The most basic purpose of the social enterprise is to achieve business goals through enhanced interactions. The ability to connect to others in the company, partners, and customers no matter where they are or what type of device they use is critical to realizing the benefits of social enterprise applications. It’s hard to be social when you can’t participate. Because of this, the social enterprise is tightly intertwined with mobile endpoints. The ability to deliver an application anytime and anywhere someone needs it is key part of making it social. Mobile cannot be an add-on to the social strategy. It has to be a critical component.

Part of the rationale behind this IBM move is to help IT deal with the influx of consumer devices by helping IT design applications that work on a variety of platforms, especially mobile endpoints. That makes sense given the growth in consumer devices that have been introduced into previously closed environments. In the ESG Research Brief, Corporate Endpoint Device Type Trends. published in May of 2011, ESG found that 95% of IT organizations surveyed were experiencing growth in the use of alternative endpoints. IT professionals know they can’t stem the tide of consumerization and IBM is helping them deal with it by bringing Worklight into their portfolio.

This acquisition dovetails nicely into other IBM social products such as IBM Connections – IBM’s social communications software – and IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices (GA planned for March 2012), which provide security for endpoint devices including mobile platforms. Worklight also enhances and extends IBM’s social enterprise development environment. IBM now has one of the most comprehensive frameworks for developing mobile, cloud, and social enterprise applications. Coupled with their traditional enterprise development tools such as IBM Rational and IBM Lotus Notes, IBM offers a compelling suite of products for creating scalable and robust enterprise applications.

With Worklight, IBM customers and partners will be able to develop and deploy socially enabled applications more quickly no matter where the user is or what endpoint platform they use.

These additions make sense, especially considering Riverbed’s relationship with Akamai. Aside from accelerating traffic between Akamai sites, these new asymmetric acceleration solutions could prove to be very useful in getting content to end-users. Riverbed’s positioning on only targeting the high growth virtual ADC or vADC markets, however, doesn’t resonate with me as much. Both F5 and Citrix offer virtual editions of their products and they are already well entrenched in the ADC space, so I believe that Riverbed will have its work cut out for it and may have to focus on more than just the virtualization angle to gain significant market share. That said, Zeus brings 1,500 customers with it, so it’s not like Riverbed is starting from scratch either. Aptimize provides some pretty slick first time viewed optimization benefits, overcoming the initial caching delay. Riverbed explains the acquisitions simply as Fast = Steelhead, Faster = Steelhead & Zeus, and Fastest = Steelhead, Zeus, & Aptimize. Cascade will provide visibility across the entire environment.

Riverbed may have an unique advantage–combining these new products with Cascade and Steelhead could present an integrated application performance solution. It is interesting to note that Riverbed has decided to keep Zeus as its own business unit. While this will keep it very focused on vADC (earning a healthy payout), it also has the potential to hinder integration efforts. Riverbed did articulate that, while an integrated solution was possible in the future, it wanted each company’s capability to be able to stand on its own to better fit the needs of the customer.

Riverbed will also need to focus on educating, training, and certifying its sales force and channel partners on these new offerings. More importantly, they need to know where in the enterprise they should be selling this to (application teams, not the networking guys). The Zeus sales force should help, but in order to really have an impact, Riverbed will need to scale. That, however, is something I am pretty sure it knows how to do.

Read more of Bob’s blog entries at Data Center Continuum.

The first time I’ve heard about Aryaka, I was very suspicious. WAN acceleration into the cloud?! How would you accelerate the last mile without a device in the endpoint?

I was delightfully surprised when I discovered that Aryaka needs a point of presence at no more than 20ms from the endpoint. And from them, it could accelerate the local traffic.

It enables WAN acceleration in large scale as an offer from telecommunications companies. A single PoP could cover a large city like New York or London. No need for endpoint maintenance, just the PoP. Brilliant!

Aryaka will also accelerate traffic from smart phones and tablets, without requiring additional clients.

The carrier market for WAN accelerations has been a greenfield for a long time. Aryaka should focus on this market instead of trying to build a network from scratch. It will cover more points faster and have a broader reach for end-users.

In Aryaka’s shoes, I would build a shared revenue model, lowering adoption barriers everywhere.

Needless to say, the solution would allow some leading WAN acceleration vendors to enter the large and important carrier and consumer markets.

Read more of Ronaldo’s blog entries at IT Matters.

Overview

There is certainly a lot of hype around cloud computing as the technology industry positions itself for the “next big thing.” Unfortunately, this rhetoric masks an important inflection point: cloud computing is real and will impact IT in unprecedented ways.

ESG envisions the cloud’s evolution as a three-stage process (see Figure 1).  On the enterprise front, cloud computing will follow ongoing technology initiatives like data center consolidation and server virtualization as large organizations turn their IT infrastructures into their own private clouds. At the same time, public cloud options of all types (i.e., IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) will also mature, driven by new standards, development tools, and services offerings.  Enterprises will typically consume these services as an alternative to internal IT resources.  Finally, as standards emerge, large companies will bridge internal private clouds and external public cloud services into a federated hybrid cloud architecture. When this happens, traditional IT walls will disappear as the cloud brings ubiquity to computing (i.e., application processing, storage capacity, etc.) just as the Internet and IP protocols delivered universal connectivity for networks.

CIOs Should Start Preparing for the Cloud

At present, the entire IT industry is pouring massive amounts of R&D dollars into cloud computing. This will likely accelerate the technology maturation process, making cloud computing an increasingly attractive enterprise option.  Smart CIOs will quickly come to this realization and begin to adopt cloud computing by:

• Betting on virtualization technologies. Virtualization will be a foundational technology for cloud computing.  Why?  It disaggregates IT workloads from the underlying hardware. When combined with tools that enable workload mobility and flexibility, workloads can be moved from server to server, data center to data center, or private to public cloud services depending upon hardware contention, network traffic, IT resource limitations, or cost considerations.
• Modernizing the network. In the past, network traffic tended to flow in a “north and south” pattern from data centers to core, distribution, and then access networks.  With the explosion of Web applications and server virtualization, more traffic flows “east and west” between the servers themselves.  Make sure that data center networks are designed to handle this traffic, especially as the population of Web applications and virtual servers continues to explode.  Don’t forget to include data center to data center network capabilities in these plans as well.
• Embracing flexibility. With cloud computing, there is no “one-size-fits-all” model.  Rather, cloud computing is an entirely new mindset where CIOs have unprecedented flexibility. For the first time, IT managers have the true luxury of placing IT workloads (i.e., compute, application, storage) in the most advantageous and effective places.  As a result, future IT decisions should be based upon TCO, service quality, and time-to-market as much as existing IT infrastructure and organizational considerations.

What About Performance?

In spite of the promise of cloud computing, many IT professionals first conceive of two major hurdles: security and availability.  Yes, addressing these important issues is essential for cloud’s progress, but ESG believes that there is another key obstacle: high performance.  In fact, high performance connectivity to cloud services is crucial for:

• Connecting private and public clouds. High performance and responsive connectivity is a “must have” in cloud computing use cases for distributing applications, running processor-intensive scientific computing systems, mirroring transactions, and leveraging vast pools of cloud storage. Even high bandwidth “best effort” Internet connectivity could still be victimized by an unrelated traffic spike, possibly interrupting cloud computing systems and business operations.
• Providing user services. Private or public cloud ROI won’t matter if users experience reduced productivity due to unacceptable response time to access files, applications, or their virtual desktops.
• Future flexibility. Let’s face it—without high performance in the cloud, computing alternatives will remain suspect.  A few early performance problems could persuade risk-averse CIOs to abort their otherwise sound cloud initiatives and instead keep critical applications and services in-house, failing to realize the potential benefits.  High performance data migration also allows CIOs to adapt their approaches to new offerings in the future.

WAN Optimization will Bridge the Performance Gap

The performance issues above are prospective “show stoppers” for cloud computing, but there is a potential solution.  WAN optimization is usually equated with accelerating network traffic between enterprise data centers and branch offices, but ESG believes that it will also play a crucial role in cloud computing enablement.  Why?  Leading WAN optimization platforms already handle lots of diverse workloads to connect data centers to other data centers and a range of IT applications and services to end-users.

ESG sees cloud computing use cases as a new superset of WAN optimization functionality. That said, all WAN optimization solutions are not created equally.

To meet the challenges of cloud computing, WAN optimization offerings must provide high performance and:

• Support for multiple services. To connect cloud data centers, WAN optimization must accelerate network traffic, business system protocols and linkages, and remote mirroring application like EMC’s SRDF for disaster recovery. At the other end of the spectrum, users benefit from WAN optimization for high performance connections to business unit applications, cloud services, and file services. Finally, WAN optimization solutions can help enable greater use of cloud-based storage services for backup, archival, and near-line capacity by accelerating specific block based storage protocols (like iSCSI or REST.)  Each layer of IT resources, applications, servers, and storage can then be placed where it has the best mix of quality and cost, independent of other components’ locations.
• Multiple form factor choices. As workloads and users become more mobile, WAN optimization must find its way into lots of locations in the cloud and across the enterprise.  This will require additional form factors to traditional WAN optimization hardware appliances.  ESG sees the need for virtual WAN optimization appliances that can be easily deployed or moved with workloads around both public and private cloud environments. In addition, WAN optimization agents will accelerate cloud service performance for mobile worker endpoints across the globe.  Again, storage-specific cloud accelerators will also provide huge value.
• Visibility and manageability. Since the main goal is high performance, IT managers will want to monitor and adjust the network to ensure that business-critical traffic meets or exceeds SLAs, and plan for future moves of IT resources as desired.  This will require WAN optimization systems to act as a network service, providing consolidated visibility of real-time application traffic. With this information in hand, network engineers need the ability to fine-tune network traffic based upon changes in the application mix, cloud service adoption, or workload location.

With these characteristics, WAN optimization could go beyond high performance delivery alone.  ESG believes that these attributes could help large organizations take better advantage of cloud computing flexibility.  Why?  The combination of high performance, multiple form factors, and granular visibility will allow more choices for CIOs.  Enterprises can easily experiment and rapidly adapt their infrastructure by moving workloads around and assessing which location delivers the “biggest bang for the buck.” In this way, cloud-centric WAN optimization can also help improve the business’s top and bottom lines.

The Bigger Truth

Cloud computing is on the horizon. It will be arriving far sooner than many people think. It’s time that the cloud computing discussion moves beyond rhetoric and focuses on key issues. Beyond security and availability, ESG believes that high performance networking needs more attention.

WAN optimization is an obvious enabling technology as it is designed to accelerate network traffic between source and destination.  With cloud, however, the sources and destinations will multiply and change rapidly. This requires a new type of WAN optimization built with the cloud in mind. Cloud-centric WAN optimization will ultimately support lots of services, come in an assortment of form factors, and provide central visibility and management regardless of cloud service location.  Applications, servers, and storage can each be dynamically deployed and activated wherever most appropriate for the organization’s changing needs.

ESG believes that cloud-centric WAN optimization is an enabling technology that will play a major role in the success or failure of enterprise cloud computing initiatives. The sooner CIOs realize this, the more they can take advantage of available and emerging cloud computing options.

Click here for the PowerPoint slide.

Click here for the full ESG Research Report: 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey. ]]> http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/01/most-important-it-priorities-for-2010-by-industry/feed/ 0 http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/01/percent-of-organizations-increasing-spending-by-technology-2010-vs-2009/ http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/01/percent-of-organizations-increasing-spending-by-technology-2010-vs-2009/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:14:21 +0000 kevin http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/?p=13817

Click here for the PowerPoint slide.

Click here for the full ESG Research Report: 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey. ]]> http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/01/percent-of-organizations-increasing-spending-by-technology-2010-vs-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2009/11/a10-networks-ups-the-adc-ante/ http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2009/11/a10-networks-ups-the-adc-ante/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:28:02 +0000 Garrett Doherty http://www.esgmedia.net/?p=8239 ESG believes that IT priorities won’t change much in 2010—CIOs will still be tasked to improve business processes while cutting costs. Can this be done? Yes, but it demands that large organizations look to consolidate resources, simplify the IT architecture, and seek out innovative vendors and solutions. ESG believes that A10 Networks fits this description—its new line of 64-bit Application Delivery Controllers has the potential to radically improve application performance while cutting capital and operating costs.

Overview

As the global recession of 2009 morphs into the global recovery of 2010, CIOs will continue to face a financial climate highlighted by uncertainty and tremendous IT budgetary pressures.  In this economy, the ‘do more with less’ IT mantra will continue unabated, but CIOs are still responsible for IT departments that drive the business, create new revenue opportunities, and improve business processes.  These IT priorities were clearly reflected by ESG research data in early 2009: When asked to identify business initiatives with the greatest impact on IT, survey respondents said that cost reduction initiatives and business process improvement were their organization’s highest priorities (see Figure 1).[1] Given the remaining economic clouds, CIOs will likely have similar priorities moving forward.

The top two objectives presented here are interrelated, leading to competing challenges for CIOs.  Business process improvements often require new types of Web 2.0 applications for improved collaboration and communications.  These applications, in turn, demand high performance/low latency networking to support more sessions, connections, rich content, and security services.  How in the world can CIOs develop new applications and enhance application delivery services when they are under intense pressure to avoid big purchases and continue to cut costs?

What Can be Done?

At its root, IT has but one purpose: align business goals with technology tools to improve responsiveness, productivity, and automation.  This goal doesn’t change during tough economic times, but since CIOs are forced to squeeze resources, they must move beyond status-quo solutions and approach their jobs with creativity, flexibility, and open minds.  To achieve this goal, ESG sees progressive organizations:

• Simplifying network architectures. Most networks grew organically over time—a new subnet here, a new VLAN there, and servers everywhere.  It doesn’t take too long for this ad-hoc growth to create a rat’s nest of wires and lots of operational overhead.  Smart organizations are actively addressing this network mess by consolidating data centers, collapsing disparate data center segments into flat L2 networks, and adopting server virtualization.
• Implementing all-in-one enterprise technologies. As part of simplifying their networks, many organizations are looking to replace their portfolios of network appliances with high-performance, multi-function systems.  These “Network Services Super Gateways” (NSSGs) are the networking equivalent of super computers, designed to balance large parallel workloads across shared memory and processors while accommodating split second changes in requirements.  ESG sees strong demand for NSSGs in two areas:  network security and Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs).
• Evaluating alternative vendors. Through the years, many networking vendors have become complacent when it comes to innovation.  These vendors tend to offer high priced/high margin products that can’t help CIOs contain capital or operating costs.  ESG sees more and more large organizations opening the door to new network upstarts with modern products that take advantage of Moore’s Law to offer tremendous scale and performance in a consolidated, low-cost footprint.

NSSGs Offer New Performance and Economic Model

A few years ago, ESG was introduced to A10 Networks, a Silicon Valley-based startup with an impressive networking and IT industry pedigree.  The company was founded in 2004 by Lee Chen, former co-founder and VP of Engineering at Foundry Networks.  Since its inception, A10 has been focused on creating a radically new ADC architecture in order to deliver twice the performance at half the price of its competitors.  To accomplish this, A10 equipped its ADCs with:

• Custom hardware. In assessing the ADC market, A10 discovered that a lot of operations were performed in software.  This meant that available ADC performance was extremely limited unless customers were willing to ‘throw a lot of hardware’ at the problem by purchasing additional modules, processors, or memory.  Following an old Silicon Valley formula, A10 moved a lot of ADC processes from software to hardware in its high-end appliances.  This design gives A10 boxes extremely high performance in small cost-effective devices.
• A scalable operating system. Rather than simply customize the Linux operating system, A10 built its Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) from the ground up to take advantage of modern multi-core processors.  This helps A10 achieve linear scalability across a unique shared memory system.

These advances alone made A10 Networks an attractive option for enterprise customers with lots of Internet-facing applications.  Recently, however, A10 Networks upped the ante by introducing:

• A 64-bit version of ACOS. A10 may be the first ADC vendor to extend its operating system and data path from 32- to 64-bit.  What’s the big deal?  While a wider data path allows for an increase of data processing, the most immediate benefit is the unlocking of memory resources; 32-bit systems are limited to 4 GB of memory per CPU core.  Since so many functions in the ADC are dependent on memory, A10’s 64-bit systems can scale all operations—the number of users, connections, services, RAM caching, etc.  The 64-bit OS creates a win for the IT department (more sessions per ADC appliance to drive consolidation) and a win for the customer (more RAM cache equals faster content and transaction delivery).

In summary, the wider data path allows for an exponential increase in data processing.  Think of a 2 lane highway. Increasing the speed limit on the highway could potentially increase the number of cars traveling on the road, but there are physical limits to the increases. Alternatively, you increase the number of lanes from 2 to 8. In this case, even if each car never went any faster, it would still be possible to quadruple the amount of traffic.

• A range of 64-bit hardware platforms. As we’ve learned in other tech markets such as enterprise software and the video game industry, to unlock the power of 64-bit systems, a 64-bit OS must work with the overall hardware design. Otherwise, the system will default to the lower common denominator of 32-bit processing. A10 addressed this limitation with a new line of 64-bit AX Series hardware platforms running the 64-bit version of ACOS.

With a 64-bit platform utilizing shared memory, the AX platforms have the capacity to consolidate advanced enterprise features. This is attractive for customers with cloud computing, virtualization, and security initiatives as all of the advanced features can be run on a single application platform and can help reduce operating costs. All of the new 64-bit models include carrier grade hardware components, redundant power supplies for reliability, and solid state drives (SSDs) for the environmentally conscious.

• Advent of the NSSG “Supercomputer Class” ADCs. Previously, the only ADCs that could address the capacity for the world’s top enterprises, Web sites, and service providers were chassis-based systems with racks of blades. At the top of its 64-bit lineup, A10’s new high-end models are the first to bring this capability into 2U appliances that deliver up to 3 million Layer 4 connections per second and 40 Gbps throughput with up to 16 10Gb ports, surpassing most chassis systems currently available.  Both models have enough juice to serve as a data center application platform to run solutions for initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing, IPv6, Large Scale Network Address Translation (NAT), security, and more in addition to core server load balancing and application acceleration functionality.  At under $200k with all features included, customers can decrease their cost per transaction while increasing user connections. Given this, A10’s NSSG “Supercomputer Class” ADCs should certainly be considered for demanding applications.
• An extended product line. In the past, ADCs were really limited to large enterprises.  Why?  Design limitations meant that ADCs were generally too expensive for smaller organizations.  Recently, however, A10 Networks broke through this enterprise-focused glass ceiling by extending its AX ADC product line down-market.  The ‘low-end’ AX 2500 comes in a 1U form factor, offers 10Gbps performance, and supports up to 300k L4 connections per second at a list price under $25k.  Each successive model number steps up the processor, memory, or both to boost advanced features such as RAM caching, layer 7 processing, and deep packet inspection performance.  ESG believes that this type of price/performance will be a perfect fit for small to extremely large enterprises seeking to start small and grow over time.
• An integrated DNS application firewall. While A10 downplayed this in its announcements, ESG believes that DNS firewall capabilities may be extremely attractive for enterprise customers with large, dynamic, and growing networks.  The DNS firewall performs three important functions:  1) It offloads DNS request traffic from the existing DNS infrastructure, 2) It acts as a DNS proxy blocking malicious DNS traffic and DDoS attacks, and 3) It throws A10’s signature high performance at DNS to accelerate the total network experience.

Ultimately, this technical mumbo-jumbo is easily summarized.  With its recent announcements, A10 Networks can pack more horsepower and ADC services into a family of extremely small, high-performing, and environmentally-friendly devices.  This should make the AX series even more attractive than it is today.

The Bigger Truth

While the economy remains in the doldrums, Internet innovation continues at a staggering pace.  Leading edge companies will continue to develop new Web-based applications, helping them increase revenue, improve productivity, and enhance collaboration.  In the near-term, however, large organizations will have to build this new software functionality while simultaneously reducing costs.

Difficult?  Yes.  Impossible?  No, but it will take creativity, IT simplification, consolidation, and creativity.  Progressive CIOs will extend this by eschewing the status quo and keeping an open mind toward new and innovative technology pioneers.  In ESG’s humble opinion, A10 Networks fits this description as it has attacked the existing ADC category with a new design, operating system, and economic model. Its recent 64-bit offering and the extension of its product line only add to the company’s unique value.  Given these qualities, CIOs would be wise to add A10 Networks to their short lists of ADC vendors.