<p>Paul Andersen is the Sr. Marketing Manager for Array Networks and is responsible for communications and product marketing for Array's line of application, desktop and cloud service delivery solutions.</p><p>There is a lot going on in today's data center and there are several major trends creating challenges that IT managers must solve. Most prominent is virtualization, which aims to maximize application infrastructure to gain advantages in cost, security and ease-of-management. Although the most common use of virtualization is moving applications from dedicated servers onto more flexible and efficient virtual machines, interesting trends are developing around the integration of networking equipment with virtual environments and the moving of networking functions onto virtualized infrastructure.</p><p>A prime example of these trends is the application delivery controller (ADC), which provides availability, acceleration and security for enterprise applications and cloud services and has recently experienced two major transformations in response to increased adoption of virtualization. In the traditional data center, it was common practice to deploy ADCs in front of dedicated servers. Today, however, dedicated servers are being replaced by virtualized servers; as a consequence, ADCs must be able to seamlessly perform their function within virtualized environments.</p><p>In this first transformation, ADCs gained the ability to integrate with virtualization management systems in order to determine not just the health of applications, but also the health of underlying hypervisors. ADCs also became virtual management system aware as a response to integrating with and providing persistence for resources that are commonly moved, redistributed and shared across applications and servers to maximize utilization of compute resources.</p><p><a href="http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/10/12/virtualization-the-application-delivery-controller/">Keep reading...</a></p>