F5 Gets More Cloud-Friendly

F5 is making file virtualization more cloud friendly with the introduction of  software that translates storage protocols, making it possible to store files in  public or private cloud networks using a range of technologies.ARX Cloud Extender software runs on servers that sit between F5's ARX file  virtualization appliances and storage networks that may use different protocols  than are used by the devices the files are being sent from, the company says.

So if CIFS files are being stored in an Iron  Mountain (IRM) Virtual File  Store service cloud, the ARX Cloud Extender will make the protocol translation.  The software can handle any NSF or CIFS implementations as well as Iron Mountain  VFS and NetApp (NTAP) StorageGrid.

The software is expected to be available by the end of the year. F5 isn’t releasing pricing.


F5 is also opening up an application programming interface to its ARX appliance, which will enable customers to get new functionality from the devices. For example, using the API, a script could be written to compile the changes to a file or storage system since an application last scanned it. When
the application scans for an update, the script would feed it just the changes since the last scan rather than having the application scan the whole system itself, a more time-consuming option.

The API will be provided to customers as part of their maintenance contracts for the ARX, the company says.

F5 is announcing a virtual version of its ARX appliance that can be sold to OEMs to be bundled with  other products such as WAN optimization gear or file servers. Also, customers interested in an ARX
could readily download a trial comply of ARX to test before deciding whether to buy, the company says.

The virtual version supports VMware (VMW) virtual environments and will cost less than the ARX appliance, but F5 wouldn’t say how much it costs. It's available in the first quarter of next year, and comes in three models the 500, 2000 and 4000 for varying capacities.

http://www.cio.com/article/643871/F5_Gets_More_Cloud_Friendly?source=rss_cloud_computing
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Optimizing the Virtual Cloud

BURBANK, CA–(Marketwire – July 29, 2010) – Cloud computing is a revolution for corporate data systems. Instead of having to install and maintain costly server hardware on-site, enterprises can now subscribe to a cloud service and literally use computing resources as they are needed.

When they are no longer required, those resources are used elsewhere. The idea has firmly taken hold; a prominent motion-picture company recently turned to a cloud for their highly compute-intensive animation needs, and certainly saved major costs by not having to utilize in-house resources.

One element that makes cloud computing so attractive is its use of virtual servers. It boggles the mind to think that a user at a corporation can access the cloud and actually launch their very own complete server for needed tasks. When that task is done, that server is no longer needed and it simply ceases to exist. The incredible gains that virtualization has brought in hardware and space economics — to cloud computing and everywhere else — are still being realized.

But as we all know, while we all have our heads in the clouds it is important to keep our eyes on the ground as well. In the case of cloud computing, that "ground" is the hardware hosting virtual systems — hardware that is still subject to drastic system slows courtesy of file fragmentation.

All hard drives suffer from file fragmentation — and hard drives are the place that data for virtual systems, and hence a computing cloud, is stored. In comparison to a traditional server, a virtual environment has a few added steps to data storage and retrieval, however, and fragmentation can have even more of an impact. When a file request occurs on a virtual server, the I/O request is relayed, at the least, from the guest system to the host system — which means multiple requests are occurring for each file request. When a file is fragmented into hundreds or thousands of fragments, there are multiple I/O requests for each fragment. This operation creates an enormous amount of unnecessary overhead on disk subsystems.

Virtual disks also suffer from "bloat" — their sizes are dynamically set to grow, but they don't shrink when users or applications remove data. This wastes the space that could be allocated to other virtual systems.
The latest in technology automatically and invisibly prevents a majority of fragmentation before it occurs, totally negating the effects of fragmentation in virtual environments. Because free space is also consolidated as part of the process, virtual disk "bloat" is eliminated. Enterprises can now take full advantage of cloud and virtual computing without ever having to worry about the performance drain from fragmentation again.

http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2010/07/optimizing-the-virtual-cloud/

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Expand’s WAN Optimization Enables $250,000 of Annual Savings for Ridley Inc.

Expand Networks' Technology Improves Efficiency through Consolidated IT Initiatives

Roseland, NJ – July 19th 2010 – Expand Networks (www.expand.com) the leader in WAN optimization for branch office consolidation and virtualization, has been chosen by leading animal nutrition company, Ridley Inc., to assure the success of major IT initiatives, including server consolidation, thin-client computing and bandwidth optimization. Having initially deployed Expand as part of a bandwidth consolidation project, the $200,000 investment paid for itself in just over 6 months. Ridley is now investing a further $180,000 in new Expand technology in order to meet renewed bandwidth requirements needed to support ongoing business growth and strategic IT initiatives, and is set to recoupyear on year savings of $250,000 from the deployment.

Ridley Inc. manufactures and markets animal nutrition and health products and is a publicly traded company on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Based on a business ethos of 'continuous improvement', it operates from 42 locations across North America employing over 1200 staff. With most locations being extremely harsh and dusty environments, such as feed mills, Ridley embarked on a thin-computing strategy, removing servers and computers from remote locations and delivering server based computing from its central location in Mankato, Minnesota.

Chad Gillick, IT Manager, Ridley Inc. explains, "We recognize the importance of IT in enabling the business to streamline its processes, gain greater efficiencies, increase productivity and reduce costs. Expand's WAN optimization technology has been a critical enabler in helping us deploy strategic IT initiatives such as server based computing and virtual desktop infrastructure."

By deploying the Expand solution Gillick has been able to remove expensive desktop and laptop computers at the remote sites and replace with thin client terminals, without the need for costly bandwidth upgrades.

Having looked at competitive offerings from Riverbed and Cisco, Gillick chose Expand because of its superior capabilities in accelerating Citrix and web based traffic. Furthermore, due to the fact that Ridley utilizes a managed WAN service from AT&T, Expand's WAFS capabilities with QoS, enabled Gillick to tailor traffic flows and dynamically manage bandwidth requirements 'on the fly'.

Gillick continues, "Not only did we recoup our initial $200,000 investment in just over 6 months based purely on efficiency and productivity savings, we're also gaining significant financial and operational benefits in other areas. For instance, without the Expand solution we would have needed a 45mbps connection at the central site that would have cost in the region of $26,000 per month. With Expand we were able to reduce this to a 9mbps link costing $4,500, an annual saving of over $250,000. On top of this, it's enabling of server consolidation and thin client computing, we have managed to reduce our technical refresh costs which were running at $400,000 annually down to $220,000. We believe we will be reaping the benefits of the Expand solution for many years to come."

Adam Davison, corporate VP sales and marketing, Expand Networks, comments, "We continue to see tremendous traction in the market place for our technology. It's especially rewarding when an organization such as Ridley Inc., that clearly places a huge emphasis on its IT infrastructure to deliver business agility and competitive advantage, chooses Expand's solution over competitive offerings. This is further validation of Expand's technology and demonstrated why WAN optimization is becoming a catalyst and enabler for many of today's strategic IT initiatives."

More information on Ridley's WAN optimization project can be found at: http://www.expand.com/ridleyinc

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Cloud Computing: The Need For Speed

The spectacular predictions for cloud revenue growth over the coming decade depend critically on the success of cloud providers in persuading major enterprise customers to deploy many of their mission-critical systems in the cloud rather than in-house.

Today's cloud users are overwhelmingly web companies, for whom the low cost of cloud computing, together with simple elastic scaling are the critical factors. But major enterprises are different. In looking at the cloud option, their first major concern is security. This is well documented, has been discussed to death in cloud blogs and conferences, and is certainly a real problem. However, I think we can be very confident that the cloud vendors will be able to quickly overcome the concerns in this area.

The reality, although not currently the perception, is that many/most in-house systems are no more secure than cloud systems. The perception of cloud security will change quickly over the next couple of years, as more cloud services are deployed. There are certainly no significant technical impediments here. Many of the security technologies used to protect in-house datacenters can be adapted to secure cloud services.

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Hubs, Spokes and WANs

Recently, we've had a number of discussions with enterprises about how they'd like to use the cloud.

The basic use case is around capacity on-demand (not surprisingly), but the specifics have raised some interesting issues. The companies have distributed branch offices that need the capacity for a range of applications, including dev/test environments as well as back-office and web apps. Today, these distributed groups are relying on corporate IT to meet their scaling and infrastructure needs, and they are frequently bottlenecked.

This is both in terms of overall challenges in getting new capacity approved in a timely way, but also from a network bandwidth perspective. At a panel this week at Interop, Riverbed noted that 2/3 of their enterprise customers have a hub and spoke model that requires the "spokes" to backhaul to the "hub" for connectivity to the internet, and thus to cloud computing services.

Only the remaining 1/3 have direct connections. At the same panel, Blue Coat agreed with the stats but commented that the branch sites are trending towards a direct-connect model as new sites are added.

As Expand Networks are able to provide a complete holistic VM based solution at both branch offices and head quarters, the TCO can be significantly lower than appliance beased solutions so check them out also.

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Virtualization, cloud to shape 2010 WAN trends

Predictions about the WAN optimization landscape in 2010 center on virtualization, cloud computing and video traffic

Virtualization, cloud computing and video traffic play a prominent role in predictions about the WAN optimization landscape in 2010. Read on to see what a few more industry watchers have to say.

Frederic Hediard, vice president of product management at Streamcore, emphasized the influence video will have in the coming year:

“The high growth in real-time video traffic on corporate networks will continue to drive the need for solutions that provide visibility, traffic prioritization and bandwidth management. When enterprises make large investments in videoconferencing equipment, they cannot settle for poor performance from these systems,” Hediard says.

Among its 2010 predictions, Riverbed noted the demand for end users to be able to connect to corporate resources no matter where they are working: “As more cloud and virtualization projects come to fruition, users will be further away from their data. More vendors including Riverbed will step up to provide offerings for the cloud that address several key issues including service availability, data and vendor lock-in, security, data transfer bottlenecks and performance unpredictability.”

Riverbed also expects to see growth in enterprise edge boxes that consolidate branch services: “Consolidation and virtualization initiatives help increase flexibility and efficiency in delivering valuable services while reducing costs. The deployment of edge boxes will provide another opportunity for more consolidation as enterprises will look to not only consolidate servers but also print servers.”

Adam Davison, vice president of corporate sales and marketing at Expand Networks, also emphasized virtualization and the cloud in his look-ahead observations:

“As we continue to move toward virtualized infrastructures, as-a-service offerings and cloud-based services, we will see more applications traversing the WAN than ever before. Many of these applications will be content-rich, real-time and bandwidth-intensive as the use of collaboration and Web 2.0 applications become more widely utilized across distributed enterprises and virtual workgroups. This will create increased demand for advanced WAN optimization solutions, however IT is already realizing that it is no longer just about providing acceleration, but about enabling enhanced levels of traffic visibility and control, and assuring the quality of the user experience across all these complex environments.”

On the topic of cloud computing, Davison notes that the ability to provision a software solution for virtualized WAN optimization from the data center to the branch office and mobile users will be critical:
“Management, visibility and monitoring of the WAN and its traffic will be critical here. For example, QoS in and out of the cloud; mobile clients for remote cloud users; VDI/SBC support for desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and for the support WAN optimization-as-a-service (WOaaS) will all be critical considerations,” Davison says. “Only a wholly virtual WAN optimization offering will enable the cloud infrastructure, both private and public, to be deployed and managed from any location.”

While the idea of WAN optimization-as-a-service has been thrown around as a trend for some time, Davison says Expand is confident that 2010 will see it come into its own. “Our recent survey of IT decision makers certainly supports this sentiment, with 76% saying they would consider adopting a WOaaS strategy if offered at a compelling price point, with 44% citing ongoing cost efficiency and reduction in OPEX as a key drivers for this.”

In addition, Expand expects to see more service providers and telcos integrate WAN optimization products into their own offerings to add value and differentiate themselves from competitors. “With this integration, users may not even be aware they are reaping the benefits of WOaaS,” Davison says. 

Original Article NETWORK WORLD - http://napps.networkworld.com/newsletters/accel/2010/010410netop2.html?page=2

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The Cloud Computing – Application Acceleration Connection

Like peanut-butter and jelly, cloud computing and application acceleration are just better together.
Ann Bednarz of Network World waxes predictive regarding 2010 trends in application delivery and WAN optimization in WAN optimization in 2010. One of the interesting tidbits she offers from research firm Gartner is growth in the application acceleration market: 

Second, the research firm is predicting a return to modest growth for the application acceleration market in 2010. Gartner is forecasting a compound annual growth rate of 12.22%, with 2014 revenue of $4.27 billion.

This, when viewed alongside the predictions that cloud computing – both public and private –will see significant growth in 2010, should be no surprise.

The build out of "enterprise class" cloud computing service will continue to major growth area.   IDC stated "The emergence of enterprise-grade cloud services will be a unifying theme in this area, with a battle unfolding in cloud application platforms -- the most strategic real estate in the cloud for the next 20 years."  The overall growth in the IT industry for major categories of hardware, software and services are expected to have a 2 to 4% growth rate.

It shouldn't be a surprise, but perhaps the connection isn't as obvious as it first appears. Organizations are global, yes, but for many businesses – especially those that are most likely to take advantage of cloud computing and its cost reducing benefits, i.e. mid-sized and smaller organizations – they often focus on a fairly localized market. Larger organizations have no doubt undergone the exercise in the past of determining where, from a performance standpoint, it is best to deploy second and even tertiary data centers. Public cloud computing, however, changes the impact of location on performance and opens up a potentially increasing need for application acceleration solutions to combat longer distances and the impact of changing the delivery epicenter of their most critical, customer and end-user facing applications.

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CLOUD COMPUTING and the IMPACT on the APPLICATION ACCELERATION MARKET

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Consider, if you will, that an organization chooses to deploy an application which will be used on a daily basis by employees in "the cloud." In previous incarnations that application would have likely been deployed in the local data center, accessible to employees over the local LAN. High speed. Low latency. The only real obstacle to astounding application performance would have been hardware and software limitations imposed by the choice of server hardware, web/application server software, and the database. Now move that application to "the cloud" and consider the potential obstacles to application performance that are introduced: higher latency, lower speed, less control. What's potentially true is that moving to "the cloud" mitigates the expense associated with higher performing servers so bottlenecks that may have occurred due to limitations imposed by the server hardware are gone, but they are replaced by the inevitable degradation of performance that comes with delivery over the Internet – higher latency, because it's farther away and there are more users out there than "in here" and lower speed because it's rare that an organization has LAN-like speeds even to the Internet.
So what we have is a most cost-effective method of deploying applications that's farther away from its users. The potential – and I'd say inevitability – is there that performance will be impacted and not in a good way. The solution is to (1) keep the application deployed locally, (2) tell the users to deal with it, or (3) employ the use of application acceleration/optimization solutions to provide consistent performance of an acceptable level to users no matter where they might end up.

There are well-known, proven solutions to addressing the core problem of distance on application performance: caching, compression, more efficient connection management, etc… All of which fall under the "application acceleration" umbrella.  As cloud computing experiences higher adoption rates it is inevitable that performance will be raised as an issue and will need to be addressed. Hence it makes perfect sense that growing cloud computing adoption will provide growth opportunities for application acceleration solution vendors' as well, which will positively impact that market.

That's good news for customers and end-users, as they are typically the folks who are impacted the most by architectural and deployment changes to applications. Usability is impacted by performance and responsiveness, which directly impacts productivity – one of the key metrics upon which many end-user employees are evaluated. A rise in offerings related to application acceleration for cloud computing deployed applications will be beneficial to both providers (differentiation and up-selling of services) and customers (remediating potential impact of moving applications further from users) alike.

As the cloud matures we are likely to see, in general, a positive impact on many application delivery related markets – WAN acceleration, application acceleration, and application security – as providers begin to offer a wider variety of services in order to differentiate from the competition and make their offerings more attractive to enterprise-class customers used to having many more technological options for dealing with application delivery challenges than are currently available from most cloud computing providers.

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