Great briefing w/ Donato Buccella, CTO, at #Certeon; s/w only WAN optimization (VM to VM) seems key in cloud interconnectivity requirements
No Comments »
Welcome to Virtual WAN Speeds and Feeds
Where does WAN optimization and application acceleration come together with virtualization and cloud computing? Right here.
Sep 03, 2010
Aug 24, 2010
Jim Metzler’s SearchEnterpriseWAN evaluation of Certeon aCelera
“…aCelera performance can be tailored to the topology, environment and performance requirements of both data centers and branches; is 64-bit; and takes advantage of the benefits of virtualization, ranging from system monitoring to high availability and distributed resource scheduling.”
“Important synergies exist among virtual servers, virtual desktops and virtual appliances such as a WOC or a performance monitoring solution. Perhaps the most important synergy is that virtual appliances are of particular interest to IT organizations when server virtualization technology has already been disseminated to branch offices and has also been implemented in the data center”.
Get Jim’s full virtualization report from Webtorials
Check out the Jim’s article Virtual appliances WOC software needed in both datacenter and branch. on SearchNetworking
Aug 17, 2010
July 23, 2010:
Riverbed re-re-re-announces Virtual Steelhead with a promise of Q3 general availability. At his point in time it’s probably safe to say that we will see a Virtual Steelhead soon
http://www.riverbed.com/company/news/press_releases/press_072210b.php
History of Riverbed’s virtualization strategy
- September 2008: Introduce RSP (Riverbed Services Platform), a Steelhead appliance with hosted virtualization that shipped 5 months after Certeon’s first virtual appliance suite
- September 2009: Riverbed Central Management Console Virtual Edition (CMC-VE) shipped with a marketing spin that said this product made the Riverbed product line virtualization and cloud ready
- Fall 2009: Cloud Steelhead announced as another product with no ship date (not even a quarter) and no subsequent press releases
- Fall of 2009, March 2010 and July 2010: Virtual Steelhead press releases with the same message each time, “will be shipping this quarter”
As of July 27 2010 Riverbeds Virtualization product line includes:
- RSP Hosted Virtualization on a Steelhead Appliance: The “RSP”, first used KVM, then the non-production hosted VMware Server not ESX – now what – was it a mistake? – Will it continue? Will it be supported?
- Riverbed Central Management Console Virtual Edition (CMC-VE)
Riverbed feels the pinch: Companies need real virtualization
Whether it was growing market pressure from Certeon, Expand, Blue Coat, Citrix and Silverpeak, or looking at a Gartner prediction of 200% revenue CAGR for WAN OPP virtual appliances while hardware revenue growth hovers around 14% revenue CAGR over the years of 2009 to 2014. Riverbed’s hand has been forced.
But, what did Riverbed do?
Riverbed announced that they will add virtual appliances for VMware ESX hypervisors only to the product line, because the market is demanding it. Wanting part of a 200% growth spurt, they released an incomplete product line that does not scale, is not dynamic, is not a match to enterprise IT strategy, and does not deliver a TCO that companies can afford.
Since Riverbed is dependent on the hardware revenue, specifically revenue from their expensive datacenter appliances, they have left them alone and requiring customers absorb the excessive costs dictated by their business model. Riverbed will not support datacenter level scale with their virtual appliances.
2 paragraphs and specifications table on the web do not show support for a product line, there are no datasheets and it is not part of any other datasheets. http://www.riverbed.com/products/appliances/virtual_steelhead.php#
Riverbed will continue to sell a complete overlapping hardware line.
Where is Riverbed’s focus and the forward thinking:
In the 3rd official press release in July 2010 Riverbed states that they still see virtualization as “new technology”, and say “The appliance is a bit ahead of its time, considering that virtualization is just starting to gain some traction.”
The Steelhead virtual appliance is for “Environments where a physical appliance didn’t fit”. That realization, and MSP pressure have forced Riverbed to deliver a limited product. The environments where the product is focused are, “specialized mobile platforms” (trucks – vans), “rugged platforms” (tanks) and “branches”. MSP pressure has built up because MSPs cannot force companies to accept hardware that that do not want.
The high end Steelhead Virtual Appliance may work at some SMB datacenters where ”customers have data centers that are almost entirely virtualized” and they support no more than 600 total users. More than 600 users – hardware is required
Riverbed Virtual Appliance: Simply repackaged hardware
- It is Version 1 until proven otherwise
- It is NOT certified “VMware Ready”
- Is it NOT storage agnostic (ASK: can it be run from a SAN)
- Is it NOT hypervisor agnostic: – VMware only
- NO HyperV version, NO Citrix Xen version
- Is it NOT manageable by VSphere ? (ASK: does it use VMtools for VMware environments that provide VMotion, DRS & HA capabilities )
- Is it the same code base (CentOS and Application) as the REAL Steelhead
What does this tell you: Simply ported to the a hypervisor environment NOT Optimized for hypervisor environments
Look at the Riverbed VE specs for Virtual CPU and Memory in the chart that follows. The Riverbed VE is swilling resources.
- Riverbed VE shows no linear scaling from model to model, you might as well say box to box.
- Riverbed VE shows Limited Scalability
- Only up to 600 users (6000 TCP connections)
- Riverbed VE is CPU bound compared to aCelera, 4 virtual CPUs to support 250 users, 2 virtual CPUs to support 30 user
- Riverbed VE requires 32GB of storage for before it can start for its file cache. This is almost 50% of the available storage for it 3 smallest virtual appliances.
In contrast, aCelera with 4 Virtual CPUs supports 2000 users (20,000 concurrent accelerating connections) and 128,000 connections
The Riverbed VE specs look like Blue Coat, Expand and Silverpeak specs
- Each vendor did as little as possible to say they have a Virtual Appliance
virtual appliance specifications
http://www.riverbed.com/products/appliances/virtual_steelhead.php#
Please Note the Language used to explain Optimized TCP Connections in reference c
(c) TCP Connections can be expected up to the amount listed
Links
Riverbed July announcement:
http://www.riverbed.com/company/news/press_releases/press_072210b.php
Press:
http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/_featured/article.php/3894571/Riverbed+Unveils+Virtual+WAN+Optimization.htm
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/riverbed-looks-ahead-of-trend-launches-virtual-appliance-for-wan-optimization/37076
Riverbed web pages:
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/cole/wan-optimization-first-virtual-then-the-cloud/?cs=42409
http://www.riverbed.com/products/appliances/virtual_steelhead.php#
http://blog.riverbed.com/2010/07/riverbed-announces-virtual-steelhead.html
Aug 09, 2010
On July 22, 2010, Riverbed announced that it will introduce a virtual WAN optimization appliance in the third quarter of 2010. It seems that Riverbed has finally come around to the idea that software-based WAN optimization makes sense.
While Certeon started off in 2005 as a hardware-based WAN optimization company, Certeon made a strategic decision in 2008 to go “virtual” with its solutions. For the past two years Certeon has dedicated R&D resources to refine its aCelera software appliances. Now in its third generation, Certeon’s aCelera virtual appliances have been deployed successfully in production networks around the world, reducing application response time and lowering network bandwidth requirements by up to 95 percent.
Read More »
Aug 05, 2010
I had to clip Jessica Scarpati’s article with out any editorial comments.
We’ll let Silver Peak President and CEO Rick Tinsley speak for himself.
September 2009:
“Virtualizing network elements – like routers and switches and WAN accelerators – is one of those things that makes for a good PowerPoint and good marketing, but I’m not sure where it’s going to go in terms of actual deployment.”
10 months later:
“We were surprised when we started. We knew everyone uses virtual machines in their data center, but we weren’t sure how many customers use virtual infrastructure in their branch offices,” he said, adding that he found many large technology companies were using virtualization at the branch to save on shipping costs and configuration time. “It really is a pretty compelling [case].”
Deliver as little as possible:
He noted that Silver Peak is still hesitant to develop a virtual WAN optimization appliance more powerful than 50 Mbps and will encourage customers to stick with its physical appliances (which range from 4 Mbps to 1 Gbps) at headquarters and data centers.
Port it and forget it – OR – deliver half a product:
“It’s not like we had to write a new product or new code. It’s virtually the same code.”
Jul 19, 2010
WAN optimization technology has been around for quite some time now. In 1994, it was first introduced for telephony and later made its way into data networking to prioritize different types of traffic.
Over time, WAN optimization technology has grown in sophistication giving us protocol optimization, an ability to handle a wide array of traffic (e.g., CIFS, HTTP, FTP, MAPI, SSL, etc.) and variety acceleration techniques. Given how long WAN optimization has been around, one would think that the WAN optimization market is shrinking and that every company has this technology by now.
However, according to a May, 2010 Gartner report entitled “WAN Optimization Controller Vendor Revenue, Worldwide, 2006-2014, the WAN optimization controller market will continue to grow to US $9.83 Billion from 2009-2014 at a compounded annual growth rate of 14.6 percent. So, what continues to drive the WAN optimization market?
Several significant IT trends are the drivers for the WAN optimization market:
-Server virtualization
-Cloud computing (public, private, hybrid approaches)
-Data center consolidation
-A continual need for the network to handle complex applications and rich media
In addition to these market drivers, there is one absolute: Whenever applications are being accessed over the wide area network, they will always be subject to delays, packet loss and jitter …which will inevitably lead to application performance delays.
As we see it, the WAN optimization will continue to go strong for many years to come.
Jul 19, 2010
The Certeon webcast ― Going Virtual with WAN Optimization Software examines how virtual WAN optimization software goes hand-in-hand with virtualizing servers and desktops in the data center and at branch offices. Learn about the many benefits of virtual WAN optimization software and what is required to deploy a high performance virtualized infrastructures that supports remote access to virtual resources and applications. The registration page can be found at Network World.
Jul 14, 2010
IT organizations have embraced server virtualization to reduce costs and to dynamically provision and move virtual machines among physical servers. IT organizations have also adopted desktop virtualization for cost reduction and to improve application security and regulatory compliance.
However, both server and desktop virtualization introduce new challenges related to management, visibility, and maintaining acceptable application performance across the wide area network (WAN).
Both types of virtualization are synergistic with virtualized appliances. Dr. Jim Metzler and Webtorials have looked at the relationship among server and desktop virtualization and virtual appliances in the recently published whitepaper, Virtualization: Benefits, Challenges and Solutions. This white paper explores how virtualized appliances can fully leverage server virtualization at branch offices and data centers. Additionally, the whitepaper covers the compelling advantages of virtualized appliances including the costs savings compared to hardware-based appliances and how virtual appliance can leverage hypervisor management systems for high availability.
Download this white paper from White Paper Resource Center
Apr 21, 2010
As cloud computing rages on in popularity, hype, and maybe even implementations we are left to wonder if we could use a technology version of the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to define cloud computing realities versus those just blowing smoke?
Read More »
