Today's guest blogger is Laura Padilla, Riverbed's Marketing Director, National and Global Resellers.
Yes, I know the thought of Microsoft and Amazon Web Services collaborating seems like a sci-fi movie in the vein of War of the Worlds, but Microsoft has announced a program, called License Mobility through Software Assurance, which allows partners and customers to more easily deploy current on-premises Microsoft Server application workloads on Amazon Web Services, without any additional Microsoft software license fees. This License Mobility program allows users to employ Windows Server applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Standard Edition, SQL Enterprise Edition, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server, Lync Server, and Systems Center servers, to deploy AWS cloud-based solutions.
Riverbed is also working with both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to overcome bandwidth constraints, latency, and application performance which are all considerations when moving to the cloud. If you are looking to deploy your Microsoft Applications in Amazon's EC2, don’t miss reading how Riverbed’s WAN optimization can overcome application and network performance challenges, accelerate the process of migrating data to and from the cloud, and improve access to that data from anywhere. Lucky for you that Riverbed’s own Steve Riley, former AWS Evangelist, has crafted an informative white paper on this exact topic!
OK, it took us a little longer than we wanted to get to it, but we are pleased to announce that the winner of the Riverbed Storytellers Contest for June is Michael Vassallo of Dancker Sellew and Douglas (DS&D). DS&D is a 180-year-old firm, with offices in the New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia area, that specializes in office furniture, trading desks, lab equipment, classroom and healthcare furniture— as well as services including logistics, office planning and office furniture installation.
Michael is DS&D's Senior Network Administrator which really means that he manages the WAN, LAN, SAN, WiFi, Servers, Desktops, and so on. He reports that they use them for "everything" but the bulk of the traffic that flows through them is MAPI email, CIFS, SAN replication, and AppAssure Replication.
Michael says, "If it were not for the optimization that the Riverbed appliances provide, instead of minutes we would be looking at hours or days to complete transfers and would be severely behind the 8-ball."
In his winning story entitled "Just Can't Do It, Or Does It?", Michael wrote about how at first glance it looks like the Steelhead appliances aren't actually doing anything for his network. Then he shows us a different set of data that makes it quite clear that the Steelheads are reducing bandwidth by as much as 98%.
If you'd like to learn more about DS&D's implementation of Steelheads, please check out Michael's video (below) from 2010. And remember, The Riverbed Storytellers Contest is ongoing. Please enter the contest! We'd love to share your story with the world!
First, we have Chris Pinckney, the CIO at Psomas, a civil engineering firm. His firm, a long time Steelhead Appliance customer, has recently introduced Riverbed Whitewater to eliminate tapes from their backup routine. Psomas moved their backups into the storage cloud, a move which has resulted in faster backups and quicker restores. They have also been able to improve service to their remote and mobile workers.
Our other customer testimonial comes from Livio Arleo of MTN Satellite Communications. His company employs Steelhead Appliances to accelerate satellite-based communications to cruise ships. Satellite communications are notoriously slow because of the extreme latency that they can introduce. Steelheads can make a huge difference in performance over any WAN, but particularly over satellite links.
It’s 3am, you are putting the finishing touches on your latest deployment of a virtual appliance via Riverbed Services Platform, and your shining glory is Checkpoint Firewall in a remote branch.You’re going to sleep much better at night knowing that your little branch computers are sleeping safe at night with a big bad firewall protecting it.You have the firewall running, you are able to ping the management interface, and you are preparing to put the device inline, but....
You think, “if I put the firewall inline, how am I going to put both interfaces in at the same time.I sure am glad I thought about this because I was just about to blackhole this site.”Now you think to yourself, how am I going to get this firewall inline, without being behind the firewall?
Well, your 3am friend is the job command.Job is a CLI command that invokes the Scheduler within the Steelhead.There isn’t a GUI equivalent for this, but don’t be scared, this is an easy command to master.The syntax of the jobs command is as follows:
sh#(config)job number command number “command”
sh#(config)job number date-time hh:mm:ss
One of the biggest benefits of the job command is that it runs locally, and it will run multiple commands from a single command line entry.So in our example we would have to run two commands to put a virtual server inline on RSP.So the command sequence that we would execute would be:
Let’s review what we just did.The first job command inserts the LAN side interface into the virtual network data flow, and the second command inserts the WAN side interface, the third job enables the job for execution.
To actually run the job we’ll issue:
sh#job 1 execute
One of my other favorite uses for the job command is to create time-based QoS.In the particular instance that is coming to mind, I had a client that needed to limit replication traffic on a shared link during the day, but after 6pm, they wanted it to run full on.At 7am they wanted to return bandwidth restrictions.Using job, I was able to create a QoS rule that activated at 6pm and then returned back to a restricted state at the prescribed time.
So the next time you're up at 3am, get your friend to do the job, so you can get some sleep!
Department at Riverbed: Sales – Business Development
Age: 18
Hometown: Palo Alto, CA
School: Boston University
Interests/hobbies: I did a lot of theater in high school but not so much in college, I’m really interested in fashion
Have you interned at Riverbed before?
Yes, I worked in recruiting two years ago, I learned a lot about the hiring process, which is really helpful with making my own resume
What projects are you working on currently?
I’m doing a lot of work with Salesforce, mostly building out accounts, which means finding people in the company who we should be calling to try to sell them our product
What are you hoping to learn at your time at riverbed this summer?
I’m hoping to learn about how sales are made, and about the whole corporate sales process.
I’m happy to be part of such a great team in sales here at Riverbed and I’m excited to learn as much as I can this summer.
Sabrina Siu
Department at Riverbed: Recruiting
Age: 18
School: University of Southern California
Interests/hobbies: Films, Music & Concerts, Reading, Soccer, My two dogs
Have you interned at Riverbed before?
This is my first year interning at Riverbed and I think this is a great experience so far. I get a first-hand experience working in recruiting and I think this is a great way to get a feel for working in a business environment.
What projects are you working on?
I’m currently working in university recruiting where I have been researching all aspects and logistics behind Riverbed’s campus visits. I have done a lot of planning, registering, and scheduling for events such as career fairs, info sessions, and campus interviews on campus for the upcoming school year.
What are you hoping to learn at your time at riverbed this summer?
I’m hoping to learn as much as I can here at Riverbed. I think it’s great to learn about different careers and opportunities, and I have learned so much about the recruiting process behind acquiring candidates from universities.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
I will have graduated from university and since I do not know exactly where my career will end up at this moment in time, I hope to be working in an industry I love and have a wonderful career ahead of me.
Interests/hobbies: I love field hockey, hot yoga, running, traveling and spending time at the beach!
Have you interned at Riverbed before?
I have never interned at Riverbed Technology before. I had heard a lot of great things about the community at Riverbed and its true everyone is so friendly and helpful.
What projects are you working on?
I have been working on the Marketing assets for all the Sales Kickoffs (Athens, Singapore, and San Diego). I have done a lot of research trying to update the photograph for the homepage on the Riverbed website. In addition, I have done research on LinkedIn gold accounts. Riverbed is starting a career opportunities page on Linked In and would like to maximize the value of that investment.
What are you hoping to learn at your time at Riverbed this summer?
I am hoping to gain a lot of knowledge about careers in marketing. This will help me decide what I want to study in college and what I want to do with my future.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Hopefully in five years I will have graduated from college. After college I plan on going on to grad school or starting a career for myself.
As for now, I hope to enjoy and explore San Francisco! It has been a great experience living in a new city and I plan on taking complete advantage of all it has to offer!
School: I am going to be a senior at Half moon Bay High School
Hobbies/interests: I play volleyball for my high school and a club team called Vision, I love to ski every winter (preferably in KIRKWOOD!!!) I love going to the beach and swimming in the ocean, and occasionally surfing, and I love watching football and basketball.
Have you interned at Riverbed before?
This is my first year working at Riverbed Technology, and I love it! The recruiting team has been absolutely amazing and incredibly nice. They don’t hesitate to help with anything I need.
What projects have you been working on?
I have been working on singling out potential candidates on LinkedIn as well as contacting them about job openings at Riverbed Technology. I have also had the chance to schedule on-site interviews for some candidates and inputting some resumes into Trovix.
What are you hoping to learn during your time at Riverbed?
I am hoping to learn more about the business world, and what it is like to have a real 9-5 job in the city since I have never had a job previous to this internship.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
I see myself at a college on the east coast probably majoring in some form of engineering or mathematics, maybe pre-med.
I just want to say a huge THANK YOU to my dad, Dave Peranich, for giving me the opportunity to participate in this internship this summer!!
I am often asked how Cascade differentiates itself from various other network performance management products. While there are a number of features and core capabilities unique to Cascade, I believe it is the drill-down capability that really sets Cascade apart. It's hard to demonstrate this capability in a blog post, but I thought I would start with an analogy and take you through a typical drill-down sequence using screen shots.
Let's start with the analogy. Cascade's ability to start from a business level, top-down view is like starting with Google Maps and getting a bird's eye view of the area in question.
The next step is that you can drill-down with a simple mouse click.
Another mouse click and you are able to zoom further into the area.
Using a seamless workflow and only a few clicks you get to the specific point that you were looking for.
Cascade's top-down drill-down capability is just like having Google Maps for your network. Let's look at a real-world sequence.
So there you have it. With Cascade's powerful top-level drill-down capability, you start with an executive level dashboard view and can drill down effortlessly to the source of the problem all the way down to the packet sequence that was causing the problem.
I would love to hear from Cascade customers about how they use drill-down to discover and resolve network and application performance problems.
Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT performance company, today announced that it has acquired Aptimize Limited, a privately-owned company that is a market leader in web content optimization. The Aptimize organization, based in Wellington, New Zealand, will become the new Web Content Optimization product group, led by the former CEO of Aptimize, Ed Robinson. Riverbed® also announced today the acquisition of Zeus Technology, a privately-owned company that delivers high-performance software-based load balancing and traffic management solutions for virtual and cloud environments. The acquisitions of the two companies will form the cornerstone of Riverbed’s asymmetric optimization strategy.
It's a natural transition for us for so many reasons to add these technologies to our portfolio. At the end of the day, customers have come to rely on Riverbed to solve their performance problems for any application over any network. They don't necessarily care what tool they use - a WOC, an ADC, or NPM - just so long as their businesses can operate the way they need to.
Zeus and Aptimize make sense because they have created software the way application owners and devops teams want to consume application delivery - and build it right into the application stack. They are designed to be deployed into modern public and private clouds, unlike much of the legacy hardware ADCs that are sold today.
With Zeus and Aptimize, customers will get faster, more reliable, more secure Web applications, regardless of whether they are consumer facing or behind the firewall. We look forward to sharing this new technology with you in the coming days!
Riverbed and EMC are coming to a city near you! Starting today, in Chicago, you can meet with WAN optimization and data protection experts from Riverbed at EMC Forum events, and learn how to effectively and efficiently protect your data in private, public and hybrid clouds environments. At these day-long events, you will experience keynotes, breakouts and exhibits – all focused on addressing performance for managing your data in the cloud. Riverbed executives will discuss how WAN optimization plays a critical role in a data backup cloud infrastructure, off-site data security, lowered data protection costs, optimized storage utilization and lowered TCO from automation, as well as demonstrate integrated Riverbed and EMC solutions for data protection and backup to the cloud.
Today's blog is from Philip O'Toole, an engineer on our Cloud Steelhead development team, based in San Francisco.
Riverbed runs a unique program for its development and test engineers -- every so often it sends us to some exotic, faraway places. While there we can sample the local cuisine, see the sites, and enjoy better weather than that in San Francisco. All we have to do is install cutting edge software on our selected customers' appliances on-site, giving them early access to our latest features. :-)
Could life be really this good at Riverbed? Well, it's certainly good for our customers -- and it's all thanks to the Riverbed Advanced Access Program (RAAP). Before Riverbed release a new version of the RiOS software, several engineers go on-site with a pre-selected customer and install the pre-release code on their appliances. We discuss the new features with the customer, test it in their network, and return with their feedback to our colleagues at headquarters.
I've always been quite impressed with the program. It keeps us engineers in touch with the customers, shows us the strengths of our products in the field, and points out the areas needing improvement.
It also teaches us Development engineers to think about the product holistically -- which was an explicit goal of the program when it was first devised. We can get very involved with a single part of the new software, sometimes losing perspective. The RAAP helps us to design better products when we are reminded that Riverbed needs to sell a solution, not just a box running some clever software.
Our customers get significant direct benefit from the program too. In my experience they admire the quality of our products, so are interested in talking to the developers and testers. Just as we can learn something from them, they can gain new insight on how WAN optimization works -- and that makes them more effective in their own roles.
So if you're interested in getting a sneak-peek at our next release, sign up for the RAAP at:
For that matter, could Sir Edmund Hillary have scaled Mt. Everest without his trusty sherpa Tenzing Norgay? What would Led Zeppelin sound like if Jimmy Page and Robert Plant didn't have the rhythm section of John Paul Jones and John Bonham? The list goes on and on....
So what do these rhetorical questions have to do with WAN optimization and Riverbed? Well the point I am trying to make is: in order to build the next gen enterprise data center, you not only need Steelheads but a supporting cast of products like the Interceptor and the Central Management Console (CMC), not to mention the visbility and performance management provided by Cascade.
The Interceptor is a Steelhead-aware load balancer for large clustered deployments, and the CMC is a consolidated management appliance that provides a single pane of glass view for your entire Steelhead, Steelhead Mobile Controller and Interceptor deployment.
The Interceptor and CMC play a vital part in allowing for the scale and performance of WAN optimization deployments at the data center. It's not just about DC-DC replication traffic or consolidating multiple remote offices, but its doing both concurrently!
The latest releases of the Interceptor 3.0 & CMC together bring :
Higher throughput of up to 40Gbps for clustered Steelhead deployments
Management of up to 2000 Steelheads from a single console (..and before you ask, yes, we do have deployments that run into thousands of appliances)
Improved load balancing algorithms to distribute connections based on the health of Steelheads - taking into account not only number of connections, but also the type of load. DC replication vs user connections for instance.
See what I mean? Sure Roger Waters parted ways with Pink Floyd, but neither faction could really recapture the masterpiece that was Dark Side of the Moon now could they?
Today's guest blogger is Matt Berry. Matt is an Systems Engineer for Riverbed based in Australia.
If you read the Steelhead user guide, with all its glorious detail on each protocol, it may look a little tricky to get everything in place to optimize encrypted MAPI traffic – especially in a Windows 7 / 2008 R2 domain where Kerberos has now trumped NTLM as the default authentication method.
Well I’m here to tell you that if you follow my simple checklist below, it’s actually pretty easy to get back that glorious, wind-in-your-hair MAPI acceleration that you knew and loved in the days before encryption came into fashion. In case you’re losing sleep wondering how it happened, Outlook 2k3 could always encrypt MAPI, but it was Outlook 2k7 that stealthily auto-enabled MAPI encryption without telling anyone. Well nobody told me anyway.
Anyway, I better first explain “Delegation mode” so the next part makes sense. Essentially a plain old user account in your Domain, that’s one without admin rights, will be given the authority to work on the encrypted MAPI traffic on behalf of the end MAPI users. This “delegate” account in Active Directory then gives you full control over which servers and for which protocols (MAPI, CIFS, etc) delegation is permitted.
So here’s a summary of the steps required on your Data Centre Steelhead(s), with a few troubleshooting tips along the way:
NTP: Point the Steelhead at your NTP Server (preferably a Domain Controller or at least the one the DC uses)
DNS: Add the Steelhead’s Hostname and Primary IP address to Forward and Reverse lookup zones on the DC.
Tip: Find a PC on the network and use “nslookup <steelhead_hostsname>” and “nslookup <primary_IP_address> to ensure each resolves correctly to the other.
Tip: Ensure the Steelhead has a DNS server (usually the Windows DC) and a DNS search domain defined in Configure › Networking › Host Settings.
Join the Domain: Create a “Computer” account in AD for the Steelhead, then go to Configure › Networking › Windows Domainand follow the steps here to Join the Windows domain.
Tip: If the Steelhead is having issues finding the DC, SSH to the Data Centre Steelhead and ping the fully qualified domain name e.g. “ping lab.demo.com” and ensure a) it resolves correctly and b) is reachable from the Steelhead’s Primary interface. You should also see useful errors appearing on the “Configure › Networking › Windows Domain” page if your join fails.
Add a Delegate User: Create a new user in AD e.g. “mapi_delegate_user” , then assign the MAPI service principle name (SPN) to that user e.g. c:\> setspn.exe -A mapi/delegate mapi_delegate_user
Add “exchangeMDB”: In Windows, select properties for “mapi_delegate_user” and go to the Delegation tab. Add just one Exchange server with the exchangeMDB service.
Add the Delegate User to the Steelhead: On the Steelhead under “Configure › Optimization › Windows Domain Auth”, add the Delegate user account details and select “Auto Delegation Mode”. This will allow the Steelhead to auto-update the mapi_delegate_user AD object with other Exchange servers that require optimisation.
Enable MAPI Encryption: On the Data Centre and Branch Steelheads, Under Configure › Optimization › MAPI, simply tick the box to Enable Encrypted Optimization and select Delegation mode.
And that’s it. The Steelheads will now optimize Encrypted MAPI traffic!
Now if you need screenshots or more detail on any of the steps above, grab the “Steelhead Management Console Users Guide” from https://support.riverbed.com and look for Windows Domain Auth in Chapter 4, and Joining a Windows Domain in chapter 7.
Those of you who remember the browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape in the 1990's may remember that browsers always seemed to be named after SUV's (think Ford Explorer and Lincoln Navigator). If you use Riverbed Cascade, you might be wondering what its components are named after. I think I found the answer: vacuum cleaners!
Let's start with Shark - I noticed this one in a store a few days ago:
As every Cascade customer knows, Shark is not complete without Pilot.
The next one reminds me of Cascade Profiler - did we just forget the letter r?
No issues with the next one - Sensor is simply Sensor. I took this picture at a hotel recently.
And finally... a vacuum cleaner that represents the entire product line:
So there you have it... Next time you want to suck all the performance problems out of your network, look at the nearest vacuum cleaner for inspiration!
Department at Riverbed: Human Resources/Employee Services, Recruiting Department
Age: 17
School: West Linn High School, Class of 2012
Interests/hobbies: Cheerleading, Dance, Watching sports; especially football! (Go Raiders and Longhorns!), spending time with family, running, cooking, and camping!
Have you interned at Riverbed before? How do you feel about joining the riverbed team?
I have not been an intern at Riverbed Technology before, this is my first year! So far, it has been such a great experience. I love the people I work with, the material I’ve been working on, and the environment here at Riverbed!
What projects are you working on?
I’ve been using Trovix and LinkedIn to search and enter profiles and resumes of candidates. More recently, I’ve been researching different departments, finding 1-2 jobs within each department, and finding ways and resources to recruit for those positions! Also, I’ve sat in on multiple interviews, observing the interviewing process.
What are you hoping to learn at your time at riverbed this summer?
I am hoping to learn skills within the recruiting process, and well as human resources/employee services. I’m also interested and excited to learn about the environment and people here at Riverbed Technology!
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
In five years, I am hoping to be graduated from college and working towards a career! I know that my experience in the recruiting department at Riverbed will be a useful tool in the future! I’m not positive what I would like to do yet as far as career wise, but I’m excited to find out!
Interests/hobbies: Running, playing soccer, baking, traveling
Have you interned at Riverbed before? How do you feel about joining the riverbed team?
This is my first year at Riverbed and I love it! Everyone has been so friendly and welcoming. The environment here at Riverbed consists of people who are always willing to take time out of their busy days to assist one another and with no problem. This is definitely the type of company and culture that I want to be a part of some day!
What projects are you working on?
I have several different projects that I am working on. My most recent project involves reconciliations and comparing spreadsheets and reports from a particular shipment.
What are you hoping to learn at your time at riverbed this summer?
I am already learning so much within my own department. Internal audit is a newer subject and interest of mine that I hope to become more familiar with through practice. I also hope to gain more knowledge about the inner workings of Riverbed. Having worked in the Internal Audit Department these past few weeks has already allowed me to gain more insight into those things from the reading and reviewing of reports that I do on a daily basis.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
As cheesy as this sounds I hope that in five years I will still be a member of the Riverbed team. The internal audit department would be a great place to start because their team is awesome! However, if I am ever given the chance to get a taste of another department that would be a great opportunity as well! Riverbed has so much to offer!
Summer is here at last. Never mind the torrential rain last week. The combination of warm weather outside, a long holiday weekend, and the buzz of the overhead lights have made me all day-dreamy. Despite the existential joys of editing white papers and training guides, messaging documents and presentations, I find my little mind wandering off.
So let’s take break, and look at the RSS feed, and see what’s rolling along in the big wide world today.
“The things that appear to be top challenges for IT over the years are managing data growth, improving backup and recovery, and making business continuity and disaster recovery programs a top priority. […] I remember hearing these very same or similar things–and this is going back 15-20 years.” – David A. Chapa, ESG, June 28, 2011
Attentive readers will note that I’ve been banging this drum for Riverbed quite a bit. Really attentive or really dreamy readers will note that the word “drum” has the etymological roots of “DR” and “um,…” reinforcing Rachel A. Dines of Forrester’s cautionary theme in her smashing paper “State of Enterprise Disaster Recovery Preparedness, Q2 2011."
Let’s keep riding this runaway soul train of thought and cross-index our experts’ wisdom, including Jerry Garcia who immortalized the need to mitigate business peril in the lines: “Driving that train, high on cocaine, Casey Jones you better watch your speed. Trouble ahead, trouble behind, and you know that notion just crossed my mind.”
So where do we get off this crazy train before there is blood on the tracks? If we can switch from Chapa’s circle line to the Soo Line freight, we might see the clouds at the end of the tunnel. Natch:
“Gartner pegs worldwide public-cloud spending at $74bn in 2010, about 2 per cent of overall IT spending, and projects that it will rise by 20 per cent to $89bn this year. By 2015, global public-cloud spending will nearly double to $177bn, says Gartner, and represent around 5 percent of total IT spending on Planet Earth.” – Timothy Prickett-Morgan, The Register, June 30, 2011
In a similar vein as Gartner and El Reg, Richard Brautigan, although not so recently, claimed, "All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds."
So perhaps the right platform for us all is the Whitewater express, with backups stopping at the cloud storage provider of your choice. Check out the Riverbed solutions pages on DR and Cloud, and the Whitewater product pages if you really want to make sense of this train wreck of a blog post.
To borrow another phrase from Brautigan:
“Je reste des heures entières debout au même endroit, presque sans bouger (j’ai même vu le vent s’arrêter dans ma main.)"
For the convenience of those whose high-school French has lapsed, this is roughly equivalent to Alfred E. Neuman's catch phrase, ”What, me worry?"
Interests/hobbies: French Cooking, Playing Chess, Traveling, learning about Law, drinking obscene amounts of coffee (I used to work in a coffee shop)
Have you interned at Riverbed before? If yes, what did you enjoy/learn?
I worked at Riverbed last summer in the Sales Ops department. I really enjoyed hanging out with all the fun people in Sales and I learned a lot about how companies work.
What projects are you working on? I am currently working on a project that has to do with the contracts between Riverbed and Riverbed customers. Contracts are really specific and sometimes worded in complex ways and I have had fun figuring out what the contracts mean and what they compel Riverbed to do.
What are you hoping to learn at your time at riverbed this summer?
I hope to learn how legal departments within corporations work and learn more about contract law
Eric Thacker, Riverbed's Director of Product Marketing for Whitewater, published an article last week at CTOEdge, where he discusses Three Key Considerations for Cloud Storage Gateways. We'll give you the three considerations here, but if you want some elaboration, you're going to need to click on the link to the actual article.
According to Eric, the three key considerations are:
Enabling performance optimization
Reducing risk with end-to-end security
Eliminating vendor lock-in.
Now that you're hooked, time to go and read Eric's article. You know you want to.
The 4th of July, The Glorious Fourth, Independence Day or the birthday of the United States of America are all names that are used to recognize the day the declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress. This day marked the legal separation of the 13 colonies from Great Britain and opened new opportunities for the people of the United States to have certain unalienable rights.
Second sentence from the Declaration of Independence states “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Much like the 13 colonies that declared their independence in July 4, 1776, knowledge workers should also have unalienable rights including the liberty to access data anywhere, any time without having to deal with bandwidth and latency issues which we would all agree, if not addressed, would dampen our pursuit of happiness!
So in tribute to the 4th let me suggest 4 ways to gain independence and performance happiness.
1. Know your applications and make sure to choose a WAN optimization vendor that can give you application specific acceleration. Riverbed prides ourselves in supporting the broadest range of layer-7 application-specific optimizations of any WAN optimization vendor. Chances are that we can improve the performance of the applications you are running
2.Make sure that your choice supports all environments - data center, branch office, mobile workers, VDI, private cloud, public cloud, etc.Riverbed offers WAN optimization technology that delivers best-of-breed performance for all environments eliminating the need to have different vendor interfaces, integration, and performance standards.
3. Know where your performance issues are and have the right tools to quickly drill down to the root cause. Riverbed’s application-aware Network Performance Management (NPM) integrated architecture gives customers robust real-time network and application performance analytics, resulting in complete top-down visibility into their network and applications. Cascade is the only NPM solution on the market that fully consolidates real-time business-level performance views with packet-level analysis all in a single data set that users can seamlessly navigate in order to quickly and accurately diagnose and troubleshoot network and application performance problems.
4. Chose a vendor that has industry leading support. In April of this year Riverbed was recognized and certified by J.D. Power and Associates and TSIA for excellence in Global Customer Service and Support. These certifications acknowledge excellence in delivering outstanding service and support on a worldwide basis to Riverbed customers. Riverbed is one of a select few companies to receive this distinction for global certification under both the J.D. Power and Associates CTSS and the TSIA Excellence in Service Operations program in the same year.
Typical 4th of July tradition is to celebrate by hosting a barbeque, watching fireworks or by decorating in the colors of the American flag – red, white, and blue. For our Riverbed customer’s we encourage you to celebrate your performance independence by celebrating in the spirit of the 4th.
So whether you enjoy a nice steak and Steelhead, have some Cascade and cocktails, or decide to parade the streets decorated in Riverbed orange, we wish you a very happy Independence day!
The Latin phrase, "Caveat Emptor" means "Let the buyer beware" and it reminds us that it's up to the buyer to make sure that he is getting what he has paid for. In practice, of course, there is also an implicit promise from the vendor that he is delivering what he has promised.
When you buy data center gear, you know exactly what you are paying for. You are buying a computer from Vendor H, with, say, 16 GB of RAM, a 3.2GHz processor, 4TB of disk space, 2 10Gb Ethernet ports, and the like. And even if you run one or more virtual machines on that system, you still know what hardware you're running on, and how much network capacity you have.
More and more, though, we are hearing stories of cloud vendors who refuse to tell their customers what equipment their applications will be running on, and which vendors' disk drives their stuff will be stored on. This strikes me as a poor practice. Without that information, and the ability to verify its accuracy, the buyer has no way to ensure that he is getting what he is paying for. Or that performance will be maintained at the level that he expects and has paid for.
All CPUs are not the same. All disk performance is not the same. And, as we at Riverbed know all too well, all network performance (and all WAN Optimization) is not the same. You would never let your hardware vendor send you unidentified equipment without knowing the specs, so why would anyone ever accept unidentified hardware for their cloud resources? If you ask me, if your cloud vendor won't let you know exactly what hardware your stuff will be on, it may be time to look for a different cloud vendor.
Dave Shackleford wrote a terrific introductory paper on Cloud Security (that link downloads a PDF) which is available for free online in The SANS Institute reading room. (Learn more about The SANS Institute here.) Dave discusses this very issue on page 11.
The paper actually predates some of the security measures in Riverbed's Whitewater product, but the concepts and ideas that he presents are clear, easy-to-read, and important. It's a good read.
