Sure, you’ve got most of your servers running Virtual now.  And you’ve got a couple of contexts on your Cisco ACE.  But how manageable and automatic is the provisioning?  Check out Cisco’s Vframe: 

Cisco VFrame DC offers a rich middleware platform to orchestrate the provisioning of VMware ESX Server in a quick, easy, consistent, and repeatable manner. Cisco VFrame DC will integrate with VMware VI3 to automate the provisioning of stateless, network-based ESX Server images onto a utility pool of Intel and AMD processor based servers.

Cisco VFrame Data Center manages the external dependencies VI3 does not address. It orchestrates the configuration of all the services downstream from the hypervisor

Blue Coat buys Packeteer for $268M

More consolidation means maturing technology and increased meaningful competition. Is this enough for these guys to join Cisco, Riverbed, and Juniper? The big 3 in WAN Optimization have thorough solutions using hardware at both ends of the WAN. I’ve always seen Blue Coat and Packeteer as the leaders in a single-end caching, scanning, and prioritizing solution. While this does get them unique technologies, I don’t see it helping them branch out into a more complete solution. Even with Packeteer’s SkyX very-late-to-market solution. I guess if you liked their solutions before, you will even more now. And you’d only need to buy a handful of boxes.  I guess that’s why they are now the largest at 35% of that market!

OK, this one is about speeds for load balancers.  Or firewalls for that matter. Don’t get completely caught up in the maximum throughput and concurrent session numbers.  Remember to fully investigate the connections per second (CPS) or new flows data under a variety of enabled features.  Sure a box can pass 900Mbits/sec when it is 20 high-speed flows and there are minimal rules enabled.  But how many new connections can it process and build state tables for under your configuration requirements.  The file size requested in those new connections will also have a drastic effect. You might find products handing only 4000 up to 400,000.

Nearly all web acceleration features of load balancers can be done on your web server, but they do give you a single, hardware-enabled place to do it.  Browser supported compression such as gzip is a nice feature because there’s no additional hit to your web servers. You also get many other options based on content  type and sometimes even speed of remote client.  Caching control transparently enhances remote browser handling of images while freeing staff from maintaining cache headers for all images.  Finally, even TCP flow enhancements are more easily handled (sometimes with more options) on an appliance than tuning the OS of your web servers.

The Cisco ACE module and appliance deliver very advanced hardware virtualization.  Each virtual Application Controller Engine is called a context, which is configured by naming it, assigning VLAN interfaces, and defining resource restrictions.

context name
 allocate-interface vlan vlan or range
 member resource-class-name

(more…)