Features:
Server Load Balancing
APV x600 Series application delivery controllers ensure 99.999% availability for cloud services and enterprise applications. Leveraging robust distribution algorithms, health check mechanisms, clustering and failover capabilities, APV Series appliances maintain connections, ensure persistence, direct traffic away from failed servers and intelligently distribute application services across multiple servers for optimized performance and availability. APV Series can load balance traffic for a wide variety of protocols at Layers 2, 3, 4 and 7, including WebSocket.
Layer-7 Policy Engine
Customized traffic management is often a trade-off between performance, control and ease-of-use. Unlike ADCs that rely on complex, compute-intensive scripting to enable custom Layer-7 policies, Array supports a vast library of policies that are hard-coded at the kernel level, are configurable with point-and-click simplicity via the WebUI or CLI, and can be combined and nested to create advanced customized application traffic management. With Array’s unique approach to Layer-7 traffic management, customers get the best of all worlds: ease of use, granular control and superior performance and scalability.
SSL/TLS Acceleration & Offloading
The majority of internet traffic is now protected by SSL/TLS encryption, which ensures data privacy and integrity; however, SSL/TLS comes with a cost in terms of processing compute-intensive 2048-bit encryption. Array SSL offloading reduces the number of servers required for secure applications, improves server efficiency and dramatically improves application performance. The APV Series also simplifies SSL certificate/key management to enable intelligent content management and routing.
In addition, the APV Series provides SSL acceleration to offload compute-intensive key exchange and bulk encryption, and delivers industry-leading clientcertificate performance. SSL acceleration is ideal for scaling secure SaaS offerings, e-commerce environments, and business-critical applications that require high-volume secure connectivity.
The APV Series’ SSL/TLS engine includes advanced security to minimize the possibility of attacks, thus further enhancing the security of applications and servers. For example, if an SSL renegotiation attack is detected, the APV Series can disable SSL renegotiation or enable rate limiting. Secure SSL renegotiation is also supported. In addition, some applications may support only SSL 3.0 or TLS 1.x, which have proven to be vulnerable to attacks. The APV Series can bridge from current SSL/TLS versions to provide improved clientside security without requiring changes to the server or application.
APV Series SSL/TLS processing is performed in hardware to provide high performance and capacity, as well as industry-leading TCO.
SSL Intercept
SSL-encrypted data traffic is increasing rapidly, which can place data centers and enterprises at risk – in many cases, encrypted traffic cannot be inspected by security appliances such as firewalls, IDS/IPS, data loss prevention and deep packet inspection, thus bypassing these important security measures.
Array’s SSL Intercept capability decrypts SSL traffic, allowing 3rd-party appliances to inspect them fully, then re-encrypts before forwarding the traffic to its destination. Flexible deployment options include L2 or L3 mode, integrated or distributed mode, forward or reverse proxy, and load balancing across multiple 3rd-party security appliances. In addition, an APV Series ADC can operate as a Webagent service to implement explicit forward proxy mode for additional security.
As an option, the Webroot BrightCloud Threat Intelligence Service is available for the APV x600 Series. BrightCloud includes reputation services which protect users from malicious sites, as well as a web classification service to allow blacklisting of inappropriate sites and/or whitelisting of sites for which traffic must flow without inspection due to regulatory or other requirements – such as financial or healthcare sites that contain confidential personal information.
WebWall Web Application Firewall and DDoS Protection
With WebWall®, Array’s suite of web application security capabilities, APV Series application delivery controllers can protect against distributed denial of service (DoS/ DDoS) and malformed URL attacks and allow a wide range of Layer 2 through Layer 7 protective policies to be stacked atop one another for increased security.
APV appliances are security-hardened to protect applications and servers from L4 and L7 DDoS attacks and support content filtering to guard against protocol and application DDoS attacks at the application, session and network layers, as well as Syn-flood, tear drop, ping-of-death, Nimda, Smurf and other malicious attacks. In addition, Array’s DDoS protection features machine learning for anomaly detection and automatic configuration of threshold values. APV appliances also feature extensive access control lists, network address translation and stateful packet flow inspection – all executed at the kernel level – to guard against attacks and unauthorized access without impacting performance or scalability.
In addition, integrated web application firewall capabilities provide deep application data inspection – beyond IP and TCP headers – to deal with attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting. Deployable in front of multiple web or application servers, Array’s web application firewall detects and responds to signatures for known application vulnerabilities and is programmable to deal with future threats.
Secure Application Access
Web-based and other applications typically require secure authentication in order to grant access to users; however, when users require access to multiple applications, or applications include subsystems that also require authentication, the process of logging in can become cumbersome and difficult. The APV Series supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) to allow user Single Sign-On (SSO) across multiple applications and subsystems. Serving as a SAML SP, the APV Series interacts with a SAML IdP (such as Array’s AG Series SSL VPN) to securely authenticate the user, thus simplifying and streamlining access.
Link Load Balancing & GSLB
Link load balancing (LLB) and global server load balancing (GSLB) ensure 99.999% availability for wide area network (WAN) connections and geographically dispersed sites and hybrid cloud environments. Link load balancing with end-to-end health monitoring and dynamic routing detects outages and monitors performance in real time to distribute traffic across multiple WAN connections for a premium, alwayson end-user experience. Ideal for geographically distributed applications, multi-site architectures and hybrid cloud applications, global server load balancing directs traffic away from failed data centers or cloud services and intelligently distributes services between sites based on proximity, language, capacity, load and response times for maximum performance and availability. In addition, Array’s GSLB supports mixed health check relationships across SDNS service pools, as well as EDNS-client-subnet to provide improved resolution services and thus improve the user experience.
Application Acceleration
APV Series appliances leverage multiple acceleration technologies and optimizations to deliver a premium end-user experience for a wide range of applications and data services. In-memory caching increases server efficiency and improves seek and response times by over 500%, hardware or software compression can reduce bandwidth utilization and end-user response times by more than half and TCP connection multiplexing aggregates millions of short-lived client connections into persistent fast lanes that increase server efficiency by up to 70% while improving application performance.
ePolicy L7 Application Scripting
Where Array’s Layer-7 policy engine cannot meet application traffic management requirements, ePolicy scripting allows transactions and content to be manipulated to achieve traffic distribution that improves data center efficiency and mitigates the effect of delivering applications over the internet.
eRoute L4 Routing
Using eRoute, inbound and outbound WAN traffic may be load balanced across multiple ISP links based on preset and user-defined algorithms and directed across routes optimized for maximum stability and performance. Additional L4 traffic management features include VLANs, port forwarding, port and link redundancy and the ability to bundle multiple low-cost links to improve bandwidth utilization and reduce costs.
Application-Specific Certifications
In conjunction with ISVs and application developer partners, Array APV Series appliances have been certified to provide load balancing, acceleration and security for enterprise applications such as Microsoft Lync 2010 and 2013, Microsoft Exchange 2010/2013/2016, SAP, Oracle, eClinicalWorks and others. Leveraging deployment guides, businesses can take the guesswork out of application delivery. Following simple step by step instructions, IT can rapidly and confidently configure APV appliances for optimized delivery of business critical applications.
Traffic Shaping & QoS
Traffic shaping optimizes application traffic on WAN links to improve bandwidth utilization and end-user response times. Supporting user-defined policies, APV Series appliances prevent bandwidth-intensive applications from over-utilizing WAN links and ensure essential applications are prioritized to meet service level agreements. Used in conjunction with link load balancing, global server load balancing and QoS features such as filters and class-based queuing, traffic shaping can dramatically improve application performance.
IPv6 Support
For organizations needing an IPv6 web presence, server load balancing protocol translation (SLB-PT) transforms existing IPv4 web sites into IPv6 compatible sites and greatly reduces the need for duplicate equipment, content and management. Where there is a need to make the most of depleted IPv4 resources, NAT and dual NAT (dual-stack IPv6) allow multiple clients to utilize a single IPv4 address. In migration environments, Array IPv6 solutions support both NAT64 and DNS64 to enable IPv6 clients to connect with IPv4 servers and content. To ensure a consistent application experience across IPv4 and IPv6 clients and networks – and to enable fully-capable, next-generation solutions – IPv6 feature parity is supported for all Array APV Series application delivery controllers.
Management & Integration
APV Series application delivery controllers are simple to install and offer intuitive configuration and management via a cloud-friendly, intuitive WebUI and a familiar command line interface. Using the administration tool kit, network managers can view the status for a wide range of system parameters, enable services on the fly and automate configuration using XML-RPC or RESTful API. Leveraging extensible APIs, application and network intelligence can be integrated with third-party and cloud monitoring and management or exported for optimizing complementary data center systems. In addition, APV Series appliances support VMware vRealize Orchestrator and Microsoft System Center integration for intelligent command and control of virtualized application infrastructure.
eCloud API & OpenStack Integration
To meet the deployment and management requirements of load balancing and application delivery in the cloud, Array’s eCloud API provides a script-level interface for cloud management systems to manage and monitor Array devices and assist in interactions between cloud operating systems and virtual machines running Array load balancing. For cloud providers and enterprises leveraging the OpenStack architecture for cloud management and automation, Array’s integration with OpenStack load balancing-as-a-service (LBaaS) creates a standardized means to rapidly integrate with and control Array technology.
Product Editions
APV x600 Series hardware appliances support three product editions. AppVelocity supports a rich server load balancing and application acceleration feature set optimized for local traffic management. AppVelocity-S combines SSL acceleration with server load balancing and application acceleration to create a traffic management solution ideal for SaaS, ecommerce environments and applications requiring a high degree of secure connectivity.
The AppVelocity-E edition is purpose-built to provide industry-leading throughput and transactions per second for elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) traffic. ECC is increasingly used as an alternative to RSA encryption. AppVelocity-E models deliver enhanced security for HTTPS traffic and superior ECC performance, along with the same, robust feature set included in AppVelocity-S.
All three AppVelocity product editions include link load balancing and support global server load balancing as an option. vAPV virtual appliances include all features and software modules found on Array’s APV Series application delivery controller dedicated appliances.
Physical & Virtual Appliances
Dedicated APV x600 Series appliances leverage a multi-core architecture, SSDs, software or hardware SSL and compression, energy-efficient components and 10 GigE to create solutions purpose-built for scalable traffic management. The APV6600FIPS model offers FIPS 140-2 Level 2 compliance for organizations that require a higher level of security. The next-generation APV x800 Series dedicated appliances are also available for customers that require higher performance, 40 GigE ports and advanced features supported only in the newer platforms.
Whether running on Array’s AVX Series Network Functions Platform, on common hypervisors or on many popular public cloud marketplaces, vAPV virtual appliances are ideal for organizations seeking to benefit from the flexibility of virtual environments, offer infrastructure services and new elastic business models or evaluate Array application delivery with minimal risk and up-front cost.
