Data Center Knowledge | News and analysis for the data center industry - Industr's Journal
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Friday, September 4th, 2015
| Time |
Event |
| 12:00p |
Why Optimization and WANOP for Your Cloud Is Now Easier than Ever The kinds of services we can deliver via a cloud model has absolutely diversified over just the last few years. We’re now pushing down rich content, a variety of applications, and a lot of new use cases. The reality here is that cloud will continue to grow as more users and verticals adopt this very versatile platform. In fact, global spending on IaaS is expected to reach almost $16.5 billion in 2015, an increase of 32.8 percent from 2014, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019 forecast at 29.1 percent, according to Gartner. The report goes on to state that over time, as a business becomes more comfortable with the use of IaaS, organizations, especially in the midmarket, will eventually migrate away from running their own data centers in favor of relying primarily on infrastructure in the cloud.
This future cloud model certainly bodes well for new kinds of applications and a richer device playing field. Organizations will be able to push down all sorts of new content while still creating secure policies, enabling the user, and pushing their own business forward. However, with the growth of cloud and all of these new data points, there are some realities to talk about as well. Consider the following:
- Content is getting richer, larger, and a lot more diverse.
- Gartner forecasts that 4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, up 30 percent from 2014, and will reach 25 billion by 2020.
- More organizations are finding even more use cases for cloud.
- Global markets are shifting the dynamic competitive landscape of the cloud.
- Cloud services continue to evolve to encompass evolving demands.
These are important points to remember simply because the speed at which you can deliver content will dictate your position in your market.Pushing down services and content (like applications) is critical to keep the business moving forward and maintaining user productivity. In the past, creating optimizations was tedious and required serious hardware investments. Plus, capabilities around cross-connecting cloud and data center resources was still a bit of a challenge.
Today, however, cloud optimization and WANOP have gone through some serious generational evolutions. What you can do with intelligent WANOP systems far exceeds the capabilities of the past, and it’s much easier to deploy.
- WANOP as a virtual service. You no longer have to invest in a hardware appliance. You can now test, deploy, and even utilize entire virtual WANOP platforms for your organization. With that in mind, I’m certainly not suggesting that you take out your current physical appliances. In fact, in cases of massive throughput or the need for hardware acceleration, physical appliances are still great. Still, you can import entire WANOP virtual appliances into your hypervisor and allow it to control, optimize, and shape your traffic. This is great for cloud instances, smaller branches, or even enterprise data centers with specific WANOP use-cases. Here’s the important piece: it’s not hard to deploy. At the very least, testing a new virtual WANOP appliance has become much easier.
- Cloud, WAN and link aggregation. You’re not just trying to optimize traffic when working with modern WANOP technologies. New platforms (even the virtual ones) now allow you to aggregate links to optimize traffic and bandwidth. Furthermore, you can integrate your WANOP appliance with internal system to do link aggregation and even failover. Now, WANOP is not just optimization. It also helps with disaster recovery and business continuity. You can aggregate cellular, wireless, wired, and even MPLS links together to create better WAN utilization as well as greater failover capabilities. The amazing part is that all of this can be controlled from the virtual layer.
- WANOP is evolving cloud networking. WAN optimization and link control is now a direct part of the data center, cloud, and networking conversation. As a virtual appliance, a WANOP controller has access to all network resources being presented to the infrastructure. Now, with SDN and other networking controllers integrating WANOP is easier than ever. The important thing to understand is that as a key piece around cloud technology, controlling WAN traffic allows you to dynamically influence content delivery and the user experience. Very soon you’ll see even more applications and data sets delivered via the cloud. The stay competitive, it’ll be important to deploy technologies which allow you control the traffic that gets sent out and the requests that are coming in. Integrating WANOP with virtualization, cloud, and your data center will show you a new way to analyze and optimize traffic.
At this point, if you’re experiencing any sort of cloud challenge around delivery, control or optimizing an experience, you should look at WANOP. As mentioned earlier, these systems can now be deployed as virtual appliances for testing. Delivering enterprise capabilities to any organization with some kind of virtual footprint is easier than ever before. These technologies are allowing for more businesses to compete at a higher level. The key is knowing about these platforms, testing them out, and applying them to the right business use cases. As cloud evolves, so should your organization. Using WANOP technologies for link aggregation, traffic shaping, and overall optimization not only helps your business, it also creates a much happier user. | | 3:09p |
Blackberry Acquires Security Software Maker Good Technology BlackBerry’s smartphone business faded away due to stiff competition from Apple and Samsung, but the Canada-based company just made a move to become more competitive in the crowded, yet very lucrative enterprise mobility management software market (EEM).
The company announced in a press release that it would acquire security software maker Good Technology for $425 million cash. Investors showed their approval, sending shares of BBRY up 3 percent in early trading Friday.
UK-based research firm Ovum says that revenue in the global EEM market is expected to jump to nearly $10 billion by 2019, up from $2.7 billion last year.
“Like BlackBerry, Good has a very strong presence in enterprises and governments around the world and, with this transaction, BlackBerry will enhance its sales and distribution capabilities and further grow its enterprise software revenue stream,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in a statement.
According to BlackBerry, nearly two-thirds of Good Technology’s software activations are on Apple iOS devices. Apple is expected to unveil its next iPhone, the iPhone 6S, at an event in San Francisco next Wednesday. Good specializes in multi-OS management with 64 percent of activations from iOS devices, followed by a broad Android and Windows customer base.
The two companies are very complementary. Good adds capabilities and technologies to BlackBerry that include secure applications that protect end-user privacy. BlackBerry will now be able to expand its offerings for cross-platform EMM solutions critical in the new worlds of bring-your-own-device (BYOD), corporate owned, personally enabled (COPE), and environments with multiple user interfaces and operating systems, according to a press release.
The Good Dynamics platform provides app-level encryption, advanced data loss prevention and secure communication between applications. The platform has more than 2,000 independent software vendors and custom applications built today.
“Enterprise customers today demand stringent security and the most flexible platform across all mobility strategies,” said Good Chairman and CEO Christy Wyatt, in a press release. “We are excited to join BlackBerry, where together we will be the most comprehensive mobile platform in the market. Good has worked hard to deliver the highest levels of security across operating systems and applications.”
Prior to the acquisition, the two individual companies covered a lot of ground. Together, they create a formidable landscape.
Good serves more than 6,200 organizations, including more than half of the Fortune 100, all of the Fortune 100 commercial banks, aerospace and defense firms, and leaders across healthcare, manufacturing and retail. BlackBerry is the mobility partner of all G7 governments, 16 of the G20 governments, 10-out-of-10 of the largest global banks and law firms, and the top five largest managed healthcare, investment services, and oil and gas companies.
BlackBerry goes against a hearty group of competitors in the EEM market, including VMware, Citrix Systems, IBM and startup Tanium, which has raised $120 million in a new funding round.
| | 8:45p |
NVIDIA Launches GRID 2.0 Architecture for Virtual Server Platforms Looking to make graphics processing units (GPUs) a more mainstream element of data center environments, NVIDIA launched NVIDIA GRID 2.0 this week at the VMworld 2015 conference. The new architecture adds support for Linux and doubles the number of users per GPU server that can be supported.
Originally designed to be deployed on Windows Server, Andrew Cresci, general manager for NVIDIA GRID, said the addition of Windows Server support should significantly broaden adoption of a framework that makes it feasible to run virtual instances of graphics applications on a remote server.
“We’re starting to see more GPUs becoming part of private clouds,” said Cresci. “We’re trying to remove more of the barriers to adoption.”
At the moment, NVIDIA reports that server vendors such as Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo, have qualified the GRID solution to run on 125 different server models, now including blade servers. NVIDIA has also lined up support from both VMware and Citrix for its approach to delivering graphics via desktop virtualization software.
NVIDIA claims the latest version of NVIDIA GRID 2.0 supports more users per server, and overall application performance is now twice as fast. Less clear, however, is the degree to which IT organizations will make use of NVIDIA GRID to replace or augment workstations. Being able to access graphics files on a remote server makes it simpler for engineers to, for example, invoke graphics files using a mobile computing device. In fact, going forward it’s also likely that most “power users” will want to access those files using multiple types of mobile computing devices.
But how many of them might consent to giving up their workstations to access graphics applications on a server remains to be seen. At the same time, Cresci noted that many senior executives that have a workstation today may not need one if they all they need to do is review files that can be stored on a server. In either scenario, the collaboration capabilities surrounding graphics files and applications will be significantly enhanced.
In general, virtualization on the desktop has been a tough sell in the enterprise. Virtual desktops delivered via the data center account for a relatively small percentage of the desktops in the enterprise. As such, the general expectation is that NVIDIA GRID will be used to augment existing workstation application environment rather than replace workstations all together.
Over time, however, Cresci said NVIDIA does indeed expect to see more of those types of application workloads moving back on to servers in the data center and eventually out on to the cloud.
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