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The Next Generation Cloud and Your Network (Video)

March 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The wide area network, or WAN, is essential to next-generation cloud computing. This video featuring Forrester Research analyst Vanessa Alvarez looks at what is required for next-generation cloud implementations and the critical role the wide area network plays in the success of cloud deployments.

Forrester’s Vanessa Alvarez highlights the importance of automation, flexibility, and agility when enterprise organizations rely on the cloud, in particular, the large amounts of data traversing the WAN.

Automation, self-service, and manageability are needed to design the new cloud architecture, and virtual WAN optimization will play a critical role.

The cloud brings server, storage, networking, and computing together. When deploying cloud, organizations need to look at server virtualization and virtual WAN optimization as a solution.

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Big Data in Motion

January 19, 2012 By 1 Comment

cloud computing big dataOne of the most talked-about new buzzwords in the past year is “big data.” A recent Forbes article points out that big data is not just quantity, but also includes multiple types of data. Having a lot of data sitting around doesn’t really accomplish anything; the real key to big data is being able to analyze large diverse data sets and act on the results. While WAN optimization can’t help you analyze the data, it can help you move the data to the right place as quickly as possible and with the lowest bandwidth cost.

Most of the focus on big data from storage companies concerns how to store, protect and guarantee availability. Analyzing the data is quite a bit more difficult, usually requiring clusters of servers. With large clusters commonly used in enterprise deployments, on-demand cloud computing is typically mentioned in the same breath as big data.

However, there is one problem with analyzing big data in the cloud: moving the data to the cloud.

Journey to the Cloud

Moving big data into the cloud means crossing two big hurdles: location and bandwidth. First, the farther away the cloud data center is from your site, the more latency you have to deal with and the longer it will take for your data transfer. Second, bandwidth is important as well, since insufficient bandwidth means the data transfer will take an excessive amount of time. Add the transfer time to the analysis time and it is possible that the resulting big data analysis will be stale and outdated by the time everything is finished.

As Edd Dumbill from O’Reilly mentioned in a recent article, this brings us to the third hurdle in moving big data to the cloud: velocity. With an exponentially increasing amount of data coming into an organization and skyrocketing analysis requirements (think “streaming data”), incoming data must be analyzed as quickly as possible.

If you are using cloud computing to analyze your big data, and you happen to be located in the same city as the cloud data center, and you have unlimited bandwidth, you are ready to go (and probably aren’t reading this post).

If, however, like most people, you are dealing with latency and limited bandwidth, WAN optimization can help. All of the features that help business move and access data across a WAN also apply to big data movement into the cloud.

Protecting Big Data

Replicating big data over a WAN has the same problems as moving data into a cloud data center. Meeting any replication requirement can be difficult and, as the size of the data grows, so does the complexity. Silver Peak has a long history of optimizing replication over WAN connections, with virtual appliances that scale to 1 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) in WAN capacity and physical appliances that scale to multi-Gbps. Replicating big data is no different. If big data replication is a requirement, Silver Peak can help.

The Last Bit

Whether you are trying to move big data into the cloud or replicate it across a WAN, Silver Peak has a solution that can help. Network Acceleration can overcome the impact of latency, Network Integrity can correct lost and out of order packets, and Network Memory can reduce the amount of bandwidth required to move big data. Big data CAN be moved to the cloud — and Silver Peak can make it a reality.

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Optimizing the Cloud

December 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Enterprise cloud deployments are growing in popularity, but the wide area network (WAN) is often overlooked as more applications and data are moved into the cloud. Unlike hardware-based WAN optimization, Virtual WAN optimization makes it easy to optimize application and data access between enterprise data centers, the cloud, and branch offices.

This video show how Silver Peak’s virtual WAN optimization can quickly and easily be deployed to optimize Verizon’s Terremark cloud.

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Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

November 16, 2011 By 1 Comment

WANop pot of gold at the end of the rainbowOne of the most spectacular effects of a cloudy sky following a storm is the rainbow that often appears. While rainbows are often preceded by violent storms that might otherwise make us cold, wet, and uncomfortable, looking up afterward to see an incredibly colorful arch in the sky somehow makes us feel better. As children, we may have even found ourselves trying to pinpoint the end of a rainbow, imagining some Utopian place where everyone is walking around in wonder.

Oh yeah…and then there’s “the pot of gold!”

You might wonder what rainbows and stormy weather have to do with data center technology or WAN optimization. Well, with cloud computing in particular, there are some direct parallels.

IT professionals who are responsible for managing cloud infrastructures are keenly aware of the challenges in maintaining network performance and reliability. They are challenged to keep costs down and create an infrastructure that supports scalability and high end-user productivity. These factors represent “weathering the storm,” and when everything is working well, this is what I like to refer to as the “rainbow effect” of a well-functioning cloud environment.

Just as the weather is unpredictable, cloud infrastructures also face unpredictable traffic demands and application performance challenges that can wreak havoc on networks, data centers, and remote offices all connecting to the cloud. While we can’t prevent bad weather from happening, we have learned to prepare for it by designing buildings that structurally endure harsh weather, boarding up windows, sandbagging, and warning people to evacuate.

In the IT world, we are also empowered to prepare for the unexpected. With virtual WAN optimization, we now have the power and flexibility to build our cloud and data center networks to withstand unexpected traffic congestion, reduce the bandwidth-consuming effects of redundant data, overcome latency challenges for long-distance users, and easily build-in “bursting” capabilities to address anticipated spikes in cloud-based application usage. (Look for a future blog post to address this last point)

The value virtual WAN optimization offers for the cloud is like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And while the pot of gold is a mythical legend, WAN optimization is the real thing.

Consider, for example, the amount of money that can be saved each month by avoiding WAN connection upgrades to support a disaster recovery site. Then consider each WAN link that supports a number of different regions where you do business. Can you feel the gold coins rolling through your hands yet?

Virtual WAN optimization not only saves on hardware costs, it also saves on rack space, power, international shipping charges, and deployment time. Combine this with the already-proven benefits of WAN optimization on links with high packet loss and latency, and you get a more reliable network that makes end-users and IT support personnel more productive.

You may not be the leprechaun guarding the pot of gold, but you can consider yourself lucky (even if you’re not Irish) that you have found a solution to your WAN infrastructure needs. If you’ve experienced the benefits from using virtual WAN optimization within a cloud infrastructure, I’d like to hear your story.

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Silver Peak Sways Finding in UK Law Firm’s Move to Cloud

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

cloud WAN optimizationIn the court of technological success, cloud initiatives are highly dependent on underlying WAN infrastructure. But whereas WANs are often plagued by bandwidth limitations, latency, and packet loss, in the case of the Cloud vs. Thomson Snell & Passmore, Silver Peak’s data center class WAN optimization has swayed the decision in favor of the U.K.-based law firm.

The facts of the case are undisputed. By deploying Silver Peak’s data center class WAN optimization across both its branch offices and its hosted data center, Thomson Snell & Passmore has not only simplified its migration to a cloud-based infrastructure, but also has reduced its data network operating costs, while ensuring a consistent desktop experience throughout the firm’s distributed environment.

Working with one of Silver Peak’s leading U.K. solution providers, Response Data Communications (RDC), Thomson Snell & Passmore relies on Silver Peak to ensure network stability and guarantee the operational and financial success of its business critical applications, which includes Microsoft Office 10, SharePoint, and Pilgrim Systems Lawsoft (PMS)…all delivered via Citrix XenApps and leveraged on the firm’s brand new, best-practice-based MPLS network.

Silver Peak also helped Thomson Snell & Passmore overrule any objections of applications  functioning well in a cloud environment, especially when delivered using virtual desktop protocols, such as Citrix. Plus, Silver Peak enabled Thomson Snell & Passmore to migrate its legacy data to the new infrastructure in a matter of days instead of weeks—over 3.5 million  documents, mailboxes, and records!

The verdict? Maximum cloud performance for the widest range of applications and distributed WAN environments.

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Virtual open architecture for WAN optimization anywhere

August 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA) InfographicWAN optimization is now vital to all aspects of a distributed network. Gone are the days when WAN optimization was only required to address the issues of a handful of problem WAN connections.

Today, major IT initiatives such as data center consolidation, cloud computing, virtualization, and disaster recovery share a common theme — and a common challenge:  They all rely on a wide area network (WAN) infrastructure plagued with bandwidth limitations, latency and packet loss.

This has driven a need for more flexible WAN optimization that can be cost-effectively deployed across an entire private or public network—from the cloud to the data center to the branch.

But the legacy model of proprietary, fixed hardware-based offerings cannot service this evolving market because the offerings are tightly bound to underlying hardware in a closed architecture, thereby limiting deployment flexibility and scalability.

The rapid adoption of “virtualization” has changed this, and the presence of under-utilized computing resources within the network has opened the door for enabling WAN optimization on any hardware platform across the network.

Silver Peak has fully embraced virtualization and today revolutionizes the delivery, pricing and deployment options for WAN optimization with our Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture, or VXOA.

VXOA is based on the underlying software that powers our entire family of Silver Peak NX, VX, and VRX products. So whether you deploy our multi-Gigabit NX-10k physical appliance or our 4 Mbps VX-1000 virtual appliance, you’re
getting the same data cente- class software. It’s this software that makes it easy for Silver Peak VXOA to run on any hypervisor, any server, any router blade…any platform that meets the minimum system requirements.

It doesn’t end there. We have taken this a step further and now offer you the most competitive pricing and licensing options for deploying WAN optimization on any platform. This includes new subscription or “pay as you go” pricing, which allows you to avoid larger up-front capital costs and pay for only what you need as an annual operating expense. And enables you to break free from the expensive hardware refresh cycles forced by other vendors.

Silver Peak offers you investment protection — or “pay as you grow” pricing — allowing you to start small and upgrade to higher-capacity appliances as your network demands dictate. You only pay the difference between the smaller and larger licenses when upgrading.

Silver Peak VXOA breaks customers free from the dependency on proprietary hardware and vendor-dictated hardware refresh cycles. With VXOA, we give you more choice and flexibility to achieve the
highest-capacity and most cost-effective WAN performance for all applications in any environment.

Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Virtualization, WAN Optimization Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bypassing the Bandwidth Cap

July 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

cloud bandwidth limitLimitations are onerous things. They slow us down and keep us from being all we can be. Even as more businesses turn to cloud computing to expand their potential, they run smack dab into the limitations of their Internet service provider’s bandwidth cap and suddenly find themselves waiting…and waiting…and waiting to retrieve data that they need right away, if not sooner.

Like Matt Ingram at GigaOm said recently, “The cloud is a wonderful thing,” noting that it provides us with endlessly expandable storage possibilities for those files – music, video, large documents – that we either don’t want or can’t afford to have taking up space locally. Then comes the “But…”:

But when the cloud meets an Internet service provider’s bandwidth cap (something that is unfortunately becoming more and more commonplace) it can be a less than happy experience.

And that’s a huge “but” in the cloud computing discussion. Companies would dearly like to trim expenses and maintenance requirements by centralizing data center and storage activities in the cloud, but before they can do that, they need to be certain the financial and time savings of this consolidation will not be offset by the additional time and expense to recover data from the cloud.

Cloud Identification

Cloud computing is a fairly broad term that is used very liberally. While it often means different things to different people, essentially it involves the delivery of the following hosted services over a shared WAN such as the Internet:

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) - when a hosting provider, like Amazon Web Services, provides virtual servers with unique IP addresses and blocks of storage on demand. Customers benefit from an application programming interface (API) from which they can control their servers, and they have the flexibility to pay for exactly the amount of service they use.1
  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) - a set of software and development tools hosted on the provider’s servers. Developers can create applications using the provider’s APIs.1 Google Apps is one of the more popular PaaS offerings.
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) - a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers (e.g. Salesforce.com) or download the application to an end user device.

Irrespective of the type of service deployed, all cloud computing initiatives have one thing in common – data is centralized, while users are distributed. This places an increased emphasis on the network, making cloud computing susceptible to the same WAN bandwidth, latency, and quality challenges that impact other enterprise applications.

cloud WAN OptimizationClearing a Path to the Clouds

To ensure that using the cloud remains the business enhancement it was intended to be rather than an ill-timed bottleneck, WAN optimization is critical to all cloud computing initiatives. By overcoming these challenges, Silver Peak’s WAN optimization is critical to all cloud computing initiatives.

Cloud services can be delivered across two types of cloud environments. In a “private cloud”, access is restricted to specific users (e.g. via a Virtual Private Network). In a “public cloud”, the hosted service is available to anyone. Both private and public clouds perform in a similar fashion as they are equally susceptible to the same bandwidth, latency, and quality issues. However, it is more difficult to deploy WAN optimization in environments where both ends of the link are not owned by a single entity, as is often the case in public cloud environments. In a private cloud environment, it is common for a single entity to “own” both ends of the WAN link, making it easier to deploy existing WAN optimization solutions in these environments.

Today, the vast majority of WAN optimization deployments in support of cloud initiatives involve the placement of a physical WAN optimization appliance on both ends of the network. However, initiatives are in the works for virtual appliances that can reside on existing infrastructure.

Silver Peak employs real-time network optimization techniques to maximize application performance across the cloud while minimizing IT operational costs.

These techniques include:

  • Network Integrity: a variety of real-time optimization techniques to “clean up” the cloud for better effective throughput. Advanced Quality of Service (QoS) services can prioritize traffic and guarantee that necessary bandwidth requirements are met.
  • Network Memory™: disk-based deduplication that eliminates the transfer of duplicate information sent across the WAN when cloud-based applications are accessed.
  • Network Acceleration: various TCP acceleration techniques that help overcome latency across a cloud infrastructure.

Whether it’s Google Apps, Hosted Microsoft Exchange, or an organization’s own disaster recovery system, Silver Peak provides real-time optimization techniques that maximize WAN performance and lower WAN costs in support of strategic cloud initiatives. The company’s unique network-centric approach to WAN optimization delivers maximum scalability while providing the flexibility needed to support all current and emerging applications.

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Get off of My Cloud: Optimizing the Private Cloud

July 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

private cloud WANThere’s a split going on in cloud computing. Once considered a very public yet often nebulous and insecure environment known more for pay-as-you-go applications and services (i.e., SaaS), we have witnessed over the last couple of years a breakup of cloud computing into public and private cloud sectors.

What originally accounted for the cloud’s burgeoning popularity now comprises what we commonly refer to as the public cloud. This portion offers Web-based applications like Google Apps and Salesforce.com, which run on the public Internet and are open to any paying user.

What has emerged more recently, however, is the private cloud. Private clouds, as indicated by their name, are owned by individual companies and enterprises and are used to centralize all or portions of their computer systems. Anything from data storage to applications to operating systems can now be cloud based and managed independently by an individual company.

Recently, Microsoft’s David Linthicum provided Forbes.com with his thoughts on the business benefits of the private cloud (BTW, Microsoft is a huge proponent of the private cloud over the public cloud for enterprise use). Linthicum says that the four main business benefits of a private cloud environment are:

  • Additional uptime
  • SLA reporting
  • Compliance management
  • Understanding disasters

What all four benefits boil down to is that a private cloud arrangement minimizes management and maintenance because computing is performed in a centralized location – a one location, one IT department, one place to fix when something goes down. This minimization of IT expenses is precisely what enterprises are looking for in this day and age of doing more with less.

Unfortunately, no good idea goes unchallenged.

Rain on Me

Linthicum winds up his article with this caveat:

However, this technology is not something that solves all of your problems. You need to leverage this technology around the right strategy, and with the right people. Training should be a huge part of the deployment plan for cloud management tools, and you’ll also want a policy to constantly monitor their effectiveness.

And he’s right; all those things do need to be considered when establishing a private cloud environment for an enterprise. Where he comes up short, however, is in neglecting the issue of cloud access. Unfortunately, not everyone in the organization will be likely to access the centralized computing system in an orderly fashion so as not to overtax the wide area network that connects employees to the private cloud.

So whether the company is in disaster recovery mode or just doing business as usual, there needs to be some consideration of how everyone will access the cloud without bringing it down.

WAN optimization cloudYour Cloud Line Urges Me

All cloud computing initiatives have one thing in common – data is centralized, while users are distributed. This places an increased emphasis on the network, making cloud computing susceptible to the same WAN bandwidth, latency, and quality challenges that impact other enterprise applications. By overcoming these challenges, Silver Peak’s WAN optimization (WANop) is critical to all cloud computing initiatives.

Silver Peak employs real-time network optimization techniques to maximize application performance across the cloud while minimizing IT operational costs.

These techniques include:

  • Network Integrity: Silver Peak provides a variety of real-time optimization techniques to “clean up” the cloud for better effective throughput. Advanced Quality of Service (QoS) services can prioritize traffic and guarantee that necessary bandwidth requirements are met.
  • Network Memory™: Silver Peak uses Network Memory disk-based deduplication to eliminate the transfer of duplicate information sent across the WAN when cloud-based applications are accessed.
  • Network Acceleration: Various TCP acceleration techniques help to overcome latency across a cloud infrastructure.

So, when an enterprise decides to seek a private cloud solution, and channel the Rolling Stones by saying, “Get off of my cloud,” they will find the path to that cloud significantly faster and more efficient by employing these WANop techniques.

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Storm Front Coming: Looking to the Cloud for Recovery

June 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

cloud computing recoveryMy home state of Massachusetts is not usually thought of as “tornado alley” as we average three, typically non-destructive twisters per year. Nevertheless, last week we were hit with four separate twisters in a single day.

Those four tornadoes are a tiny fraction of the more than 1,400 reported in the U.S. this year. Their frequency and severity this year have been stark reminders of the violence and destruction Mother Nature can inflict without warning. One fact should now be abundantly clear to all businesses if it wasn’t evident before these disasters – fast and reliable disaster recovery plans need to be in place in anticipation of when, not if a disaster strikes.

Flirting with Disaster

I had that though in mind when I recently re-read a cloud computing case study by Chris Murphy at InformationWeek. The article included an interview with the CIO of Brady Corporation, a product, facility and safety identification company specializing in the kinds of identification technologies that take on a heightened sense of urgency in the wake of disaster. What was notable about the article is that Brady Corporation, as Murphy writes, “has embraced the cloud more aggressively than most.”

While Brady Corp. may be “aggressive,” many companies are looking to the cloud for their disaster recovery solutions.

Cloud for disaster recovery makes sense. Since all cloud computing initiatives have one thing in common – data is centralized, while users are distributed – it is, by its very definition, a sensible solution for disaster recovery.

disaster recovery cloudIt does have its drawbacks. Recovering data from the cloud places an increased emphasis on the network, making cloud computing susceptible to the same WAN bandwidth, latency, and quality challenges that impact other enterprise applications. Even with deduplication, recovery processes from the cloud involve the transfer of large amounts of data across a WAN, requiring a significant amount of WAN bandwidth. Moreover, the transfer of these large amounts of data must be done without interruption. Yet WAN latency and packet loss can disrupt this process, resulting in missed recovery point objectives (RPO).

When the time spent in recovery means time lost making money, the last thing a company needs is to get bogged down by bandwidth limitations when it is trying to get mission-critical systems back up and running.

Clearing the Path to the Cloud

WAN performance does not have to be an obstacle to cloud-based disaster recovery, though. Use of advanced WAN deduplication – the kind pioneered by Silver Peak – enables more data to be protected across the WAN without adding costly bandwidth. Latency and packet loss also need not adversely impact backup and recovery processes when a company utilizes features such as those in Silver Peak’s Network Integrity and Network Acceleration applications.

WAN optimization (WANop) is an indispensible component of cloud-based disaster recovery projects and Silver Peak’s WANop solutions increase the performance and reliability of cloud backup, replication and recovery while reducing IT costs. Using WANop, Silver Peak creates a smooth, efficient path to the cloud that includes:

  • Improved data transfer times: Silver Peak’s Network Memory recognizes repetitive information and delivers it locally.  In addition, Silver Peak provides enhancements to accelerate TCP and CIFS, reducing the impact of latency on data transfers.
  • Maximized WAN efficiency: Network Memory can reduce as much as 95% of WAN traffic by eliminating the transfer of duplicate information.  Network memory fingerprints at the byte level, enabling Silver Peak to detect and eliminate repetitive patterns even when the backup/replication solution is performing similar functions at the block level. In addition, Silver Peak leverages advanced compression techniques to further reduce the amount of WAN bandwidth required for backup and replication.
  • Reduced packet loss and delivery errors: Silver Peak reduces the impact of both packet loss and jitter that occurs when router links are oversubscribed and drop or re-order packets. Adaptive Forward Error Correction (FEC) for example, can reduce effective packet loss by an order of magnitude.
  • Guaranteed data security: Silver Peak NX appliances use hardware-based AES encryption to protect network traffic and local content, protecting all data at all times from unauthorized access.
  • Cost -effective scalability: Silver Peak can support a full 500 Mbps WAN capacity in a single NX appliance, with several variants available that support over 45 Mbps. This enables enterprises to support data center to data center links cost-effectively, while also supporting network-based backups across many remote locations.

The Silver Peak solution cost-effectively scales to support large data center environments, delivering the most LAN and WAN side throughput for disaster recovery environments. Only Silver Peak optimizes both TCP and non-TCP traffic, improving data transfer times and maximizing WAN efficiency across all backup and replication solutions.

So when it comes to disaster recovery, a company should keep its feet on the ground, its data in the cloud and its access to the cloud WAN-optimized.

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Video: WAN Optimization for Next-Gen Data Centers

June 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Here is a great video of Silver Peak vice president of product management Damon Ennis talking about the new NX-10K appliance, the industry’s first multi-Gigabit WAN optimization appliance for next generation data centers and the industy’s highest-capacity WAN optimization appliance. This will be instrumental in helping customers “future-proof” the WAN for cloud and virtualization architectures in the data center.

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