that also has routing and load balancing capabilities at optimised execution speeds.