Customers Choose VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer to Replace Thousands of Legacy Load Balancers with Modern, Software-based Solution

VMware today announced continued momentum in providing customers a modern software alternative to legacy hardware load balancers, and new platform enhancements for the NSX Advanced Load Balancer. VMware’s standalone load balancing solution has displaced more than 7,000 hardware-based load balancers, and is helping cloud-focused and security conscious customers, including six of the top 10 U.S. financial firms, support agility, business resiliency, and enhanced security requirements. With the latest release, NSX Advanced Load Balancer can deliver platform enhancements to enable applications to scale elastically across any infrastructure in data centers and clouds with simplified operations, centralized control, real-time analytics, and end-to-end automation.

“The speed of digital business, and the needs of modern applications, have outpaced the capabilities of legacy appliance-based load balancers. They are inflexible, complex to deploy and manage, and expensive,” said Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager, Networking and Security Business Unit at VMware. “NSX Advanced Load Balancer is changing all of this for customers, and we are winning with customers as evidenced by the nearly 70 percent growth in the number of VMware load balancing customers since the acquisition of Avi Networks last year. And as the current global pandemic accelerates digital initiatives across all industry segments, NSX Advanced Load Balancer is delivering a modern application delivery architecture to automate and scale applications, helping enable their resiliency and availability across data centers and clouds.”

A 2018 IDC Business Value Study showed that participants achieved significant value with the NSX Advanced Load Balancing platform worth at an annual average of $4.11 million per organization. This includes reported 53 percent lower costs for purchasing an ADC solution, 47 percent lower costs of operations, and a five-month estimated time to payback. Customers could also scale capacity almost 100% faster, according to the study, which is critical to addressing time to market and business continuity requirements.

NSX Advanced Load Balancer is an enterprise-grade load balancing and application security platform built on cloud-native principles and delivered entirely as software. The platform provides local and global load balancing, web application firewall (WAF), application analytics, and Kubernetes ingress services across any data center or cloud. NSX Advanced Load Balancer is agnostic to the underlying environment and delivers load balancing and security software in both VMware and non-VMware environments. VMware will deliver new innovations in NSX Advanced Load Balancer 20.1, including:

• Cloud-scale networking enhancements to simplify global load balancing updates, full integration with Google Cloud Platform and VMware NSX-T integration.
• New architecture for consolidated Kubernetes Ingress Services optimized for multi-cluster, multi-site container deployments
• Automated PULSE Services for proactive customer case management and security services including WAF threat feeds

As a key pillar of VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network solution, NSX Advanced Load Balancer helps bring the public cloud experience of automated one-click deployment, pervasive connectivity and visibility, and intrinsic security to the entire network. This simplifies networking and security, saves customers time and money, and accelerates digital transformation. VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network solution is the only complete Layer 2-7 virtual networking stack that delivers innovative software-based capabilities for switching, routing, firewalling, load balancing and SD-WAN for enterprise and Telco/5G environments.

Customer and Partner Commentary

SwissSign Group is a trust service provider (TSP) and the power SwissID – the digital identity of Switzerland. Tom Sprenger, CTO of SwissSign Group said, “SwissSign provides identity services that enable simple and secure access to the online world and better protect e-business processes with trusted identities. To meet the high security expectations of our customers, as well as the regulatory requirements while benefiting from today’s agile system environment, NSX Advanced Load Balancer plays a crucial role in our solution landscape. It enables us to consistently propagate our software-defined philosophy together with maximum automation down to the level of WAF and Load Balancer.”

NetCloud provides IT services that enable government agencies and commercial clients to deliver advanced technological solutions for their most critical needs. Lukas Egger, Head of Cloud at NetCloud AG said, “To support our customers modernizing their applications, the NSX Advanced Load Balancer is a critical building block for us, because it is truly multicloud and software-defined, and provides a consistent management across virtual machine and container-based environments.”

Availability

VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer 20.1 is expected to be available in VMware’s fiscal Q2 FY21 which ends on July 31, 2020.