Why does being virtual really matter in application delivery within the cloud and across the WAN? Well, as this article on PCQuest.com points out, it’s faster and more cost effective. Or, as the author so succinctly puts it, “Another fairly common, though expensive, solution is to place pairs of special dedicated (hardware) appliances along the transport path to boost or improve throughput.”

We would also suggest that being virtual in the cloud and across the WAN gives you options, options beyond dedicated, single-purpose, expensive hardware appliances. The options gained by organizations choosing to go virtual with their cloud and WAN application delivery setup include:

• Leveraging the soft benefits of virtualization – these benefits include: dynamic resource allocation across the cloud, increased WAN utilization, high availability for both local, branch, and headquarter offices, network bandwidth optimization, and disaster recovery improvements.
• Leveraging the hard benefits of virtualization – these benefits include: use of industry standard servers and hyper visors, ability to perform server consolidation, reduce cooling costs, and reduce appliance usage/need.
• More users, less spend – being virtual in the cloud allows organizations to scale users as system resources are added. It’s simple math, add more CPU, memory and disk – add more users. Hardware approaches to the cloud commonly have fixed numbers of users attached meaning adding users equals adding costs.
• Location options – as the quote above indicates, adding hardware pairs across the cloud or WAN also means having people and resources in the locations to support. Being virtual allows organizations to have their resources, well, virtual.
• Money – also known as the great equalizer. Using the options identified above for virtual application delivery via the cloud organizations can lower cost, reassign spend, reduce CAPEX and OPEX.

 What do you think? Do these drivers ring true for you? Are we missing any?