Application Gateway vs Array Networks AVX Series Network Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Application Gateway

Teams running multi-region cloud applications on Azure will get the most from Application Gateway because its native integration with Azure infrastructure eliminates the latency and complexity of bolted-on WAF solutions. It handles Layer 7 load balancing with built-in DDoS protection across Microsoft's global backbone, and the free tier removes budget friction for teams testing WAF capabilities before scaling. Skip this if you need a vendor-agnostic WAF that ports easily to AWS or GCP; Application Gateway is tightly coupled to Azure and doesn't play well outside that ecosystem.

Array Networks AVX Series Network Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Enterprise security teams consolidating network appliances into a single virtualized platform will benefit from AVX Series because it runs multiple vendor VMs,your existing FortiGate, WAF, and VPN stacks,on one box with hardware-accelerated SSL and guaranteed resource isolation through CPU pinning and NUMA boundaries. Support for up to 64 virtual machines per platform with automated provisioning addresses the operational friction of managing sprawling physical appliances. This is not the tool for organizations needing cloud-native flexibility or those without substantial on-premises infrastructure investment; AVX is explicitly built for data center consolidation, not hybrid or multi-cloud architectures.