For you online shopping fans out there (please don’t cringe – just bear with me, as the tech junkie will emerge shortly), the concept of a “Preview Sale Friday” or a “Super Sale Saturday” will not be alien.

Let’s dig a little deeper on how online retailers prepare for what could be either a real Super Sale or a damp squib. Prior to the advent of virtualization and dynamic orchestration, one can imagine rampant over-provisioning for the business optimist and a much more measured approach by the pragmatist. But either of those could be wildly off base. The optimist could be proven wrong by the non-arrival of the shopping masses, leaving the infrastructure lying idle, much to the chagrin of the CFO. The pragmatist could be wrong as well due to unprecedented demand causing outages or delays, resulting in frustrated shoppers – CFO chagrin 2.0.

Today, in our hyper-virtualized server world, we are in a much better place with on-demand and elastic application provisioning. But wait: Aren’t we missing something? What about that entity called the ADC (application delivery controller) that sits right in front of those Web servers? Doesn’t that need to be virtualized as well? Well, my current hardware vendor provides a virtualized version – that should do the trick, right? Nope.

You also need a “Shopping Director” that is able to provision, license, meter, and report on the actual virtualized ADC (vADC) instances being deployed. Why is this so important? Let’s go back to the Super Sale example.

Let’s say you have provisioned just a single vADC prior to the start of the sale. This is an economical way to get started, but you are keenly aware that if the throngs start to show up it could be quickly overrun. You have an ace up your sleeve – a Shopping Director. As your shoppers start to arrive and you need more vADCs, the Shopping Director automatically detects this and starts to provision (and license) additional instances with no human intervention.

Let’s take a moment to absorb the impact of this. This is akin to a checkout line in a shopping mall, where, once the manager sees more than three shoppers in line, he automatically opens up another. Now, let’s say during the middle of the day, the online traffic starts to decrease – auto-magically the provisioned instances are scaled back in concert.

Let’s also say you are a hosting provider, and you want to provide this dynamic and real-time, scalable solution to your customers. You need to be able to meter and provide a turnkey report to make billing a snap. Again – the Shopping Director to the rescue with its sophisticated metering capability.

So there – you should now be able to appreciate the power behind a Shopping Director in an online retail solution. This same concept can be applied anywhere you are looking to real-time provision your ADC, resonant with your application usage, and do so in a cost-effective and dynamic way.