Data Center POST and Paul Andersen, Array Network’s Senior Director of Marketing, recently spoke about what the company hopes to accomplish at HostingCon Global this year. The event, taking place on July 24-27 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, is the largest gathering of the hosting and cloud services community in the world. Array Networks is a leader in application delivery networking with over 5000 worldwide customer deployments addressing secure delivery of applications to end users.

During our Q&A with Mr. Andersen, we discussed the problems Array Networks is attempting to solve, as well as their new line of AVX virtualized appliances and how it adds value.

Q and A with Data Center Post’s Contributing Editor, Kathy Xu

Data Center POST, Kathy Xu (DCP-KX) Question:  Tell our readers about Array Networks: What do you do and what problems are you looking to solve?

Paul Andersen - Array Network’s Senior Director of MarketingArray Networks, Paul Andersen (ARRAY NETWORKS-PA) Answer: Array Networks makes application delivery and security solutions, known as Layer-4 to Layer-7 services, which include load balancing, application acceleration, SSL VPN (Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network), Web Application Firewall and other similar functions.

As service providers (IaaS, MSPs, hosting) and enterprises move toward virtualization and cloud principles for their data centers, many are looking to deploy application delivery and security as software virtual appliances on virtualized servers. However, oftentimes the agility of virtualization comes at the expense of performance. This is particularly true of application delivery and security functions, such as SSL termination. Array is solving the problem of providing the agility of cloud and virtualization with the performance of dedicated appliances.

DCP-KX Q: What new developments are underway for Array Networks? 

ARRAY NETWORKS-PA A: Array has recently introduced a line of purpose-built, virtualized hardware appliances. These new hardware appliances feature a built-in hypervisor and are capable of running any of Array’s software virtual appliances (ADC, SSL VPN, WAN Optimization, Web Application Firewall) in mix and match configurations. The appliances support different size virtual appliances (entry, small, medium, large). The hardware appliance may be purchased on a pay-as-you-go basis. Each virtual appliance may be automated via integrations with OpenStack, VMware vRealize, Cisco ACI/APIC and Microsoft System Center.

In essence, the Array virtualized appliance supports all of the cloud principles customers are looking for: Agility, portability, orchestration, on-demand provisioning and utility pricing. Array also supports both higher levels of performance and guaranteed performance. Each virtual machine is allocated dedicated CPU, SSL, memory and interface resources. Essentially, Array’s new AVX virtualized appliances deliver the agility of cloud and virtualization with the performance of dedicated appliances for delivering Layer-4 to Layer-7 services.

DCP-KX Q: What do you hope to accomplish at HostingCon? 

ARRAY NETWORKS PA A: HostingCon will attract many IaaS, MSP and hosting customers / providers. Many of these providers are looking to offer application delivery and security as a service, in addition to their storage and compute services. They want the agility of cloud and virtualization in order to automate the provisioning of their services. However, they need to be able to support guaranteed performance and SLAs for the services they offer. Array’s AVX Series virtualized appliances are a perfect solution for this business opportunity. We want to build awareness for the new AVX appliance at the show.

DCP-KX: Thank you for your time and best of luck at HostingCon 2016!  Readers, if you are interested in learning more about Array Networks, please visit https://www.arraynetworks.com.