Blog

Jabberwiki

For a spring Friday, we offer something a little different.  Our own Nik Rouda, Director of Solutions Marketing, was reading Alice in Wonderland to his daughters the other night, and the next morning, in his words, "this just came pouring out."  So we offer it without comment. 

Poetry is so rare in blogs these days.

JABBERWIKI
(adapted from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

`Twas latent, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the WAN:
All mimsy were the admingoves,  
And the network raths outgran.   

"Beware the Jabberwiki, my son!
The delays that bite, the waits that catch!
Beware the Webweb bird, and shun
The frumious Bandwidthsnatch!"

He took his Wiral Shark aloud:
Long time the manxome SLA he sought – 
So rested he by the Tumtum cloud,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stand,
The Jabberwiki, with eyes of blame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey WAN,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal Steelhead went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou sped the Jabberwiki?
Come to my arms, my VMish boy!
O fastest day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas latent, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the WAN;
All mimsy were the admingoves,
And the network raths outgran.

Interop is coming! And Riverbed is all over it!

Are you going to be at Interop '11 at the Mandalay Bay in Fabulous Las Vegas starting on May 8?  Riverbed sure will.  We're going to be all over this show.  There's so much going on it's hard to know where to begin.

First of all, we are a global Interop sponsor and the sponsor for registration. 

There's the CIO Boot Camp on Sunday and Monday the 8th and 9th.  We're also a sponsor of that event, and we'll have a couple of speakers there:

Our customer Ben Bailey of AVST will be joined by Riverbed's CIO, Thomas Bakewell, for a presentation called Case Study: Developing Disaster Recovery in the Cloud, Monday from 1 to 1:30. 

Steve Riley, one of our most prolific bloggers and a member of Riverbed's Office of the CTO, will take part in two panel discussions at Interop:

• Optimizing Hybrid Cloud Communications Monday at 3:35pm and,
• The New Age of WAN Optimization Thursday at 11:30am.

As for the IT Expo (the vendor fair) which opens Tuesday at 10am, we'll have the largest booth in Riverbed history (1500 square feet!); you shouldn't have a lot of trouble finding us in Booth 1927.  Among the things you'll find going on in the booth are:

• Ongoing live product demonstrations at six different stations:
  • Steelhead appliances
  • Cascade
  • Steelhead Mobile
  • Riverbed Services Platform (RSP)
  • Whitewater
  • Cloud Steelhead
• Presentation Theater, where a rotating group of Riverbed people (including yours truly... come by and say hello!) will give live 5-10 minute presentations and demos throughout the IT Expo.  All attendees get a free t-shirt, and are entered for a chance to win an iPad 2 each day.  There will also be some customers and other presentations mixed in.
• Wednesday at 3pm, we're taking part in the Interop Booth Crawl, which means that not only will you be able to learn all about Riverbed and WAN Optimization, but you'll also be able to have some adult beverages served to you by our own bartender.
• We'll also be running a Twitter-based contest called Speed The Cloud, where you'll have another chance to win a $500 Apple Gift Card by guessing how long it'll take to download a file from a Cloud provider in Virginia to our Interop booth, both optimized and unoptimized.  The winner will be entry with the closest guesses, based on the results of a live booth demonstration at about 2:00pm on Thursday, the final day of the IT Expo.  Details coming soon. 

If you're going to be at Interop '11, make sure you stop by the booth and get a t-shirt, and say hi.  We'd love to hear from you!

Network World: IT pros name their favorite IT product

Network World recently published the results of conversations they had with several IT professionals about their favorite IT products. 

A couple of the IT professionals shared that Riverbed was their favorite product.  Below are links to the story and a couple of quotes.
 
Christopher Luter, Department of Children and Families, State of Wisconsin
Steelhead appliance

Link here

“With the Riverbed Steelhead appliance, we experience LAN-like speed at all times. Our employees are able to access information almost instantaneously, enabling them to serve the families of Wisconsin to the best of their ability. It delivers exactly as promised. First time, first try.”

Jason Irby, Pacific Dental Services
Riverbed Cascade

Link here

“As far as I am concerned, managing a production environment without Riverbed Cascade is the evolutionary equivalent of not having opposable thumbs. There is no way I could have my hands around our challenging environment without the use of our Cascade server.  Our total investment with the Riverbed product was fully justified by day nine through reducing problem resolution times and avoidance of production gaps.”

 

 

OMG! The Sky is Falling!

Last Thursday morning I woke up to the kind of headline in the New York Times that I hadn't seen in years. "Amazon Cloud Failure Takes Down Web Sites" it read.  Wow.  An article about downed computers.  That takes me back.  I haven't seen those since the late '90s and early '00s (we still don't have a name for that decade, do we?), when security glitches and outages affected major web sites and became front page news.

Probably the least surprising thing about complex computers and computing networks is that from time to time they go down.  In fact, I'm more surprised when they stay up.  After all, what is the Public Cloud but a collection of computers.  Adding virtual computing doesn't change the fact that there are physical computers underlying the virtual machines.  In fact, the addition of VMs to the mix just makes for more complexity and more things that can fail. 

Back in 2003, I wrote a book on Highly Available Systems Design, and while we didn't write about virtual  machines or public cloud computing, the principles really haven't changed all that much.  Since every component of a computer system can fail, if you want truly reliable computing you must foresee these outages and  build protections into the system, and eliminate as much of the complexity as possible.  Of course you have to balance that with cost; the larger and rarer the prospective outage, the harder and more expensive it is to protect against it.  And if you take that to its ultimate extreme, you soon realize that the Earth is a single point of failure, and there's not much we can do about it.

So newspapers are reporting about computing outages again.  I look at it in a couple of ways.

1. The publicity is ultimately GOOD for the Public Cloud Computing industry.  Why?  Because ALL publicity is good, and because in the end more people will learn about Cloud Computing.  
2. Because companies will learn from their mistakes and build in better protections so that the same failures won't cause the same kind of outage next time.
3. The first time around, one of the companies who had some of the most widely-publicized failures was amazon.com.  They seem to have gotten past those early problems, and I hear they're doing pretty well these days.

 

Mazu Networks Acquisition, Two Years Later

Today's Guest Blogger is Alex Alvarez, the Senior Director for Worldwide Sales in Riverbed's Cascade Group. 

With the acquisition of Mazu Networks on February 19^th 2009, Riverbed embarked on a journey to become a multi-product company and a leader in application aware network performance management (NPM).  I was working at Mazu when Riverbed acquired us.  The economy was struggling, and while it was good to find a home at Riverbed, many people inside and outside the company were unclear on how well Mazu would fit into a WAN Optimization company.

After a year of working through acquisition issues, cross training and product integration plans, I knew the acquisition was going to be successful about one year in when I started meeting customers like Thomas Prokop of Consol Energy, who taking advantage of the combined Cascade/Steelhead solution to get real business benefits. Tom told me having both products mad a real  difference for him. Customers like Tom enabled Cascade sales to double in the first year after Riverbed's acquisition, which was, of course, very exciting for us and our customers.

It was a game-changing moment when Riverbed doubled down in November of 2010, and became a NPM leader with the acquisition of CACE Technology.  In one move the Cascade NPM product line was made complete by adding packet analysis. Loris Degioanni and Gerald Combs joined the Riverbed team and with our co-founder Steve McCanne form our troika of packet capture and analysis pioneers.

I have never been involved with a product used so often by so many.  Wireshark is used by everyone involved in networking; we see hundreds of thousands of downloads per month. Taking on the responsibility as the corporate sponsor of Wireshark engages Riverbed with the packet analysis community in a unique way. The upcoming Sharkfest ’11 will be the first for Riverbed and we are all looking forward to meeting the Wireshark community at this very special event.

I am very excited about the future as we continue to integrate Pilot and Shark into Cascade’s product line and grow the capability of Pilot, the packet analysis product with the coolest reviews. Often called Wireshark on steroids, Pilot takes Wireshark users to the next level and helps our Steelhead customers get the most from their investment.  With great customers, partners, and product synergy the future looks rosy. 

Nobel Prizes and Cloud Steelhead

What do the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics and the launch of Cloud Steelhead 1.1 have in common?  

Both are seminal achievements that are much easier to understand than they may otherwise seem.  While the result of dragging scotch tape through pencil shavings earned the Two Russian-born scientists the sciences greatest honor, Cloud Steelhead has the ability to earn you a similar distinction within your organization. 

With this release Cloud Steelhead adds compatibility for ESX-based public cloud environments and extends cloud partner ecosystem.  

Cloud Steelhead now offers validated technical compatibility with a number of cloud service providers, including Terremark, ZettaServe and Xtium, as well as solution technology partners CloudSwitch and Media Platform. These companies join Amazon EC2 and VPC as part of the wide ecosystem of cloud services supported by Cloud Steelhead.

Just as Alfred Nobel made his name with a BANG, Cloud Steelhead can be just as impactful on your cloud infrastructure, by speeding your migration to and performance from the cloud for all of the applications you run from Amazon Web Services or other ESX based enviornments.  Just think, all of these benefits, without that pesky trip to Sweden....

Riverbed drinks its own wine

Riverbed Backup Administrator Jim Clayton shares how he uses his company's Whitewater product to enable him to do data backup smarter and in a more cost effective manner.

 

XenDesktop at the Speed of Now

Today Riverbed announced the expansion of our abilities to accelerate and control the broadest range of virtual desktop environments over the WAN.  We are adding enhanced support for Citrix XenDesktop joining our existing coverage for the virtual desktop solutions from leading providers like Microsoft and VMware. Customers who deploy Steelhead products in a virtual desktop environment are able to overcome the WAN performance issues that bottleneck virtual desktop deployments, significantly enhancing virtual desktop end-user productivity and helping speed the adoption of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).  This announcement is particularly important in light of the many recent developments we’ve seen in the VDI space.    

The convergence of a number of trends in the server and OS market are propelling an increased interest in desktop virtualization.  The enormous success that server virtualization projects have had at helping customers achieve the promised benefits of greater flexibility, lower costs, and improved data management have driven rapid growth in the space as well as increased interest in identifying other opportunities to realize these benefits.  Server virtualization vendors have made significant improvements in their desktop virtualization products, committing more resources and attention on them to eliminate legacy concerns regarding functionality and performance.  The increased focus by vendors on desktop virtualization meets a surge demand for OS and client systems as organizations have anointed Windows 7 as the true successor to XP and have initiated refresh cycles.  With a total addressable market of 35 million servers vs 370-600 million enterprise desktops these contravening forces suggest continued growth in this space along with corresponding increases in emphasis by product and solution vendors. 

The primary challenges limiting the adoption of VDI are similar to the challenges of centralized architectures: application performance and bandwidth utilization.  VDI products are particularly susceptible to this as poor responsiveness typically manifests itself not merely as slow application performance but also impacts higher priority tasks leading to sluggish mouse movements and keystrokes.  Additionally, recommendations of up to 256k of bandwidth per user session, which are typically both compressed and encrypted, levies a significant bandwidth tax for usage and also limits the ability for third party technologies to try to ensure quality of service and performance.

Riverbed plays a central role-enabling server centralization and virtualization projects and is well positioned to leverage this success in the desktop virtualization space.   One of the Steelhead products' key differentiators is the ability to optimize across applications and protocols.  That is particularly valuable as organizations rely on their networks to support multiple applications and uses.  This versatility is relevant to VDI as users often run additional applications and services outside of their network stream. 

In addition, Riverbed provides additional benefits to VDI deployments by addressing the inherent difficulties of performance and bandwidth utilization in the virtual desktop stream.  This functionality enhances software solutions from major vendor including Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp, VMware View, Microsoft RDP and RemoteFX.  By addressing the fundamental limitations of virtual desktops across vendors while also providing optimization for all other traffic on the WAN, Riverbed is strongly positioned to promote its solution in the virtual desktop space.

Accelerating South Africa

I just returned from a too-short trip to South Africa.  Last week we held User Forums in both Capetown  and Johannesburg, and I was the primary speaker.  This was a most enlightening visit.

We started in Cape Town, and for the first day's meeting we drove about 45 minutes from our hotel in downtown Cape Town to a beachfront restaurant in Melkbosstrand, a township within Cape Town.  Die Damhuis ("The Dam House") is the oldest building in Melkbosstrand and used to be a private homestead next to a dam. The building has been declared a National Monument and has been restored to its former glory to accommodate the beachfront restaurant.  We met with about 10 local customers and at least one Riverbed prospect.  It made a beautiful and memorable venue for our meeting.

The second day we met in a fairly conventional hotel, the Melrose Arch, in Johannesburg where we had about 15 customers, including two from as far away as Kenya.

In each venue, and despite some nasty jet lag, I spoke for about 2 1/2 hours and the audience was extremely attentive and interested and asked many questions.  The biggest differences that I heard about between WAN Optimization in the US and in South Africa are:

1. Wide area networking and network connectivity in South Africa is slow, unreliable, expensive, and generally of poor quality.  This means that as valuable as Steelhead appliance functionality is here in the US and other areas where network connectivity is good, it's even more important in South Africa, where IT organizations can get satisfactory amounts of data through these unreliable and inconsistent pipes.
2. Cloud services are virtually non-existent in South Africa.  I spent some time talking about Whitewater and Cloud Steelhead before I learned that these powerful technologies are still a few years away from being useful in this part of the world.
3. There was more interest in our satellite-based optimization (Skipware) than I have seen when speaking with US customers.  That's not hard to understand given the remoteness of many of the locations in Africa where networking services are required. 

 

Before I flew home Thursday  night, I got to spend a few hours at The Lion Park, a sort of game preserve and zoo (though their web site says it's neither of those things), where I had the chance to see some really cool animals (zebras, giraffes, hyenas, antelopes, cheetahs, meerkats, and others) up close and personal, and even got to pet some white lion cubs.  (I took all of the photos in today's blog posting.)

 

  Special thanks to Vanessa White, Melissa Craig, Christo Briedenhann, and Retha Meiring who help cover Africa for Riverbed, and who made this trip an absolute pleasure! 

Do competitor products work as well as Riverbed?

Approach any Riverbed competitor and ask them why you should consider their product, and they'll likely give you the answer, "...because our product works just like Riverbed, but it's much cheaper..."

At first this claim might seem non-controversial.  Certainly, the "it's cheaper" aspect may not be difficult to prove.  But the first part of that claim--"it works just like Riverbed"--might take some digging to understand.  How can you really tell if the competitor product is as effective as Riverbed?  Here are five questions that I believe are key to answering that question:

1) Does the competitor offer layer-7 application-specific optimization capabilities for all of your  important apps?  To distract from weak or non-existent application-specific optimization capabilities, Riverbed competitors often draw attention to their compression and byte-level data deduplication  features of their product.  But the reality is that just about every WAN optimization product can perform data compression.  What competitor products universally lack is the breadth and diversity of Riverbed's layer-7 optimization capabilities.  The list is quite extensive--SMBv2 (important if you use Windows 7), encrypted MAPI (important for Exchange 2010), Citrix ICA and CGP, Oracle E-business suite (for both JRE and JInitiator), SSL (for encrypted web applications), SRDF (for EMC customers), NFS (for Unix environments), and a number of others.  These capabilities are necessary not only to address latency and protocol chattiness issues, but also data encoding or encryption performed by the application that can hinder the effectiveness of data deduplication algorithms.

2)  Does the product use a universal data store or a per-peer data store? I've commented in past blogs about the importance of the universal data store used in Riverbed Steelhead products.  The reality is that a WAN optimization deployment will not scale with the per-peer data store used by most competitors, and this has been demonstrated in numerous failed WAN optimization deployment attempts, including by many current Riverbed customers who previously attempted to use a different vendor's product.  If you have a large enterprise infrastructure with tens or hundreds of networked remote locations, my suggestion is to not be tempted to believe that you will be the exceptional customer who is skilled-enough to avoid the scaling issues that have afflicted so many other customers.

3)  Is the vendor's products useful for all my requirements?  One vendor may claim they excel in Disaster Recovery applications.  Another might claim their product works better for ICA thin client traffic.  Other vendors specialize in QoS.  Still another might claim they work well in branch office consolidation environments, although they don't have a mobile software client.  The reality is that purchasing from any of these vendors will lead to a fragmented multi-vendor strategy where each vendor product focuses on a narrow set of WAN optimization requirements.  This leads to wasteful and inefficient allocation of management, support, and operational resources.  Riverbed is the only WAN optimization vendor that can comprehensively meet all of your WAN optimization needs, including for QoS, cloud, mobile, data center, branch office, and virtual appliance requirements.

4)  Are other customers happy with the vendor's products?  Competitors are quite eager to make claims of parity or even superiority to Riverbed, but often they are less willing to back up their claims by letting you talk to their other customers.  My suggestion is that before you spend your resources in evaluating and testing any vendor's products, that you first demand to talk to other customers who are happy with those products.  While this very reasonable request might seem to be easy-to-fulfill, the reality is that for many vendors it often is not.

5)  Why is the competitor product cheaper in the first place?  Vendors such as Cisco are known for premium prices.  Cisco's core switching and routing products are not necessarily superior to those from competitors, but customers are accustomed to paying higher prices for them merely because they are purchasing from the dominant equipment vendor.  But in the WAN optimization market, things are different, where Cisco claims their products are the same as Riverbed, except cheaper.  Somehow, there seems to be an inconsistency to this logic.  I believe the key question is this:  if Cisco WAAS products were truly equivalent to those from Riverbed, then would they be cheaper?

Can Cloud Storage Really Work?

Today's guest blogger is Eric Thacker, Riverbed's Director of Storage Product Marketing for our Whitewater (Cloud Storage Accelerator) Appliance.

Earlier in the week, Iron Mountain announced it was “retiring” its public cloud storage service, following in the footsteps of Vaultscape and EMC Atmos Online.  This has created a lot of chatter about whether using the public cloud for storage will really get adopted.  If Iron Mountain, with its brand association with data protection and broad storage customer relationships from its tape vaulting business, can’t make a go of it, is there really hope for anyone else?  Is someone like Nirvanix next?

Well, the fat lady isn’t singing on public cloud storage yet.  In fact, she’s not even in the opera house.  Each of these cases has its own unique conditions that led to the closure of the cloud storage business.  Nirvanix recently announced that it will throw a “lifeline” to IM customers with free data migration and cloud storage for 30 days.  In addition, as you saw in a earlier post here, Riverbed recently announced that we had integrated support for Nirvanix into our Whitewater cloud storage accelerator.  We chose Nirvanix based on customer demand and its unique product offering.   Differentiation and/or scale is key in this sector.  Storage professionals are attracted to the public cloud as long as it meets their needs.  The move to public cloud storage is only just beginning to take hold and looks to have a promising future.  We recently did a webcast with Nirvanix and Wikibon's David Vallante covering cloud storage.  Take a look at it and you’ll get an idea of why matching a solution’s benefits to customer needs is absolutely required to provide a successful cloud storage offering.

Riverbed and the Job Growth Trend

A recent story by US News & World Report spotlights Riverbed as an entrepreneurial company that has demonstrated great job growth.  As an employee that has been around since the early days, I can not only attest to the rapid job growth, but also the quality of employees that work at Riverbed.  Riverbed CEO Jerry Kennelly articulated very nicely what we are not looking for in a Riverbed employee:

"We're not looking for people who want to come into pre-defined, straight-jacketed positions; sit in a cube with their head down quietly; work 8 to 5; take no risks; and have no independent, original thoughts," Kennelly says. "That's the last person we want in this company." 

Riverbed is looking for smart, hard-working, and passionate folks that want to change the world by helping to deliver innovative technology to the market.  Our internal name for this is join the "Riverlution".

Interested in a job at Riverbed?  Please visit the careers section of our website at http://www.riverbed.com/us/careers/index.php

 

Distributed recentralization: Networks to eleven!

It's a sunny Friday morning here in Seattle. (No, really.) On these rare times when prodigious quantities of warmth and light stream through the large south and east windows of my house, it's easy to let the daily fray subside for a bit and reflect on larger trends. Lately, I've noticed some interesting connections between cloud computing and user-centric IT.

A colleague recently spotted a couple articles that piqued my curiosity. In The virtual desktop: Everything old is new again, CRN's Edward Corriea describes how virtualization's initial appearance on mainframes faded away like an old pair of jeans, only to come back in fashion later: first on commodity x86 hardware and then as one of the core components of cloud computing. Next up is desktop virtualization, or VDI. Edward cites VDI's intense I/O requirements as one of the main shortfalls of large-scale VDI deployments. So many virtual clients, each performing profligate I/O itself, create a "VM I/O blender" on the physical hardware: constant random I/O kills disk performance.

In InformationWeek's 2011 End-user Device Survey, Jonathan Feldman chronicles the ongoing consumerization of corporate IT. Provocatively, he wonders whether it makes sense to hang on to the traditional corporate desktop. Android tablets and VDI are both making gains, he writes; yet fat desktops trapped in three-year replacement cycles and tied to expensive PC leases remain prevalent. Not everything is so gloomy, though. SaaS subscriptions are way up and for some organizations speed now trumps features: he's seeing tradeoff of screen size for portability. Jonathan's data show that organizations are now readying for true VDI, too. He goes on to describe how to free up IT funds to support comprehensive mobile device management, including the burgeoning BYOD ("bring your own device") movement. Jonathan concludes with sage advice: "The end user device paradigm shift offers significant opportunities for business technology innovation, but you'll miss out if you're purely focusing on span of control and defensive IT."

Reading these articles reminded me about a presentation on virtualization security I delivered at Microsoft TechEd a few years ago. I began that talk, as I frequently do, with a short retrospective. The "operating system" running on that hulking PC you bought in the late 1980s didn't have a whole lot to worry about: how much damage can one user running one application really cause? Eventually the operating system had to mature: first to enforce application boundaries so that multitasking would work, then to enforce user boundaries so that multiple people could share a computer. When hardware became powerful enough, software technology shifted: a hypervisor along with a finely-tuned host OS enforced guest OS boundaries so that multiple environments could share a server. A simple visual progression of these trust boundaries might look like this:

At this point, you might be wondering: "What's this got to do with user-centric IT and, wait, doesn't Riverbed sell network stuff?" Let me link these seemingly disparate elements together.

Virtualization is, of course, one of the fundamental technologies that underlie cloud -- providers can crank resource utilization to 11.  But a funny thing happened along the way to the user-centric IT concert: while the cloud offers seemingly infinite compute and storage, people learned the bandwidth to get there isn't all unicorns and rainbows. That phone or tablet of yours is a full-fledged computer, roomy and always connected. It's likely to be your primary means of accessing (and secondary means of storing) work-related stuff. The trends Edward and Jon highlight -- more VDI, more BYOD, more SaaS, more mobility -- all require network capacities that are expensive to build out and bump into inconvenient laws of physics.

We're entering an era I call distributed recentralization. As I ponder the simultaneous emergence of cloud computing and the move toward IT consumerization, it occurs to me that each one contributes to the sudden and continual growth of the other. We humans are creating and consuming massive amounts of data every day, a lot of it with consumer-type devices. Much of that information gets sent to and redistributed from the cloud. All this activity puts enormous pressures on network links -- pressures that often can't be overcome just by buying a bigger pipe.

We're passionate about WANs at Riverbed. WANs allow people to create, access, store, and compute information wherever it's convenient to do so -- frequently at distance. Our expanding product line enables you to be as creative as you can be without worrying about network or storage constraints. Cloud and consumerization certainly don't imply that IT will become a commodity; indeed, the information an organization possess, and how it manipulates and shares that information, truly are competitive differentiators. Let us help you crank your differentiation to 11.

The Wonderful World of Wireshark

Our guest blogger today is Yoav Eilat, the Director of Product Marketing for Riverbed's Cascade Products.

This week, Riverbed sponsored a series of seminars about Wireshark in 4 cities in the U.S. (Tampa, San Antonio, Denver, and Falls Church, Virginia). Our speaker is Laura Chappell, a legend in the network analysis world, who regularly draws large audiences to her seminars.

Riverbed became the corporate sponsor of Wireshark as part of the acquisition of CACE Technologies back in October, when the CACE commercial products (Shark and Pilot) became part of the Riverbed Cascade product line. This gave us an opportunity to meet some of the biggest names in the network analysis world, including Gerald Combs and Loris Degioanni who now work at Riverbed. It’s just striking to see the large community around Wireshark and all the different ways that people use it to solve performance and security problems.

The most entertaining part of Laura’s seminar is to see how networking products reflect the nature of the vendors that make them. Armed with a packet analyzer, Laura can see which vendors care about Internet standards and which don’t… which Web browser is the most efficient… or which smartphone relentlessly grabs resources on Wi-Fi networks. As she keeps saying, “the packets never lie.” (Just for the record, Riverbed’s products don’t lie, either!)

If you’re interested in network analysis and visibility, make sure to check out Sharkfest, the annual Wireshark user conference being held June 13-16, 2011 at Stanford University. The event is also sponsored by Riverbed and will feature many great speakers from the networking world.

 

Making cloud storage a little less scary

You see it everywhere tech surveys are posted - people love the idea of cloud, but the implementation is sometimes a little too scary for many enterprises.

One of the issues that is often raised is that of vendor lock-in. Given that cloud is so new, customers either want the ability to multi-source cloud or quickly change cloud vendors without upending their entire IT delivery process.

With Riverbed's latest announcement about the Whitewater product family, I guess you could say we're doing our part to make cloud storage services a little more friendly to enterprises everywhere. First and foremost, we have added the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network to our list of supported cloud storage providers. That means we have a new, high performance, global platform of cloud storage data centers that customers can tap into as needed. Nirvanix - welcome to the Riverbed family of partners!

We also announced support for additional front-end backup software.  EMC NetWorker, CA ARCserve, and Quest vRanger Backup Tools are now supported in addition to Symantec NetBackup, BackupExec, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. That means customers can start to leverage cloud with the software they already have in place, and don't have to change or adjust software based on the cloud that they choose. Moreover, if they decide to change backup software, they don't have to worry about their cloud strategy changing.

It's the combination of flexible cloud storage accelerators with market-leading partners like Nirvanix that we believe will drive cloud to be a reality for organizations everywhere. This announcement is one step in the right direction to make the implementation of cloud as appealing as the idea of it.

 

 

Using the Cloud to Solve Problems

Today's guest blogger is Philip O'Toole, a member of our Cloud Steelhead Engineering Team, who called me a few weeks ago with this great story.  I encouraged him to blog about it.  It really demonstrates the ease-of-use and flexibility of cloud computing.

The recently-launched Riverbed Cloud Portal is a web service, allowing for simplified deployment, easy management, licensing, and instant upgrades of the new Cloud Steelhead. Hosting the Portal itself in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud allowed us to streamline deployment and management of the Portal, significantly shortening our time-to-market, while still allowing us to meet our needs for reliability and security.

Like most modern web services, the Portal is backed by a database. And like most databases, the schema sometimes needs modification. We use an open source tool to help with database migrations, and generally it works very well. However, early during development we had an interesting experience which really showed the Portal team the power of the Cloud when it comes to collaborative development.

One day the migration tool started acting up, reporting errors in a low-level part of the code, and in a manner that seemed quite specific to our environment. I was sufficiently familiar with the tool to know that something fundamental seemed to be wrong, so I e-mailed the tool's developer. He agreed it was very strange, that the root cause was not obvious, and had some questions for me.

Normally the process would go something like this:

• He sends me an e-mail asking me to run a test.
• I run it (perhaps I don't run it quite right, and he needs to ask me again).
• I send him the results. 
• Lather, rinse, and repeat.
• We go back and forth for a week or more until we finally determine the root cause.

Most developers have been there at some point -- it can be long, slow, process working with a developer in another country, across timezones, both of you trying to resolve an issue like this. Often it occurs late in the development cycle, close to a release, when time is most precious.

This is where the public Cloud came to the rescue. If occurred to me that if I could reproduce the issue in an EC2 Instance (i.e. a virtual machine) in the AWS Cloud, I could then simply turn the VM over to him and let him debug it himself. After all, it's a public Cloud.

It was easy since we've got lots of these virtual machines up and running for development and testing. I fired up a scrubbed VM (so it had nothing proprietary), added access to the VM from source IP addresses outside of Riverbed (access to the VMs is locked down by default -- security is always a critical consideration), reproduced the error, and then sent him the DNS name and credentials for the VM. He logged in, quickly identified the root cause, and showed me how the VM could be patched to address the issue.

As a result, we had our fix in less than a day, and I could implement it on our real systems. It struck me how easy it was to collaborate on this issue, when I could recreate a machine with the problem, and then turn it over to the tool creator who lives in England. The developer has even committed the fix to the product's publicly available source, so it's a win for everyone.

It was a very interesting process -- obvious perhaps, but I had to experience it to really understand the advantages of this use of a public cloud. After all, as any developer or system engineer knows, nothing is worse than having to ship physical hardware somewhere just so someone can work hands-on with the problematic system.

SNW Spring Opens Today in Santa Clara

Computerworld's Storage Networking World show opens today at the Santa Clara, CA, Convention Center.  (If I were going, I wouldn't miss Steve Wozniak's keynote...!)

When you think of storage infrastructure companies, you might not think of Riverbed, but in fact, we'll be all over SNW.

In addition to our booth in the exhibition hall, our customer, Pump Solutions Group (PSG) will present a case study on the benefits the company since they began accelerating and deduplicating their cloud-based backups with Riverbed's Whitewater Appliance.

There will also be a presentation from Riverbed Technical Leader Steve Riley and Technical Director Josh Tseng (both of whom are regular guest bloggers in this space) on the benefits of acceleration in cloud computing and cloud storage environments.

Traditionally, Riverbed's space has been networking, but with the increasingly wide adoption of cloud computing, the lines between networking and storage technologies have blurred (blurring than was started by SAN several years ago, and has continued to this day).  We've been able to take our expertise in WAN Optimization and apply it to storage. 

Our Steelhead appliances can make a huge difference in replication speeds and times, and our Whitewater appliance has made it safe and realistic to do daily full backups out to a cloud storage provider. 

If you're going to be at SNW in Santa Clara, please make sure you stop by our booth and talk to some of our folks about what we can do to better protect your critical data and get those backups done in less time, while making it easy and quick to restore the data.

April Fish (Poisson d'Avril)

There is always something special about this day when winter turns to spring and everyone is ready for a little lighthearted celebration. Believed to have started in the late 1500’s, April Fool's Day has gained international fame as people had fun sending someone on a "fool's errand," looking for things that don't exist, playing pranks, and trying to get people to believe ridiculous things.

The concept of April Fools’ Day in Western World is has many parallels on other calendars from around the world, including:

• The Festival of Hilaria in Rome
• In Scotland, April Fools' Day is traditionally called Hunt-the-Gowk Day ("gowk" is Scots for a cuckoo or a foolish person), although this name has fallen into disuse.
• Iranians play jokes on each other on the 13th day of the Persian new year (Norouz), which falls on April 1 or April 2. This day, celebrated as far back as 536 BC, is called Sizdah Bedar
• In Denmark, the 1st of May is known as "Maj-kat", meaning "May-cat", and is historically identical to April Fools' Day. However, Danes also celebrate April Fools' Day ("aprilsnar"), and pranks on May 1st are much less frequent.
• In Poland, Prima aprilis ("April 1" in Latin) is a day full of jokes; various hoaxes are prepared by people, media (which sometimes cooperate to make the "information" more credible) and even public institutions.
• And there's Poisson d’Avril (April Fish) in France and French-speaking Canada.  This is also widespread in other nations, such as Italy, where the term Pesce d'aprile (literally "April's fish") is also used to refer to any jokes done during the day.

(with thanks to Wikipedia)

My personal favorite is Poisson d’Avril where French children tape a picture of a fish on the back of their schoolmates and cry “Poisson d’Avril” when the prank is discovered.

So in the spirit of our Steelhead heritage I encourage everyone to have a little April Fish fun and see how many people you can tag with a fish.  We encourage you to post your pictures in the comments below.

And, by the way, if you're curious about Riverbed history and the story of the Steelhead name, you should know that we chose Steelhead for our first product name because it is the most prized trout that a fisherman can catch.  The name captures the spirit of the company which is centered on strength, pride, agility and tenacity.

Have a great day today and beware of the Fool’s errand!

ɥsıɟ lıɹdɐ ɹo lıɹʌɐ,p uossıod

¡puɐɹɹǝ s’looɟ ǝɥʇ ɟo ǝɹɐʍǝq puɐ ʎɐpoʇ ʎɐp ʇɐǝɹƃ ɐ ǝʌɐɥ

˙ʎʇıɔɐuǝʇ puɐ ʎʇılıƃɐ 'ǝpıɹd 'ɥʇƃuǝɹʇs uo pǝɹǝʇuǝɔ sı ɥɔıɥʍ ʎuɐdɯoɔ ǝɥʇ ɟo ʇıɹıds ǝɥʇ sǝɹnʇdɐɔ ǝɯɐu ǝɥʇ  ˙ɥɔʇɐɔ uɐɔ uɐɯɹǝɥsıɟ ɐ ʇɐɥʇ ʇnoɹʇ pǝzıɹd ʇsoɯ ǝɥʇ sı ʇı ǝsnɐɔǝq ǝɯɐu ʇɔnpoɹd ʇsɹıɟ ɹno ɹoɟ pɐǝɥlǝǝʇs ǝsoɥɔ ǝʍ ʇɐɥʇ ʍouʞ plnoɥs noʎ 'ǝɯɐu pɐǝɥlǝǝʇs ǝɥʇ ɟo ʎɹoʇs ǝɥʇ puɐ ʎɹoʇsıɥ pǝqɹǝʌıɹ ʇnoqɐ snoıɹnɔ ǝɹ,noʎ ɟı 'ʎɐʍ ǝɥʇ ʎq 'puɐ

˙ʍolǝq sʇuǝɯɯoɔ ǝɥʇ uı sǝɹnʇɔıd ɹnoʎ ʇsod oʇ noʎ ǝƃɐɹnoɔuǝ ǝʍ  ˙ɥsıɟ ɐ ɥʇıʍ ƃɐʇ uɐɔ noʎ ǝldoǝd ʎuɐɯ ʍoɥ ǝǝs puɐ unɟ ɥsıɟ lıɹdɐ ǝlʇʇıl ɐ ǝʌɐɥ oʇ ǝuoʎɹǝʌǝ ǝƃɐɹnoɔuǝ ı ǝƃɐʇıɹǝɥ pɐǝɥlǝǝʇs ɹno ɟo ʇıɹıds ǝɥʇ uı os

˙pǝɹǝʌoɔsıp sı ʞuɐɹd ǝɥʇ uǝɥʍ ”lıɹʌɐ’p uossıod“ ʎɹɔ puɐ sǝʇɐɯlooɥɔs ɹıǝɥʇ ɟo ʞɔɐq ǝɥʇ uo ɥsıɟ ɐ ɟo ǝɹnʇɔıd ɐ ǝdɐʇ uǝɹplıɥɔ ɥɔuǝɹɟ ǝɹǝɥʍ lıɹʌɐ’p uossıod sı ǝʇıɹoʌɐɟ lɐuosɹǝd ʎɯ

(ɐıpǝdıʞıʍ oʇ sʞuɐɥʇ ɥʇıʍ)

˙ʎɐp ǝɥʇ ƃuıɹnp ǝuop sǝʞoɾ ʎuɐ oʇ ɹǝɟǝɹ oʇ pǝsn oslɐ sı (,,ɥsıɟ s,lıɹdɐ,, ʎllɐɹǝʇıl) ǝlıɹdɐ,p ǝɔsǝd ɯɹǝʇ ǝɥʇ ǝɹǝɥʍ 'ʎlɐʇı sɐ ɥɔns 'suoıʇɐu ɹǝɥʇo uı pɐǝɹdsǝpıʍ oslɐ sı sıɥʇ  ˙ɐpɐuɐɔ ƃuıʞɐǝds-ɥɔuǝɹɟ puɐ ǝɔuɐɹɟ uı (ɥsıɟ lıɹdɐ) lıɹʌɐ’p uossıod s,ǝɹǝɥʇ puɐ -
˙suoıʇnʇıʇsuı ɔılqnd uǝʌǝ puɐ (ǝlqıpǝɹɔ ǝɹoɯ ,,uoıʇɐɯɹoɟuı,, ǝɥʇ ǝʞɐɯ oʇ ǝʇɐɹǝdooɔ sǝɯıʇǝɯos ɥɔıɥʍ) ɐıpǝɯ 'ǝldoǝd ʎq pǝɹɐdǝɹd ǝɹɐ sǝxɐoɥ snoıɹɐʌ ؛sǝʞoɾ ɟo llnɟ ʎɐp ɐ sı (uıʇɐl uı ,,⇂ lıɹdɐ,,) sılıɹdɐ ɐɯıɹd 'puɐlod uı -
˙ʇuǝnbǝɹɟ ssǝl ɥɔnɯ ǝɹɐ ʇs⇂ ʎɐɯ uo sʞuɐɹd puɐ '(,,ɹɐuslıɹdɐ,,) ʎɐp ,slooɟ lıɹdɐ ǝʇɐɹqǝlǝɔ oslɐ sǝuɐp 'ɹǝʌǝʍoɥ ˙ʎɐp ,slooɟ lıɹdɐ oʇ lɐɔıʇuǝpı ʎllɐɔıɹoʇsıɥ sı puɐ ',,ʇɐɔ-ʎɐɯ,, ƃuıuɐǝɯ ',,ʇɐʞ-ɾɐɯ,, sɐ uʍouʞ sı ʎɐɯ ɟo ʇs⇂ ǝɥʇ 'ʞɹɐɯuǝp uı -
ɹɐpǝq ɥɐpzıs pǝllɐɔ sı 'ɔq 9ᄐގ sɐ ʞɔɐq ɹɐɟ sɐ pǝʇɐɹqǝlǝɔ 'ʎɐp sıɥʇ ˙ᄅ lıɹdɐ ɹo ⇂ lıɹdɐ uo sllɐɟ ɥɔıɥʍ '(znoɹou) ɹɐǝʎ ʍǝu uɐısɹǝd ǝɥʇ ɟo ʎɐp ɥʇᄐ⇂ ǝɥʇ uo ɹǝɥʇo ɥɔɐǝ uo sǝʞoɾ ʎɐld suɐıuɐɹı -
˙ǝsnsıp oʇuı uǝllɐɟ sɐɥ ǝɯɐu sıɥʇ ɥƃnoɥʇlɐ '(uosɹǝd ɥsılooɟ ɐ ɹo ooʞɔnɔ ɐ ɹoɟ sʇoɔs sı ,,ʞʍoƃ,,) ʎɐp ʞʍoƃ-ǝɥʇ-ʇunɥ pǝllɐɔ ʎllɐuoıʇıpɐɹʇ sı ʎɐp ,slooɟ lıɹdɐ 'puɐlʇoɔs uı -
ǝɯoɹ uı ɐıɹɐlıɥ ɟo lɐʌıʇsǝɟ ǝɥʇ -

:ƃuıpnlɔuı 'plɹoʍ ǝɥʇ punoɹɐ ɯoɹɟ sɹɐpuǝlɐɔ ɹǝɥʇo uo slǝllɐɹɐd ʎuɐɯ sɐɥ sı plɹoʍ uɹǝʇsǝʍ uı ʎɐp ’slooɟ lıɹdɐ ɟo ʇdǝɔuoɔ ǝɥʇ

˙sƃuıɥʇ snolnɔıpıɹ ǝʌǝılǝq oʇ ǝldoǝd ʇǝƃ oʇ ƃuıʎɹʇ puɐ 'sʞuɐɹd ƃuıʎɐld 'ʇsıxǝ ʇ,uop ʇɐɥʇ sƃuıɥʇ ɹoɟ ƃuıʞool ,,'puɐɹɹǝ s,looɟ,, ɐ uo ǝuoǝɯos ƃuıpuǝs unɟ pɐɥ ǝldoǝd sɐ ǝɯɐɟ lɐuoıʇɐuɹǝʇuı pǝuıɐƃ sɐɥ ʎɐp s,looɟ lıɹdɐ 's’00ގ⇂ ǝʇɐl ǝɥʇ uı pǝʇɹɐʇs ǝʌɐɥ oʇ pǝʌǝılǝq ˙uoıʇɐɹqǝlǝɔ pǝʇɹɐǝɥʇɥƃıl ǝlʇʇıl ɐ ɹoɟ ʎpɐǝɹ sı ǝuoʎɹǝʌǝ puɐ ƃuıɹds oʇ suɹnʇ ɹǝʇuıʍ uǝɥʍ ʎɐp sıɥʇ ʇnoqɐ lɐıɔǝds ƃuıɥʇǝɯos sʎɐʍlɐ sı ǝɹǝɥʇ