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Wright Pierce's Director of IT and longtime Riverbed customer Ray Sirois was recently at the Washington Convention Ctr Subway Station when he couldn't help but notice the Riverbed mojo surrounding him. Ray captured the moment with this snapshot.
Thanks for sharing the photo Ray and for being such an awesome customer!
While some enterprises are still unsure of how the cloud will benefit them, conference organizers certainly don't share that trepidation: my calendar is packed with events. I wish I could say that people have agreed on what the cloud is, but no -- not only is cloud computing keeping the events industry afloat, it provides a platform (get it?) for endless debate and gasbaggery.
Since I always enjoy being in the middle of the fray, I'll take my turn. Fundamentally, the cloud is one great big WAN. And where there's a WAN, there's...a...(here it comes)...way! To eliminate inherent performance problems! To provide users that lush, LAN-like experience! (Hm, is that an orchestra swelling in the background somewhere?)
The performance challenges posed by cloud computing are really very similar to those posed by other forms of computing from a distance. Fortunately, you can solve these in much the same way you solved general WAN performance problems you encountered during your data center consolidation project. I'm working on a paper some of the cool things you can with Cloud Steelhead and Amazon EC2. I'd like to float a few of my ideas here.
Many organizations get started with cloud computing by duplicating an important (but not critical) application to the cloud for a period of testing time. If the testing is successful, the on-premise deployment is decommissioned and the cloud deployment becomes primary. Steelhead can help this project succeed in two ways:
Distributed organizations can dispense with centralized IT altogether and instead deploy everything in the cloud. In some cases, venture capital funding even requires this. The economic and technical benefits are clear: applications can be written to take full advantage of the cloud's capabilities and resources can be added or removed to match demand. Bandwidth usage in these scenarios can be quite high, though. This is an ideal opportunity to combine branch office Steelheads, mobile Steelheads, and Cloud Steelhead together to drive further cost reduction from your monthy telecommunications and cloud transfer charges.
Cloud Steelheads can communicate with each other, too. Global enterprises using AWS often need to transfer data from one region to another. Because AWS relies on public Internet connections for data transfer between regions, Cloud Steelhead can accelerate these transfers and reduce your bandwidth costs, often by a significant amount. When you configure a Cloud Steelhead in each region, the auto-discovery agent will detect the Steelheads and ensure that cross-region traffic is optimized.
You can take advantage of AWS's international peering agreements to accelerate traffic to other cloud providers that don't offer Steelhead as an option in their data centers or on virtual machines. As an example, assume you’re a business based in Australia and you wish to consume PaaS or SaaS style cloud services from a provider whose closest data centers are in Singapore. Even under the best of network conditions, latency between these locations can be unbearably high. It's likely, though, that AWS's Singapore region is topologically very close to your ultimate destination, perhaps with latencies as low as five milliseconds. You can install Steelhead appliances in your Australia office, deploy a few Cloud Steelhead instances in AWS Singapore, and route traffic to and from your ultimate destination via AWS. Users will experience performance almost like that of a LAN because the long-distance, high-latency links are carrying only optimized traffic.
If you're wondering whether Cloud Steelhead would benefit your particular project, drop me a note in the comments below and I'll reply. Cloud Steelhead is an ideal application for compute requirements on Amazon EC2 where users are separated from resources by long distances.
Today's Guest Blogger is Matt Berry. Matt is a Sales Engineer from Down Under (Australia), which explains the theme of his piece.
Are you mad? Considering changing your first name to Max? Just been on eBay looking for some “V8 Interceptor” muscle?
Well I’m here to tell you that you’re looking in the wrong place. Riverbed can give you the Interceptor without all the '70s wind resistance. It goes well beyond a blown V8 with fat tires and an exhaust system you could only dream of on your Toyota hatchback. The Riverbed Interceptor can intercept 1,000,000 – yep, 1 million – TCP sessions; can be souped up with 10Gigabits/sec of Ethernet connectivity madness; and can pump 12Gbits/s of throbbing WAN accelerated glory into the network!
“What on earth is he talking about?” I hear you ask. Well check this out:
Put a pair of Riverbed Interceptors between your WAN and Data Center LAN and you’ve got a highly
available, Steelhead-aware, load-balancing solution with full stateful failover! Try and do that in a 1970s Ford Falcon Fastback! If one Interceptor fails (which makes Max really Mad), the other will seamlessly Intercept and redirect optimized sessions to the same Steelhead – thereby not interrupting the Optimized flow.
Ever wanted to pause a Steelhead for planned work? “Pause? Huh?” Yes, have the Steelhead reject new sessions so old sessions can be gracefully shut down. Well the Riverbed Interceptor now makes this possible – you can plan work on a Steelhead without losing a single packet. “That’s just crazy talk!” I hear you say.
“How about the ability to load-balance across any sized Steelheads that I like? Maybe I want to start small, with a 2050, then later add a couple of 5050s but still keep that 2050 workhorse in the mix?” Well unlike Max’s beast of a wagon, the Riverbed Interceptor lets you do just that.
“How about a couple of kick-butt, solid state, 7050 bad boys for my DR traffic, balanced with a humble cluster of 5050s for all my whining users?” Yep! The Interceptor’s load balancing rules were made for that!
Just remember, when you think post-apocalyptic IT glory, think Interceptor!
We know that we get thousands of hits on our blog in a typical week, but at the same time, we have little or no sense of how our blog content serves you, as a reader of that blog. So today, for a change of pace, we're going to ask you to do a little bit of the writing.
Please create a comment below, and tell us what you like and don't like about our blog. What types of articles you prefer and what types you wish we'd never post. And what you'd like to see more of. For example:
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Our blog has been very much a one-way street. We'd love to increase the interactivity and the value to our readers. So please take a minute and help us make the Think Fast Blog better. We're listening.
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My blog last week featured a video demonstrating how Steelhead appliance can accelerate RDP 7 environments. The blog triggered a number of inquiries about how to configure the Steelhead to achieve these type of results.
Below is a list of the steps you need to take:
Note: If you are not familiar how to do this, please reference the "View WAN Reference Architecture" document on VMware's website
Performing these 3 simple configuration steps changes RDP from being passed-through unoptimized to being intercepted and optimized by Steelhead appliances. Happy optimizing!
Today's guest blogger is Mark Lewis. Mark is the Senior Director of Marketing and Alliances for Riverbed in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) for Riverbed. He is based in London, England.
I was talking with a customer recently about his storage needs, how they had grown over the years
and how they were likely to grow in to the future. Truth is, he said, “It’s difficult to know what to keep and what to dispose of, so we keep everything, just in case”!
It reminded me of the ‘man drawer’ sketch by comedian Michael McIntyre. A ‘man drawer’ is the kind of place you store batteries, even old ones you haven’t had a chance to throw away yet. You’ll store instruction manuals for appliances you no longer own, new and old light bulbs, keys from homes you don’t live in any more and, of course the most masculine device key of all, the radiator bleeding key.
Why do we keep all this? I have asked this question of many customers and they all agree they know they are keeping more than they need to, but the reasons are very convincing. For some it’s regulatory needs, though they admit not all documents are regulated but it’s ‘too complicated to separate them’. For others the argument of falling disk prices means the cost of storing is always coming down, excluding management of storage of course.
But how are we going to protect all that data? Even with deduplication storage technologies, the rate of growth is going to continue at a tremendous rate and more importantly what happens at the point of recovery? There are going to be a lot of old batteries, bulbs and keys to sift through or rather their business document equivalents.
One assuring bit of news are the new services being launched by various organizations such as Amazon and AT&T with many more to follow, offering backup options in a multi-tenanted environment. Some call this ‘cloud storage’.
The great news is your back up really can be someone else’s problem and with technology from organizations like Riverbed with its Whitewater appliances these third party solutions can seamlessly integrate in to any IT environment. If you want to learn more look out for a number of online seminars and trade shows taking place. Or you can read more about these solutions here
Today's guest blogger is Christian Lorentz. Christian, who is based in Munich, Germany, is the Product Marketing and Alliance Manager for Riverbed in EMEA (Europe, The Middle East, and Asia). What follows are his impressions (and a few beautiful photographs) from his visit this week to the X-Days conference in Interlaken, Switzerland.
What was considered nothing more than marketing hype here in Europe 12 months ago, is starting to turn into reality. I participated in X-Days, the largest IT show in Switzerland this week, and I saw a lot of interest from enterprises of all sizes in using cloud services.
At the X-Days conference, the large vendors' messages focused on efficiency, agility and other cloud characteristics. Why? In the last several months, many CIOs in Europe claimed that they have begun embracing the cloud before their IT organizations did. However, if you take a closer look at what they have achieved so far, you’ll see that all they've done is begin to consolidate services, streamline processes, and perhaps outsource some of their non-critical applications. This is far from what the visionaries call the cloud. These are just the first steps toward the private cloud, but the journey to the public cloud remains difficult. Why?
In Europe, cloud services offerings are not as rich as they are in the US. Most global vendors follow the one-size-fits-all model and try to sell the same services across all horizontals, all verticals, and all countries. Even though there are no longer customs restrictions between European countries anymore, there are still different legal requirements between different countries and verticals. For example, Switzerland and France are very restrictive on the location where the enterprise data can be saved. Therefore, using Cloud Storage Services that are based in Ireland, where the majority of the data centers are based, is unimaginable in these countries. The lack of local, in-country players who understand the requirements of a specific vertical or horizontal market so that they can propose the correct service is slowing down the adoption of the cloud throughout Europe.
Many IT organizations are lobbying the EC to get an harmonization of the services but this is very unlikely to happen soon, and so Europe will stay on the back seat of the “cloud shuttle” for a while.
This video says it all, but essentially Riverbed can have a big impact on the performance of RDP 7 when used over a high latency WAN connection. The RDP activities in this demo are pretty straightforward and include the dragging and resizing of a window.
Psst. Got a sec? Yeah, you. See, there's thing happening in IT Land. It's called cloud computing. It's kind of like the kitty box of technology: people are simultaneously drawn to it yet repelled by it. Guess what, though? It's here to stay. And it's completely changing relationships between groups of folks who spend a not insignificant amount of time avoiding each other socially and professionally. Well, that's about to change—starting Thursday 31 March. IEEE, Riverbed, Santa Clara University School of Engineering and Leavey School of Business invite you to an evening presentation: "Cloud Computing: A Multi-Disciplinary View From Technology, Business and Law."
Cloud computing requires the engagement of many disciplines across technology, business, and law. Contention between these disciplines is common, yet the success of cloud computing requires a new level of understanding how these fields can learn to work closer with each other. The adage “together we can be greater than the sum of our parts” has never been truer than now. Four panelists representing two technical aspects (security and performance), the business benefits, and the legal implications will join together for a lively discussion from which every attendee—no matter one’s specialty—is sure to learn something new and derive immediate benefit.
During the networking hour we invite you to enjoy wine with delicious food and mingle with like-minded professionals. Connect with the event sponsors (Riverbed and IEEE) and engage with the speakers:
I'd like to thank Sachin Desai, one of our kernel developers with a keen interest in the intersection of technology and society. It was his idea to bring together multiple disciplines and he deftly handled all the behind-the-scenes organization.
Make room on your agenda to join us from 5:45 PM to 8:30 PM on Thursday 31 March at Santa Clara University. Enroll today, space is limited!
Our guest blogger today is Rick Holden, Riverbed's Director of Technology Alliances. He enjoys late-night infomercials, old reruns of Saturday Night Live, and long walks on the beach.
Is your company increasing its use of video? Corporate YouTube? CEO webcasts? Are videos replacing printed marketing collateral? These days most companies would
answer with an emphatic yes -- but that answer is usually accompanied with a worried look because of the potential for video to overwhelm the corporate network.
Did you know Riverbed can help in scaling your streaming video deployment to far-flung locations? Riverbed Steelhead appliances can remove up to 95% of the enterprise application traffic flowing across the network, resulting in a dramatic relief of the stress on your WAN pipes, freeing up capacity for video and other applications. At the same time, advanced QoS capabilities prioritize and allocate the available bandwidth for video and other real-time apps – all of which result in the potential for more video streams of higher quality. Our Cascade product can help you understand how video traffic is impacting your network.
All of this pretty cool by itself, but as the late night infomercials tell us, "Wait! There’s more!"
With the Riverbed Services Platform, enterprises can deploy Windows 2008 R2 as a video server in branch offices and other remote locations, right inside the Steelhead appliance, without requiring any extra hardware. RSP lets enterprises put support for Windows Media and Silverlight streaming technologies at the edge of the network, and split live streams right there, saving the WAN from the crushing blow of delivering a separate video stream for each remote user. Customers have also deployed Flash Media Servers on RSP to achieve similar results with Adobe Flash technology.
But wait, there's still more! Riverbed has also partnered with several companies including Polycom,
Qumu, and Accordent, who specialize in video content management, webcasting and video capture and encoding. Their
products work seamlessly with Riverbed to provide an enhanced enterprise video solution.
All of this can be yours for the insanely low price of just $19.95. And if you call now, we will double your order! (He’s just kidding about this part. -- Ed.)
Check out how Avid, a pioneering video company, has deployed Riverbed and our partners to distribute streaming video without killing its network.
Tune into this blog and the Riverbed website throughout 2011 for some exciting new video capabilities from Riverbed and its partners.
Today's guest blogger is Jin Woo, Manager for Public Relations here at Riverbed.
This week Riverbed will be in booth #949 at the Satellite 2011 Conference, taking place at the Walter E Washington Convention Center in Washington DC. This will be a great opportunity for everyone to learn about the benefits Riverbed users can expect by improving satellite-based WAN communications.
Back in November 2010 Riverbed acquired Global Protocols, the creators of Skipware, the leading commercial implementation of the Space Communications Protocol Standards (SCPS). The addition of Global Protocols's SkipWare to Riverbed WAN optimization bolsters Riverbed's leadership position in delivering optimization solutions for satellite networks. Skipware customers are able to overcome the performance challenges associated with extremely high latency that satellite-based networks introduce.
Unlike satellite-specific optimization products, which typically only improve the behavior of TCP, Riverbed WAN optimization solutions tackle all three factors affecting satellite-based WANs:
Riverbed satellite-based WAN optimization solutions are utilized by organizations where landlines are not available, too expensive, or unable to deliver the required bandwidth. Often this includes oil platforms, cruise ships, and military field units.
In February, Riverbed also announced enhancements to the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), the software that powers Riverbed WAN optimization solutions, to deliver LTTS, TCP Westwood, and SCPS integration into Steelhead appliances. The satellite optimizations deliver adaptive TCP optimization to better utilize bandwidth over lossy links with high latency, and to deliver resiliency in the case of packet loss. This release also offers continued support for SCPS interoperability.
To learn more about how Riverbed helps customer accelerate satellite environments, click here.
We are very pleased to announce that the February winner of the Performance Hall of Fame is the posting called "Steelheads Rev Up Internet Cafes in Afghanistan" which was posted by Dean Barsaleau, a member of the team that supports the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation of US troops in Afghanistan.
The problem is that troops want to be able to communicate with friends and family back home, but there is limited network bandwidth in Afghanistan, and only a small portion of that is available for non-military purposes.
Back in January 2010, they rolled out their first few Steelhead appliances to less than a dozen Internet Cafes, they have now rolled out to over 300, and they are reducing data by more than 13TB/month. And they are very pleased by the results they've seen.
This is a graph of the optimization at one of their data centers for January 2011.
Thanks very much for the kind words, Dean, and good luck maintaining the morale of our troops!
Today's guest blogger is Nik Rouda. Nik is Riverbed's Director of Marketing, Solutions and Verticals, and he writes a pretty nifty blog entry.
Though I frequently get asked, “So, what do you do for a living?” I have a hard time with this question. I’ve found that a generic brush-off like “I work in IT” never seems to satisfy, only prompting more questions. A more precise answer generally goes “I do product and solutions marketing on how globally connected enterprises can optimize their wide area networks, gain visibility into … Hey, where are you going?”
What’s a guy to do? How do I answer this question without getting too nerdy or being too vague? The best efforts seem to involve metaphors: “I’m like William Shatner in all those Priceline commercials” or “I’m a televangelist, but I promote go-fast networking gear and I don’t use much hair gel.” If followed quickly enough with “want another drink?” then the moment passes pretty acceptably.
Now, sometimes I’m actually talking to someone who works in technology, such as a storage administrator. What metaphors can I use about Riverbed to get a storage guy thinking about the value of Riverbed?
Here are a few favorites:
“Companies trying to replicate all their data between data centers may find it’s like trying to force a cow through a drinking straw: everything isn’t going to fit. Steelhead appliances greatly reduce the bandwidth requirements, just sending the fresh milk across the WAN since we’ve seen the rest of the cow before.”
“Tiering your storage for DR purposes is like picking which of your possessions to save from a burning house, a really horrible compromise that doesn’t solve the problem. Riverbed allows you to protect everything at once, so it’s safe in the event of a disaster.”
“Buying more bandwidth to make room for replication is like building a completely new national highway system right next to the one we already have. It would be extremely difficult to do, insanely expensive, and instantly double the cost of ongoing maintenance. The real solution is to more efficiently use what you already have, prioritizing and reducing traffic, and minimizing congestion and collisions.”
“The challenge of backing up data in each branch is like the pain of having to purchase a VCR for every house in America, and making everyone drive to a video store, hoping it’s easy to find
the movie they had in mind, and also hoping it doesn’t get lost or damaged in the hot car. High-speed streaming, on-demand video services like Netflix are the future, reducing cost, hassle, complexity, and risk. Whitewater is like the Netflix of enterprise cloud backup and archive.”
So, enough about me, what do you do for a living? Want another drink?
Its hard to believe that it has been almost 7 years since we shipped our first product to our first customer. To celebrate the anniversary, members from the original Riverbed team recently got together to take a photo with the first Steelhead appliance.
Here are the team members in this photo.
front row (left to right)
Viv Keswani (engineering), Claire Mosher (tech pubs), Bob Gilbert (marketing), Timothy Lee (QA), Nitin Gupta (engineering), David Wu (VP Engineering), Irene Yam (marketing), Lap Trac (engineering)
back row (left to right)
Bart Robinson (enginnering), Randy Gottfried (CFO), Mike Michon (QA), Jordan Share (IT), (engineering), Steve McCanne (co-Founder, CTO), Al Landrum (engineering), Phil Rzewski (engineering), Steve Smoot (VP Tech Operations), Gordon Chaffee (VP Engineering), Jerry Kennelly (co-Founder, CEO), Eric Wolford (SVP Marketing and Product Management), Not pictured: Denis Murphy (VP of Sales)
Also note that a handful of ex. Riverbed employees are not pictured.
Back in September of 2003, I completed a book on High Availability. (It's been called the finest book ever written, and I learned as a child to never argue with my mother when she says stuff like that...)
That experience and the exposure to the science of high availability changed the way I look at all technology. I have a tendency to look at everything in terms of how it can affect the overall user availability experience, and I also tend to ask questions about how new products handle outages.
I had an experience with exactly that when I first learned about our Whitewater product several months before its release. I was very impressed by the technology, and I saw it (still do) as a game-changer for backup; if you can direct backups to the cloud, and they are deduplicated, compressed, and encrypted, customers can get some HUGE advantages in performance, manual intervention, routine recovery, disaster recovery, space requirements and more.
But I put my availability hat on, and asked: what happens if the Whitewater appliance itself fails? You've got the Whitewater equivalent of the SDR (essentially the de-duplication data store), encryption keys, and who knows what else all in the Whitewater appliance. And since you're using that appliance to protect you in the event of a site-wide disaster, just the same as you do when you ship tapes off-site, the loss of the appliance can't be a fatal problem.
I was immediately reassured that the loss of a Whitewater appliance did not mean the loss of your data. All of the data that's required by the Whitewater to restore the backed up data from the cloud is itself backed up to the cloud. The only piece that's not backed up to the cloud is the encryption key. That's vital, though, since all stored data is encrypted using AES-256 encryption (and data in transit is protected with SSL).
Key management belongs to the customer. When you get the replacement Whitewater appliance (physical or virtual), you configure it to point to the storage cloud, enter the same encryption key, and you're back in business.
The loss of the Whitewater appliance does not affect your ability to recover your data from the cloud.
From time to time in future blogs, we'll look at the high availability aspects of various Riverbed products.
I purchased my first smartphone back in 2005. It was a Palm Treo, and I remember clearly how I marveled at how it combined a PDA and digital camera with a fully-functional cellphone. The Treo could even load and run software applications. I drooled over its multi-functional capabilities, as I felt my smartphone made me far more productive than my colleagues who were still using their dedicated single-function cellphones.
As we all know smartphones have become far more powerful recently, by adding new processing and software capabilities that allow them to integrate email, instant messaging, web surfing, GPS, and a host of other interesting capabilities. The cameras included in the newest iPhone and Android devices are so good that many consider a dedicated standalone camera to be completely unnecessary. Smartphones today address a variety of personal productivity needs that only a few years ago required a number of different separate devices.
What is happening with smartphones is also happening in a number of other product categories. Investing in many types of single-function dedicated devices is often considered a waste. Examples of devices that we now consider obsolete include dedicated single-function printers, copiers, typewriters, fax machines, MP3 players, DVD players, and game machines.
Furthermore, technology consolidation trends are not limited to personal appliances and gadgets--we are also seeing consolidation in enterprise IT. Virtualization technologies now allow data centers to remove dedicated single-application servers and host multiple applications and OS instances on the same platform. Indeed, the key initiative behind cloud computing and cloud storage is to leverage common physical infrastructure for multiple applications and end-customers.
But consolidation has yet to arrive in the networking area. For the past several decades, networking has been the domain of mostly dedicated single-function appliances powered by proprietary software. And when you consider the relative simplicity of the functionality provided by these dedicated appliances--for example layer-2/3 switching and routing--one wonders why it can't be integrated into a more powerful multi-functional device, especially in less-demanding branch office remote environments. Proprietary hardware and software isn't required to look up ARP tables and forward packets at the WAN speeds that connect branch offices--100Mbps or less. While such technology might have been considered state-of-the-art back in the 1990's, today it is consider trivial and simple technology to implement.
Rather, today's state-of-the-art technology is layer-7 application-level networking. We're talking about more advanced network devices that are aware of applications, can report on them by inspecting packet payloads to identify distinguishing signatures, and can perform operations within the network that address the behavioral inefficiencies of each application in order to improve end-user performance.
These advanced layer-7 networking devices have considerably more processing and storage resources compared to the older-generation dedicated single-function devices. As a result, by leveraging virtualization technologies they can also host services such as firewalls, secure web gateway, domain controller, DNS/DHCP, and other application services. Of course, the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) is one example of what I am talking about--RSP has been used by Riverbed customers to host these and other applications on a shared Steelhead appliance platform. Interestingly, available RSP packages include Vyatta software that allows the Steelhead to provide functionally-equivalent routing and firewall capabilities used in dedicated router appliances.
So with all of these processing and software resources available, it seems there is no reason why layer-7 networking devices can't absorb some of the older simplistic functionality now being served by dedicated single-function layer 2/3 networking devices. For example, it does not take much CPU and memory resources to run OSPF and BGP--layer-7 networking devices that have already been deployed in thousands of enterprise networks are handling far more complicated and demanding responsibilities.
It's clear that even today, layer-2 and 3 switches and routers are already considered commoditized technology. Given past historic trends where we've seen where commodity devices become absorbed into more sophisticated products, will we also see layer-2/3 devices eventually be absorbed into more powerful and intelligent layer-7 products such as those available from Riverbed? Admittedly, such a transition--if it occurred--would take time. What do you think--can or will such a transition take place in the next five years? Why or why not?
The picture below of a pair of Riverbed Steelhead 2050H appliances may not look like much to you, but we're really excited about it. It's actually where they sit that's so exciting; they are in the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in New York City.
Microsoft has invited Riverbed to place equipment in their MTCs all around the world, and our Alliances Team is hard at work making this happen. Besides New York, you can find Steelhead appliances connected up and ready for demonstrations in Mountain View California, Paris, and Munich. And the plan for the rest of 2011 calls for similar US installations in Chicago (next week), Reston, and Dallas, Texas. Around the world, we're planning to install them in Dubai, Cologne, Beijing, India, and in the UK, all before the end of the year. And we're planning to
get into more MTCs in 2012.
Why?
Because Microsoft recognizes what a good partner Riverbed is, and how we can make their products work better and faster over the wide area network. If you're using Sharepoint, we can make that run 50x faster or more. We can accelerate SMB v2 (nobody else can). We're partners with Microsoft Online, accelerating BPOS-D and Office 365. We can accelerate CIFS by as much as 200x. And we make Exchange (even encrypted MAPI), SQL, RDP, Office, TMG and Microsoft Dynamics faster. We also expand and increase performance for Branch Cache.
Riverbed and Microsoft make excellent partners. If you doubt that, drop by one of the MTCs where our gear is installed and see for yourself.
Today's guest blogger is Thomas Bakewell, Riverbed's Chief Information Officer since 2008. Tom oversees our internal IT, and he is not shy to talk about how he uses our own technology (he calls it "drinking our own wine") to make his job easier.
Once a day I try to make the trip downstairs in my office building to our local coffee house. I always ask for a very large, bone-dry cappuccino. For those of you who’ve not had this pleasure, it’s essentially three shots of espresso with a lot of foam on top. They’ve nicknamed this drink for me as “cloudy coffee”. Really? I can’t get away from the cloud, even when I get my morning coffee. But what CIO can get away from the cloud? Between TV commercials, magazine ads and every vendor you know, apparently all there is i
s clouds, and they are pervasive. Questions and debates abound around clouds; what are they, where are they, do they represent the end of IT as we know it today, or the beginning of something new?
No wonder I like my coffee.
To be sure though, the cloud is an important component of IT. I would argue that it is important to every IT organization. It is the next logical extension of IT. We are in a unique position at this point in time, one might say it’s the perfect storm – but those are different clouds. We have endured a long and difficult recession that has caused us all to make the best choices we can given the limitations of funding. And the state of technology that exists today offers us the ability to do more with the same. Notice I didn’t say do more with less, that’s almost impossible. We can, however do more with the same given the right technologies and deployments. Match both of the above with an ever-increasing demand from our users and we’re in a position to go to the cloud.
So how do clouds actually help? Well, since I’m in IT I need an acronym to explain it. I’ve thought long and hard on this, although that might not be readily apparent. But here is the newest cloud-speak. “Cloud as a Service” or CaaS. So why is that so important? Well, that’s the answer; you get to define the service. For me I’ve defined the cloud to mean many things, extensible and elastic storage and compute resources, DR, collaboration and most importantly consolidation. All of these have allowed my organization to deliver robust business solutions at dramatically lower operating costs while implementing sooner than traditional models. Oh I have those too, and they play a critical role in the overall service catalog I provide. The cloud-based services, as I defined them for Riverbed work. They work fast, they work simply, and they match the current needs of our business. As the needs change, I’ll change my cloud models and deployments.
Is it really that easy? Yes and no. Yes it can be done well and done quickly. Current technologies allow for consolidated, virtual computing. That said there are models and partners that must be understood and selected. There are issues that must be addressed. Let’s start with the model. The basic differentiator is public, private or hybrid. They all serve a purpose. As I have defined the cloud at Riverbed, I use all three models:
This footprint or cloudscape is right for us at this time. Will it change over time? Yes. I will define the new cloud deployments shortly before I need them. Another component of our cloud strategy is partnership. Having partners host and in some cases co-manage with me has been a key ingredient to the success of the model. And finally the issues, or those things we just don’t like to think about with clouds, security and performance. Models and partners are necessary but insufficient to ensure a successful deployment. Maintaining the information assets of your business must be in the forefront of your thinking. And performance and usability for the business must be the same no matter where the cloud resides. As you can imagine, I have an inside track on getting and keeping high performance in my clouds!
Just remember one thing, the cloud is yours to define. You know your business, you know your constraints. You can use the cloud; just make sure your vendors understand your definition of the cloud. They must play in your cloud, not the other way around, after all it is your cloud.
As I wrap this up, I’m looking out my office window in San Francisco. It’s a really overcast afternoon, or is it cloudy? Maybe I’ll head downstairs and get a cup of coffee.
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