Christopher J. Buckley

Just a heads up for anyone with an interest in the Application Delivery Control market, Gartner have released their 2007 ADC assessment paper.

This paper has taken some time coming, but the make up is clear:

For me, there are two notable aspects of this paper:

1. Firstly, F5 have pushed further out ahead of their competition. Having had first hand experience of their products, I would agree with Gartner’s assessment, but also at the same time have some reservations (largely involving the iRules scripting language). Something which did irk me was Gartner’s assertion that:
   

   The Big-IP product is so feature-rich it can be intimidating to some customers

   No – the product’s GUI just isn’t that intuitive. Really – is an overview page of global health status too much to implement? [1]

2. Secondly, as anyone who has an understanding of ADC products has realised for quite a while (or, should have done), Cisco is not a lead vendor in this space. They are a niche vendor for ADC. Having had personal struggles with Cisco’s kit in ADC, it’s refreshing to see them (finally) pushed to the appropriate market segment.

   Ultimately, enterprise’s should not be deploying Cisco equipment in ADC. Look to the visionary vendors for the right solution.

3. A personal one this, but it’s nice to see Zeus Technology still holding firm in the market-leading visionary space. This site uses ADC from Zeus, and very fine it is too.

[1] In response to the comment left by Lori I feel I must clarify my comments and also raise some of my own.

1. To clarify: I am not asserting that BigIP’s feature-set isn’t as rich as Gartner, and F5, claim. Indeed, it is – and more! My two major issues with BigIP are, as I blogged previously:
   • The clunky iRules scripting language which Gartner highlights for BigIP, but fails to mention the perl-like, and intuitive, TrafficScript language of ZXTM. iRules is not an easy language to pick up in my opinion. I would love to hear other sysadmin and programmers’ opinions on this.
   • The non-intuitive interface makes using the feature richness of the product that little bit harder. As a ardent supporter of the command line, I’m the first person to appreciate GUI intuitiveness does not necessarily equal feature richness. However, F5 has a feature rich product, but they can do better with their GUI. That was the point I was making. Apologies if the original article was written in haste.

     Yes, as Lori notes:
     

     Intuitiveness is subjective, not objective, and not a good measuring stick. if intuitiveness was a primary buying criteria no one would ever purchase anything Cisco

     However, I feel this doesn’t address the real reason people buy Cisco. It’s not because it’s ‘better’ than their competitors’ products, but simply because you don’t get fired for buying Cisco. A depressing statement, but true.

     Ask yourself, would you deploy Cisco’s CSS over ZXTM/Radware/Akamai in an SME DC? Well, lots of firms do. Why? Because you won’t get fired for doing so. If you use a smaller player, you’re perceived to be taking a business risk. Lots of firms don’t suffer from this thinking, but some do. This is only my personal experience, I would appreciate other people’s experiences.

2. Interestingly, Lori writes that
   

   BIG-IP and ZXTM are not competitors in the same market segment, primarily because BIG-IP is over-kill for the SMB market in which ZXTM continues to dominate and target. These two products don’t compete directly, and both companies acknowledge that willingly…

   I have no issue with this comment. It’s a pleasure to read, in fact. I have been struggling for months now to set different expectations between these two different products in my day-to-day role.

Lori, your post has highlighted that I wrote my original article in haste. I hope that the above clarifies and appreciates the concerns you raised.