3 Benefits of FlexPool: Allocation Flexibility, Investment Protection & Operational Simplicity

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Transcript

Today organizations are rapidly adopting a hybrid cloud model.

In fact, over seventy percent of enterprises today have made this transition.

In turn, the IT administrators are moving to a software model where a majority of the application services will be either virtualized or running on bare metal in just a few years.

In the same timeframe, these companies are also rapidly moving toward, are utilizing a subscription model for their licenses and moving away from perpetual.

And organizations are making this change to their consumption model to improve their agility as well as to ensure the automation across their enterprises and their cloud environments.

Workloads these days are literally on the move. They’re very dynamic, constantly changing. So IT needs to ensure the availability of these application services for these workloads.

And with applications running, not only on-prem but on cloud environments as well, these application services and the associated licenses need to match a new flexible consumption model.

Licenses today tend to be perpetual, they tend to be instance-based. They tend to be essentially static with a fixed capacity. And of course, they can’t scale.

Also, they involve a very complex licensing scheme. So literally, you could have an administrator having to manage, literally hundreds if not thousands of licenses. That makes it very more complex.

And also licenses tend to be “no locked.” And what that when that happens, the essentially brings about a very inflexible model and the inability to port these licenses across various environments.

A10 is introducing FlexPool. This is a software subscription based capacity, pulling license. And it’s essentially a floating license pool that is composed of a large, and scalable quantity of A10 secure application services, such as our application delivery controllers, our Carrier Great Networking, as well as our converged firewall platforms. And FlexPool essentially offers 3, primary benefits.

First off, it provides for allocation flexibility. And what that means is organizations can dynamically allocate this capacity and essentially share the pool as needed, literally anywhere or at any time.

At the same time, IT can immediately spin up or provision software instances and these instances can run essentially very highly granular level of bandwidth. And each of these instances can turn, basically be scaled up or down as needed to provide on-demand consumption.

So really what this allows companies to do is to align the consumption of their application services with the resources available, such that organizations don’t have a kind of a service disruption.

The second benefit of FlexPool is what we call investment protection.

Essentially what that means is that these pooling licenses are completely portable across any environment, on-prem, multi-cloud, public cloud, private cloud, etc.

So that flexibility allows you to put these instances essentially anywhere. And really, at the same time, what that does is allows companies to globally portion this capacity. And thus balance say transient traffic spikes that are taking place throughout their network. They don’t know what’s going to happen or where, but I know they’re going to happen.

But in aggregate, they all tend to balance out such that in the end customers can eliminate over-provisioning.

A third benefit is we call operational simplicity. And basically what that means is that you’re only managing that one central license pool, if you will, as opposed to potentially hundreds or even thousands of licenses, which makes it much more complex.

At the same time, organizations are afforded complete visibility in the sense that they can monitor usage patterns. They can generate analytics as well as audit trails and many other things. So, the full visibility aspect is the third primary benefit.

For scenarios where you’re running many applications or you’re involved with many locations or even just highlight dynamic, highly transitory workloads and things, we found that FlexPool can literally be well over 3 times as economically efficient as as opposed, to instance-based, perpetual-based licenses.

At the same time, customers can literally provision these licenses actually in seconds, as opposed to perpetual licenses, which can literally take days. One pool, one FlexPool of capacity can literally support up to 4000 or more applications just with one pool. And of course, FlexPool includes support maintenance, as well as receiving additional software upgrades as they are made available.

Contact A10 to obtain a free FlexPool trial. Go to a10networks.com or contact their local sales reps and they can set you up and start evaluating the product right away.

Additional Resources

• FlexPool: A Software Subscription-based Capacity Pooling Model (Solution Brief)
• FlexPool: Capacity Pooling (Data Sheet)
• FlexPool Slices and Dices Capacity Based On App Requirements (Product Demos)
• A10 Networks Ports Software Licenses to Pool ADC Capacity (Brochure)
• Flexibly Allocate and Distribute Secure Application Services (Webinar)