Next-Generation Data Center - NetworkComputing

NSA Caught Unawares By Data Center Tax

Kevin Fogarty — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:23 EDT

The whole purpose of an organization like the National Security Agency (NSA) is to know things far enough ahead of time that its human nodes are never surprised. Certainly that's a big part of the reason the agency has been building a heavily fortified, $2 billion data center on the thinly populated, dry mountain plain just south of Salt Lake City.

However, it appears the NSA may have been surprised by a tax on the electricity the data center is expected to consume. This year the Utah State Legislature added a 6% tax to electricity coming from Rocky Mountain Power. The NSA data center is one of the facilities whose power costs could be affected, according to a story in the Salt Lake Tribune. The Tribune estimated the tax bill at around $2.4 million dollars.

F5 Combines Application Acceleration With Traffic Management

Gary Hilson — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:03 EDT

F5 Networks is bringing together application acceleration and traffic management capabilities onto one platform with its BIG-IP Application Acceleration Manager (AAM), which is designed to help enterprises reduce first-visit page load times for SaaS applications and improve throughput on mobile devices that use the company's BIG-IP Edge Client. It also optimizes legacy protocols such as FTP and UDP as well as emerging protocols such as SPDY.

BIG-IP AAM employs a number of acceleration technologies, including delivery optimization for HTTP Live Streaming, forward error correction and symmetric optimization. It also incorporates features found in F5's BIG-IP WebAccelerator and BIG-IP WAN Optimization Manager. In addition, starting with version 11.4, the company's BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager will incorporate support for TCP optimization, compression, bandwidth control, iSessions and SPDY as core capabilities.

IT Vendors Need More Pricing Transparency

Kurt Marko — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:37 EDT

I recently assembled Network Computing's SDN vendor comparison, a buyer's guide on software-defined networking hardware and software. A key component of any buyer's guide is pricing, because it affects everything from the perceived value of a specific feature set to a buyer's ROI calculus. It's hard to compare products when the bottom line is a black hole, but that's the situation we ran into with a number of vendors as we reviewed their submissions to our guide.

Finding enterprise IT equipment prices has never been as easy as looking up products on Google or Amazon, but there's no reason it has to be so complicated.

Solving VDI Problems with SSDs and Data Deduplication

Howard Marks — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:29 EDT

It's been amusing to watch numerous storage vendors announce that they, and they alone, have the magic feature (derived from unicorn tears) that will allow you to build a VDI environment to satisfy two cranky constituencies: the users, who will break out torches and pitchforks if their thin-client experience is inferior to their old PCs, and the bean counters, who've drunk the Kool-Aid� and think VDI will let them save capex and opex.

In fact, you don't need unicorn tears to make this work (you can save them for SDN). Data deduplication and solid state drives may be all the magic required.

Google's Wireless Sensors: Big Data or Big Brother?

Kevin Fogarty — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:32 EDT

Perhaps the most intriguing—and potentially frightening—technology on display at Google’s recent I/O developers conference was a collection of networked wireless sensors that were deployed inside San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Rather than just let attendees soak up the atmosphere at I/O, Google decided to measure, analyze and report on that atmosphere. It used 525 wireless devices that detected noise levels, humidity, temperature and other variables. The network, which comes out of Google’s Data Sensing Lab, was made up of cell-phone-sized circuit boards connected by a ZiGBee wireless network managed by Etherios.

EMC Navigates the IT Transformation Waters

David Hill — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:43 EDT

IT is always changing, but the breadth and depth of the transformation now seems to be occurring at an especially rapid pace. IT professionals have to be rooted in the here and now, but they also have to understand how those changes will continue to affect them, and what actions they need to take.

Events such as last week's EMC World 2013, where the theme was "Lead Your Transformation" along the lines of cloud, big data and trust (security), are designed to help IT professionals better understand both what they need to do in the present and the near future.

Why Corporate File Sharing Services Can't Compete

Kevin Fogarty — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:05 EDT

Novell recently unveiled Filr, a file-sharing service that aims to provide a more secure alternative to consumer-oriented, cloud-based services such as Dropbox. Filr is designed to reduce the risk of mobile computing by syncing data on mobile devices with master versions stored in a secure location.

However, rather than approach file sync and sharing from the point of view of the client, as most consumer-oriented services do, Novell designed its system from the data center outward. Novell describes this design as giving "IT complete control of all shared files." That's great for IT, but not so much for the user.

Aruba's 802.11ac Rollout Cleans Up Sticky Clients

Lee H. Badman — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:47 EDT

Aruba is the latest vendor to announce pre-standard 802.11ac APs. Like other WLAN vendors, Aruba is touting more than just 11ac's improved performance in an effort to distinguish itself from the pack.

For instance, Cisco claims "future proofing" with an 11ac module for its flagship 11n AP. Motorola has an environmental monitoring module and local content caching for things like frequently viewed video. Ubiquity gives away its controller code, and delivers 11ac at rock-bottom prices.

Veeam Courts Enterprises With WAN Acceleration

Tony Kontzer — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:33 EDT

Data backup vendor Veeam Software this week announced enhancements to its product line that are designed to streamline backup processes in virtual environments.

The introduction of built-in wide area network acceleration and backup snapshots for Hewlett-Packard virtual storage appliances -- both of which will be available as part of Veeam Backup & Replication v7 Enterprise Plus Edition beginning in July -- also could make the company's software more appealing for larger enterprises.

Networking Gets Interesting Again

Kevin Fogarty — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:34 EDT

There's a new energy in the networking market as vendors roll out unified networking strategies, powerful new hardware, and get their arms around the disruptive technology of software-defined networking.

SDN was everywhere at the 2013 Interop Las Vegas conference, including the keynote stage. And no wonder--SDN promises to upend traditional networking to the same degree that virtualization transformed servers and applications. While technological approaches differ, SDN aims to make rigid physical networks more flexible and scalable; rather than manually configure pathways through the network, SDN brings a level of automation and programmability to match the pace at which applications and services can be deployed inside hypervisors.

Amazon, Microsoft Partner Up for Cloud Management

Tony Kontzer — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:59 EDT

Amazon Web Services' recent announcement of a management pack that lets Microsoft shops monitor their Amazon cloud resources from the System Center Operations Manager console is one of the clearest indications yet that vendors are recognizing the importance of being able to manage an array of cloud instances using a single management tool.

Microsoft's Operations Manager claims to support monitoring of multiple cloud environments, but it can only support those for which the cloud vendor provides a management pack. A Microsoft spokesman said via email that a management pack for the Windows Azure cloud platform is provided to Operations Manager customers, and that Amazon is the first third-party vendor to offer one.

Fusion-io Leaders Step Down in Executive-Suite Turmoil

Howard Marks — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:46 EDT

Fusion-io last week announced that CEO David Flynn and CMO Rick White, both of whom were founders of the company, were departing to "pursue entrepreneurial investing activities."

Flynn took over the top job after Don Basile, now CEO at rival Violin Memory, left the company in 2009. Former HP exec and Fusion-io board member Shane Robinson is taking over the CEO's office. Both Flynn and White will remain on the board and advise the company for the next 12 months, according to the press release.

Eliminating Noisy Neighbors in the Public Cloud

David Hill — Wed, 15 May 2013 20:05 EDT

One problem with multitenant public cloud environments is the "noisy neighbor" phenomenon, when one or more customers monopolize available resources and thus significantly degrade the performance of other customers' systems.

One way to address this problem is via storage-based quality of service that provides defined service levels to all tenants. An infrastructure-as-a-service provider, CloudSigma, is using all-SSD arrays from SolidFire to create an architecture to eliminate noisy neighbors.

Motorola Launches 802.11ac APs

Lee H. Badman — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:54 EDT

Though the 802.11ac wireless standard is not yet official, some vendors are bringing pre-standard consumer and enterprise products to market. As per the IEEE's latest timeline, we should expect 11ac to be ratified in November. This close to the finish line, it's not unusual to see WLAN vendors crossing early.

Motorola is one of those early arrivals. The company announced a set of 802.11ac APs last week at Interop in Las Vegas. I caught up with Motorola at the conference for a briefing. Motorola aims for the same 11ac-related targets as Cisco, Aerohive and other vendors, but its new products have a couple of unique twists.

Iron Mountain Opens Underground Data Center to All

Tony Kontzer — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:47 EDT

Taking the business in a new direction, Iron Mountain has begun formally making its vast underground data center space in Boyers, Pa., available for wholesale and retail colocation data centers. Iron Mountain has done this for select enterprise and government clients over the years but has never offered a generally available service.

Iron Mountain's Boyers facility is located 220 feet underground in a former limestone mine. The site will pair access to data center space there with a suite of data center-related services, including engineering and design, development and construction, and ongoing operations and management. Customers also have the option of tapping Iron Mountain's retail colocation offering, in which they'll lease space in a shared data center environment.

Inside Google's Software-Defined Network

Brent Salisbury — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:54 EDT

The concept of software-defined networking has captured the attention of network engineers and the trade press, but very few examples of a live SDN implementation exist. One of those few is Google. The search giant presented details about its SDN network at the 2013 Open Networking Summit. Let's take a look.

Obviously Google operates a massive network. It's so large that a 2010 study by Arbor Networks concluded, "If Google were an ISP, it would be the fastest growing and third largest global carrier. Only two other providers (both of whom carry significant volumes of Google transit) contribute more inter-domain traffic."

Knowledge Is Key When Implementing SDN

Tony Kontzer — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:19 EDT

IT executives should take a measured approach--and no less--when considering adopting one of today's hottest infrastructure technologies: namely, software-defined networking.

Such is the conclusion of the latest InformationWeek report, which highlights the business benefits of SDN. The report, which draws from InformationWeek surveys of IT decision makers completed in the past several months, indicates that while many enterprises are at least thinking about their SDN strategies, most have done little or nothing to move closer to adoption of SDN.

Citrix Merges Repeater Features With CloudBridge

Gary Hilson — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:30 EDT

Citrix has incorporated WAN-optimization capabilities from its Citrix Branch Repeater into its CloudBridge product to improve customer transition from legacy PC apps. Branch Repeater accelerates PC applications to improve performance on virtualized desktops, while CloudBridge enables enterprise data centers to set up secure and optimized bridges to public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Current Citrix Repeater, Repeater on NetScaler SDX and Branch Repeater customers can add the CloudBridge functionality by upgrading to release 7.0 software, which is now available as a tech preview.

Citrix's CloudBridge can be deployed as a standalone physical or virtual appliance and is shipping today with the CloudBridge 2000 and 3000 line for midrange data centers. The CloudBridge 600 and 700 for branch deployments and the CloudBridge 4000 and 5000, delivering 310 Mbps to 2 Gbps of WAN optimization and secure cloud bridging in the same appliance, can be ordered now and will ship in June. Pricing was not disclosed.

Barracuda Boasts 'Bare Metal' Performance With Eon

Gary Hilson — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:01 EDT

Barracuda Networks unveiled a network virtualization platform at Interop dubbed Barracuda Eon for running and managing Barracuda Vx machines. Eon is designed to make it easier for enterprises to consolidate virtualized network appliances and applications while addressing lag and latency.

The company says enterprises can expect "bare metal" performance for a whole host of its network applications, including its Spam & Virus Firewall Vx, SSL VPN Vx, Web Filter Vx, NG Firewall Vx and the Web Application Firewall Vx. Barracuda Eon integrates with OpenFlow-enabled devices and networks and provides up to 240 Gbps throughput to reduce hardware- and hypervisor-related bottlenecks, and is engineered so that applications are isolated in such a way that one doesn't negatively affect the performance of another.

Best of Interop 2013 Winners Announced

Steven Hill — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:00 EDT

Interop and Network Computing are pleased to present the 2013 Best of Interop awards. For the past several weeks our expert judges have been pouring through 149 product submissions in eight categories.

I had the opportunity to read through all of the submission, and I can tell you there were a surprising percentage of nominees who showed the kind of forward-thinking approach and innovation we love to recognize in the Best of Interop program.

Juniper Pushes SDN Strategy Ahead With JunosV Contrail

Gary Hilson — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:51 EDT

Juniper Networks is leveraging its recent acquisition of Contrail Systems to launch JunosV Contrail, a product portfolio that includes the open, standards-based JunosV Contrail Controller for software-defined networks.

The company says the JunosV Contrail Controller provides the core benefits SDN customers are seeking: multitenancy, cloud federation and network automation. Enterprises can provision and enforce networking services such as security, load balancing and DPI using automated SDN service chaining within and across hybrid clouds. Any physical IP-based network can be virtualized using software overlay technology and integrated into an open cloud orchestration system that supports several common protocols, including XMPP and BGP. These virtual networks serve the applications; compute resources, storage and networking can be provisioned on demand.

Gigamon Unveils Branch Office Node, FlowVUE App

Gary Hilson — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:29 EDT

Gigamon unveiled its latest Visibility Fabric node at Interop Las Vegas. Aimed at branch offices, the GigaVUE-HB1 is the latest component of the company's Unified Visibility Fabric within the services layer and is equipped with Gigamon's GigaSMART technology. GigaSMART gives enterprises the ability to normalize traffic and perform VXLAN decapsulation for monitoring virtualized network overlays, ERSPAN termination, packet dededuplication, packet masking and packet slicing. The GigaVUE-HB1 enables remote network monitoring by tunneling monitored data back to a central site.

Gigamon also introduced new software, including its proof-of-concept application FlowVUE, which will offer flow-based correlation services. It's the second visibility application the company has developed and is slated to debut in the fourth quarter, joining its existing session-aware flow deduplication application. Meanwhile, Gigamon's H Series 3.0 OS Software for the management layer, set for release at the end of the month, includes a new workflow-based Web 2.0 GUI and allows customers to use its GigaPORT-C01 100Gb blade for visibility into full-line-rate 100 Gb Ethernet connections.

EMC ViPR Goes All In on Software-Defined Storage

Kurt Marko — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:01 EDT

EMC today introduced its ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform. ViPR, a project that EMC has hinted at, is pure software, unconnected to any particular storage platform. It abstracts storage pools from the underlying hardware arrays and LUNs, and will most likely run as a VM on commodity servers. EMC said ViPR will be released in the second half of this year

As we wrote in this InformationWeek State of Storage report, "2013 looks like the year the phrase 'software defined' displaces 'cloud' as the all-purpose modifier synonymous with everything in IT that is innovative and salubrious." ViPR embodies both the design philosophy and terminology of SDN by separating what EMC calls the control plane of storage--provisioning, management and data migration--from the data plane--blocks, files, LUNs and devices.

Silver Peak Boosts WAN Performance with New Products

Gary Hilson — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:45 EDT

Silver Peak Systems has released new hardware and software to improve WAN performance. The company said its NX-11K hardware appliance delivers 5Gbps of WAN capacity and up to 20 Gbps of optimized throughput for TCP and non-TCP applications. The 2U hardware appliance supports 512,000 simultaneous connections.

Silver Peak also unveiled two software data accelerators: the VX-8000 and VX-9000. The latter delivers more than one Gbps of WAN performance, the company said. Both accelerators work in conjunction with Silver Peak's VX virtual software, which run on any standard hypervisor including VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM. Both can be downloaded from the Silver Peak Marketplace for a free 30-day trial.

The Three Transformations of IT

David Hill — Fri, 03 May 2013 11:39 EDT

Information technology is now in its third transformation. The first was the digitization of business. The second is the continuing digitization of human experience. The third stage is the digitization of machines.

Each transformation is ongoing, builds upon the others, and may overlap. Thus, some technologies that formed a foundation earlier are still active. For example, the mainframe is still alive and well, even in the time of mobile computing.