Great briefing w/ Donato Buccella, CTO, at #Certeon; s/w only WAN optimization (VM to VM) seems key in cloud interconnectivity requirements


about 22 hours ago

“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

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

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.

Riverbed’s press release talks about how its future Virtual Steelhead will be well suited to ruggedized environments and transient offices with limited space.

Certeon’s take is that virtual appliances make more sense in all environments for three primary reasons:

Scalability – The aCelera virtual appliances can support up to 50% more concurrent accelerated connections than typical hardware appliances.  Additionally, aCelera scales linearly as more resources (e.g., server CPU, memory, or storage) are added…we can’t say that same for hardware-based appliances.

Manageability – Because aCelera runs within a virtual machine infrastructure, it can be take full advantage of the management tools within the virtual environment (e.g., VMware’s and Microsoft’s management tools).

Total Cost of Ownership – aCelera costs a fraction of its hardware-based counterparts.

So, while the competition gets its toes wet in the virtual appliance arena, Certeon will continue to push the limits helping customers overcome their application delivery challenges with our seasoned aCelera virtual appliances.

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.”

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.

 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

Cloud-based storage service offering must be: – Affordable -Reliable -Scalable -Able to support massive volumes of data -Able to support geographically dispersed user base. With cloud storage, there are some challenges including how to minimize the effects of latency, restricted bandwidth and congestion on the WAN Internet access link. Ideally, a cloud storage service provider should run a virtualized software solution on their hypervisor of choice to minimize the effects of latency, bandwidth limitation and congestion. While a number of hardware-based solutions could address this challenge, a software solution makes better sense because the software can be set up dynamically or on demand. The software solution is also very affordable and scalable.

WAN optimization from virtual appliance vendors such as Certeon deliver the performance benefits and the advantages that cloud storage services require. Virtual appliances such as Certeon’s aCelera can be deployed in virtualized private, public and hybrid cloud computing environments and deliver all the performance advantages of hardware-based WAN optimization solutions as well as the flexibility, scalability, manageability and costs savings associated with virtualization.

To learn more go to http://www.certeon.com/resource_center/white_papers.asp

Let’s take a look at a few of the opportunities within a Virtual Private Cloud Framework versus a Public Cloud Framework:

 In a public cloud everything is shared: data, transactions, storage, and business intelligence. Every computing and data service is shared across the cloud. In a virtual private cloud setup, things change slightly. In a VPC, maybe the software licenses are shared but the data is kept private, or the reports generated from business intelligence analytics, storage could or could not be shared in this environment as well. This VPC setup could be useful for distributed compliance initiatives.

In a VPC Framework, you could run a virtual machine and run a complete private system in the cloud. This VPC setup could be useful for distributed test and development teams.

In a VPC Framework, the management of resources can be shared or restricted as opposed to all open access to management features of public cloud computing. This VPC setup could be useful for IT remote management of branch offices.

 There is no shortage of variations or frameworks that can/will be devised/discussed around public versus private and dedicated versus virtual cloud computing. One of the things that strikes us is that virtual private cloud computing gives the benefits of public with additional private cloud options. What is your experience? Is the public cloud sufficient? How does the public cloud integrate (or not) with your virtualized infrastructure?