This is a Report Summary of the EMA Radar for Application Delivery Controllers and Load Balancers: Q4 2011.

Long before VMware made the term "virtualization" a common, almost ubiquitous term, early Load Balancers (LBs) were busy abstracting away client requests from physical servers, creating a set of "virtualized servers." The first generation of network-based load balancer solutions were application neutral -- their primary function was to ensure that traffic reached its final destination and that the traffic was evenly distributed across multiple servers. An Application Delivery Controller (ADC) can be considered the next generation load balancer. Load balancing remains a core component of today's ADCs, but their functionality has expanded to include other features such as application acceleration, compression, caching, SSL offload, and application layer security, to name a few. In this EMA Radar Report, 12 current providers of ADC/LB solutions are reviewed and compared according to a broad range of measures regarding both product strength and overall cost efficiency.