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All Sharepoint. All the time.

Recently, a lot of my work has been focusing on Microsoft SharePoint 2010.  I wanted to take a moment to blog about two recent related efforts:

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 interoperability testing in Redmond

Riverbed Steelhead appliances have been optimizing Microsoft applications since the beginning, but we are getting a fresh look at improving our protocol optimization by working directly with the Microsoft Interoperability Team at the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center in Redmond, WA.  Riverbed has a lab there that we use to work with customers, but now it's great to work with Microsoft directly to get both technical teams working together.

A special thanks goes out to HP, who provided the servers and network hardware for our interoperability lab.

Riverbed booth at Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011

From the lab, I go on the road to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Aneheim, CA.  Our booth will be showcasing Riverbed Steelheads and the Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator.  In and out of the cloud, from document management to complete searchable websites, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 redefines the collaborative environment.  Riverbed Technology enables that capability on the WAN.

Look for the Riverbed Technology booth at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 from Oct 3-6.  Conference information can be found at http://www.mssharepointconference.com .

Cloud Balancing: Don’t Put All Your Apps in One Cloud

In today’s post, we close our series introducing Zeus Technology and ADCs. Of course, now that Zeus is part of the Riverbed family, we’ll continue to write about ADCs regularly, especially now that we’ve given you a primer on the technology and what it does. Last week we talked about cloud bursting, so let’s close this series with another useful cloud trick that softADCs enable: cloud balancing.

Cloud balancing is the process of routing transactions and network requests across applications in multiple clouds. In plainer terms, it’s the simple “don’t put your eggs in one basket” approach – or in this case, don’t put all your applications in one cloud.

You might recall, earlier this year, Amazon Web Services was hit with a multi-day service outage on the East Coast after a “misaligned network” brought down several EC2 services in its Northern Virginia data center.  Or perhaps you remember when Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services experienced a multi-day email outage, with the culprit being “malformed email traffic on the service.” Cloud balancing acts as an insurance policy against such outages. For instance, Amazon’s EC2 customers could have avoided being impacted by the sweeping outage if they had implemented load balancing across two cloud providers, or with a cloud provider and their own data center. Yet too many organizations transition to the cloud without asking, "What if this provider suffers an outage?"

After all, even if we assume that all cloud providers can deliver 99 percent availability, deploying an application across several cloud instances can significantly decrease the chances that it will ever suffer from an outage due to the cloud provider.

Let me provide some perspective on this: 99% uptime means 1% downtime, which is equivalent to about 3 1/2 days a year.  Each new cloud provider adds another two “nines of availability” (raising the level to 99.99 percent, or about 52 minutes of downtime per year), so three platforms can deliver 99.9999 percent of uptime (six nines, or 31 seconds of downtime per year). From this point, the risk of cloud platform failure is effectively eliminated and the organization can concentrate on managing internal risks.

For another perspective on highly available system design, "the nines", and clustering (which is effectively what this model emulates) may I recommend my book, Blueprints for High Availability, highly available at amazon.com and other purveyors of excellent technical books.

Because Zeus’ solutions are softADCs, they are designed to balance application traffic across multiple cloud deployments, reducing customers’ risk and improving the performance and capacity of applications. This allows customers to:

• Increase the reliability of a cloud-based infrastructure by hedging the risk across multiple availability zones and cloud platforms.
• Improve the performance of the cloud-based service using geographic traffic distribution and local traffic acceleration.

Many of the customers we’ve talked about here in this series, including Gilt Groupe and STA Travel, have deployed Zeus solutions to replicate application content across multiple public or private clouds and have seen measurable performance benefits as a result. Balancing application traffic across multiple clouds delivers confidence that the application will always be available, no matter what misfortune befalls any individual cloud provider. Because the reality is, you need some safety protocols in place with the cloud. In the wise words of ZDNet’s Ken Hess, “The cloud isn’t perfect, People. Computers make up the cloud. Computers are fallible. Therefore the cloud is fallible.” So, stay prepared and don’t put all your applications in one provider.

We're at Interop Mumbai. Are you?

Interop Mumbai starts today at the Bombay Exhibition Center in Goregaon, Mumbai, India, and Riverbed is all over it.  We're a Gold Sponsor of the show, our own Naveen Prabhu spoke earlier today on Application Acceleration, and, of course, you can find us in the vendor exhibition in booth #7. 

At the booth, we have our Presentation Theater, where you can see a demonstration of WAN Optimization and other Riverbed products, as shown in the photo at left.

If you do stop by, be sure to mention that you read about it on the Riverbed Blog.

And if you can't make it to Mumbai, come see us at Interop New York, which starts Monday.  Riverbed is also a Gold Sponsor of the NY event.  We have five speakers, and our booth with the Presentation Theater. We'll have more details on Monday.

We look forward to seeing you at one or both of these exciting events!

 

Is Cloud Reality Beginning to Take Hold?

As I’ve been out talking to people about using the public cloud as a target for data protection, I continue to be surprised by how much pain many organizations regularly go through for backup and recovery, as well as the variety of methods used to protect company data. Of course, the old standby is tape, and even in my days at Data Domain, where the mantra “Tape Sucks” was like a religion, everyone was predicting the rapid demise of that 1928 invention’s role in IT. And yes, tape has lost some if its place in the market for data protection, but it continues to hang around, despite all of the pain that I hear from IT professionals about it.

Why? There are probably as many theories about that as who shot Kennedy but I think it is safe to say that tape holds on for a couple of reasons:

• Disk is still relatively expensive, even if deduped, and still complex to manage
• Some (not the majority of) regulatory requirements can best be filled by tape
• Tape is a known quantity, familiar, “better the devil you know” and all that

So people seem to make do, kludging together a patchwork of solutions to keep ahead of that dreaded backup window, often at the expense of any kind of DR planning. In fact, for most SMBs and SMEs, data protection is only a secondary part of someone’s IT job. So it doesn’t always get attacked with the same vigor and focus as other IT issues. Like I said, people make do.

But that is changing. I’ve been seeing people start to take a look at the potential of doing away with all the cost and hassle of standard data protection solutions and replacing it with the public cloud. I know about all the hype about “The Cloud” but over the course of this year, the view of the cloud I’ve seen has become more measured, with people asking deeper questions about the implications of using the cloud. For storage in particular, professionals are starting to see that not all storage lends itself as easily to the cloud. The performance implications and management difficulties of moving primary storage to the cloud has tripped up both trial customers and solution providers and has strengthened the focus for cloud storage on functions such as backup and archiving, which are much better suited for the cloud in terms of performance requirements and storage methodologies. And the majority of people in that camp are looking to jettison the shackles of tape backup and adopt cloud storage.

Mainstream backup solutions are also promoting the extension of data protection to the public cloud. Last week, I wrote about IBM recently releasing a video showing how the Riverbed® Whitewater® cloud storage gateway enables Tivoli Storage Manger users to deploy a drop-in Whitewater appliance and essentially convert all the headaches of managing a backup infrastructure into freed up capital and hours that can be spent on more pressing IT needs.

I’m sure there will be some data protection issues for which tape is a compelling solution, at least for the near future. But there’s a reason you don’t find 8-track or cassette players in cars anymore, nor video tapes available from movie rental outfits. It’s also getting more difficult to find outfits that rent hard copies of movies, and even Netflix is separating off its DVD business and applying its golden brand name to its business based on cloud streaming of videos (BTW, Netflix uses Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) for its own business).

Trends are unmistakably toward more and more use of cloud storage. As technologies like Whitewater address the difficulties and/or concerns about using the cloud, this trend can only accelerate. Will tape and disk disappear? No. But if a TSM user can drop a small box in their datacenter and essentially get access to fast, secure, infinitely scalable storage, the rules of the game have undoubtedly changed and cloud storage will command a big seat at the data protection table.  

Riverbed Technical Lead Steve Riley Q&A on Federal Data Protection

Thanks for tuning in for part three (of five) of the Federal IT initiatives Q&A video series with our illustrious technical leader Steve Riley. As projected by many industry research and analyst firms, data will continue to grow. This is not surprising. And as you may remember, with the Cloud First policy, agencies have a mandate to move data and applications to the cloud. So, for this week's video Q&A, we shift gears, and examine some of the considerations for agencies to protect their data in the cloud.

Steve answers the following:

1. How data is protected in the cloud.

2. What are the technical considerations and strategies for protecting data in the cloud.

3. How Riverbed, specifically, helps protect data in the cloud. Here is a hint – it has something to do with FIPS certification.

Next week, I'm taking a break from posting. But, tune in again October 11 for a Q&A video on teleworking and mobility. It would be appropriate to watch the video on a smart phone or tablet, outside of your workplace.

 

 

Cloud computing for government, part 2 of 3

Today we resume with part two of my three-part series on government cloud computing. Be sure to read part one, in case you missed it.

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The benefits of the cloud are supposedly self-evident, but how can agencies actually measure the ROI?

Curiously, in General Alexander’s testimony [see the last question in part 1], while he praised the capabilities of cloud security, he questioned some of the promised economic benefits. Many providers publish online calculators that allow you to compare the costs of a cloud deployment to the costs of running on-premise infrastructures. Frequently these fail to account for the personnel costs of installing and maintaining on-premise equipment, so in one sense they aren’t as good as they could be. However, trying to measure cloud ROI and comparing that to traditional infrastructure ROI ignores the cloud’s most important benefit: elasticity. The cloud allows you to add and remove resources according to demand. Traditional on-premise infrastructures are either under-utilized (and thus waste resources) or over-subscribed (and thus perform poorly). Applications designed to take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity largely eliminate the guesswork associated with predicting demand. A resource availability curve that always matches your demand curve appears a lot like perfect ROI.

What does Riverbed bring to this space that sets you apart from others?

Over eight years Riverbed has built a reputation of making wide area networks feel like they’re right next door. As organizations consolidated dispersed branch office resources into fewer large data centers, our technology has helped eliminate the typical problems that arise from computing at a distance. The cloud is a natural next step for us, because in many ways the cloud is similar to a WAN. Users can be situated anywhere and we can apply the same optimization techniques to make applications feel local. With Steelheads of various flavors you can vastly accelerate the movement of data from on-premise to the cloud and back, and also between clouds—even if the providers are different. In our Whitewater appliance we’ve adapted our optimization technology to remove the drudgery from backups, allowing you to point your backup software to a target that in turn compresses, encrypts, and backs up to the cloud—no more tape. For cases where you aren’t able to deploy our flagship symmetric optimization technology, we offer application acceleration that you can add to your cloud-based applications through two recent acquisitions: Zeus and Apptimize. And soon, through our partnership with Akamai, you can accelerate third-party SaaS applications by optimizing the high-latency link between your current location and a point of presence topologically very close to your ultimate destination. Regardless of which cloud providers you choose and what technology they’re built on, we can make any cloud perform better.

Is the cloud necessarily a permanent solution? When does it make sense to use the cloud as a temporary resource?

This would seem to conflict with the “cloud first” mandate and the notion that the cloud is the new default. It can be tempting to consider the cloud as an extension of an existing data center. Unfortunately, such thinking imposes limits—you’re less free to build applications that incorporate full cloud functionality and you can’t move to a full scale-up/scale-down resource curve. Also, I think this can create a mindset where the cloud becomes that “extra” thing that ends up not being managed well, or at all.

Is moving to the cloud strictly an IT issue? What other stakeholders need to be included in the discussions, and why?

IT organizations that choose, on their own, to move production workloads to the cloud do so at their peril. Capacity planning and disaster recovery require input from the agency’s working units. Data location and portability require consultation with legal and compliance teams. Cloud provider procedures and certifications require review by internal audit groups. Budgetary changes require working with finance folks. Don’t allow cloud projects to become line items in some developer’s monthly expense report!

Agencies will need to develop applications and services for their specific needs. Does the cloud change how they do that?

There are fundamental differences in the way applications should be built to run on clouds. Probably one of the most shocking changes is that servers are now disposable horsepower. Infrastructure is code: when you need compute resources, you simply issue a few API calls and within a matter of minutes those resources are available. Vast amounts of distributed storage are also there, waiting for you to allocate and use. In many cases this storage incorporates automatic replication, so you no longer need to build that into your application. Cloud computing also simplifies the process of updating applications: you clone an existing application, add and test updates, then move users over to the new version. Cloud providers often publish detailed technical guidance for how to develop on their particular platforms.

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Part three will follow two weeks from today.

IBM TSM Users Get Fast Track to the Cloud

IBM recently highlighted new options for data protection using Tivoli Storage Manager in a company Flash video about the benefits of cloud storage. 

The video describes how to think through a cloud strategy and how Riverbed's Whitewater cloud storage gateway enables TSM users to replace tape and disk backup with cloud storage at significant cost and management savings, all without any changes to their TSM environment.  Whitewater maximizes data transfer performance and secures data both locally and in the cloud while minimizing capacity requirements with deduplication and compression.  Essentially, Whitewater looks and acts like you have the cloud as a backup disk target right in your datacenter.

If you are one of the many TSM users that are tired of struggling with cumbersome tape or expensive disk backup systems, take a look at the video and see if Whitewater and the cloud can help address your data protection headaches.

Bursting Your Way Through the Cloud

In this post in our series introducing Zeus Technology and ADCs, we’d like to flesh out the meaning of cloud bursting. After all, with autumn officially upon us this week, the holiday season is right around the corner. And with online holiday shopping expected to rival last year’s billion dollar online sales, many retailers are already thinking about how to prepare their websites for this season’s inevitable traffic boom. Cloud bursting is often the answer for dealing with these seasonal traffic upswings, in particular on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So in this post, we’ll explain the role that ADCs play in enabling cloud bursting and in eliminating problems with demand overload.

Cloud bursting happens when an organization needs to very quickly scale to meet a sudden spike in demand on its website. This might sound like an envious predicament to be in, but in reality, if cloud bursting isn’t handled properly it can create significant problems -- most obviously, revenue loss from customers unable to access the site.  

To illustrate this, let’s look at another high-demand area -- job posting sites. Given the surge in jobseekers, SnagAJob.com, America’s largest hourly job website, saw double-digit year-on-year growth of visitors to its site. With such rapid growth, the company learned that its hardware traffic manager couldn’t keep up with demand and failed to meet the company’s goal of 99.9 percent uptime. In fact, like many online retailers, the Richmond, Virginia-based company generates all of its revenues from its website. This meant it was absolutely crucial that SnagAJob.com’s growth didn’t disrupt the availability of its online services.

During this time, SnagAJob.com also opted to move into a virtualized environment that would better accommodate its growth trajectory. To do this, SnagAJob.com replaced its hardware traffic manager with Zeus’ softADC solution. So now, if SnagAJob.com suddenly needs to scale from 20 to 100 servers, it can easily “burst” into the cloud and create new virtual machines in a matter of minutes, ensuring that incoming traffic is routed to servers that are ready to handle the capacity.

“The greatest benefit Zeus gives us is the amount of availability it enables for our members and customers,” says Matt Reidy, SnagAJob.com’s Director of IT Operations. “If a server or service is unavailable, Zeus knows about it and will divert traffic seamlessly.”

As a pure-software solution, Zeus plays a critical role in SnagAJob.com’s virtualized infrastructure. When its website experiences an influx of traffic, SnagAJob.com “bursts” into its private cloud at a moment’s notice -- but also, at no additional cost to scale its softADC up. Zeus enables SnagAJob.com to absorb and evenly distribute those spikes in traffic, and gives the flexibility to scale on-demand, utilizing more Web servers as needed. Now apply this to the online holiday shopping season, which of course, is ripe with sudden traffic troughs and crests. Wouldn’t it make sense for an online retailer to use cloud bursting to quickly, seamlessly, and efficiently manage ebbs and flows in its Web traffic? 

It’s important to point out that cloud bursting can only occur with 100 percent-software based ADCs. After all, the fluidity and rapid change required for cloud bursting calls for a software solution that can keep up with the cloud’s quick pace. Imagine scaling or distributing applications in the cloud with conventional hardware traffic management solutions.

“If we have 20 servers and need 100, we can easily spin them up,” adds Reidy. “If we still had a physical environment, we couldn’t do that as easily, and it would take days rather than minutes. Speed to change was a big motivation to moving to a virtualized platform, and Zeus is an essential part of that.” 

Last year, demand for e-shopping hit a record high of more than a billion dollars on Cyber Monday -- with demand continuing throughout the holiday season. In fact, U.S, online retail sales are expected to undergo a 10 percent compound annual growth rate from 2010 to 2015, with e-retail sales ultimately expected to reach the soaring heights of $279 billion, according to recent predictions by Forrester, a market analyst group. And as Cyber Monday inches closer, wouldn’t you feel better knowing that your favorite e-retailers are cloud bursting this holiday season?

Riverbed asks customers to Rock the Vote

Since shipping the first flagship Steelhead appliance product in May 2004, Riverbed has continued to innovate in the WAN optimization market with a number of software updates that deliver faster acceleration performance, improved scalability, and simpler management.  Flash forward more than seven years later and the product management and development teams at Riverbed are hard at work on the next generation features and functionality.

One tradition that hasn't changed in the R&D and product management process at Riverbed is the fact that we involve our customers in the process of identifying what features and enhancements we should be working on next.  I started this voting tradition several years ago using the name "Rock the Vote". Using platforms such as the Riverbed User Group (RUG), we ask our customers to vote for the features that are important to them.  The process is pretty simple.  We give them a list of features covering a variety of products and product areas and give each customer a total of three votes in each area.  If they want to vote for a feature that is not listed, they can spend a vote by writing in their own feature request.  The result is that we get several hundred votes that help our product management and R&D teams prioritize what features should be focused on next.

Delivering innovative software updates full of features and functionality that customers are asking for has proven to be a successful practice for Riverbed.  I am personally looking forward to seeing what requests we will get from our next group of customers.  If you are interested to see what the popular votes are, just wait for the next software update to come out.

Riverbed Technical Lead Steve Riley Q&A on Federal Cloud First Initiative

For part two of our federal IT initiatives Q&A with Steve Riley, we focus on the Cloud First policy. Now, if you do not work in the the federal IT space, the Cloud First policy is the federal government's strategy for cloud computing, which is part of the greater plan to reform federal IT. The general estimate is $20 billion of the federal government's $80 billion in IT spending could be used for cloud computing.

In the enterprise, cloud computing is a trend that has been discussed and migrated to for many years. However, the push for cloud computing in the federal IT space was kicked-off and championed by Vivek Kundra, the U.S. government's first CIO. And, although Kundra recently left his post last month, former Microsoft executive and managing director at the Federal Communications Commissions Steve VanRoekel has taken the position and reigns, and plans to use Kunrda's grand vision for IT reform as a foundation for even greater changes to federal IT. 

Grab your coffee, tea or something stronger, and watch the below Q&A, which covers what spurred the Cloud First policy (cost reductions and collaboration among agencies), considerations (safety and security), as well as how Riverbed helps agencies to execute on the Cloud First policy. 

 

Stay tuned. Next week, we'll talk about data protection. 

 

We'll Hang with You Until It's Fixed

Today's Guest Blogger is Kary Rogers, a member of Riverbed's Support Team since 2008.

When you install a Riverbed product into your network, you may have questions or run into problems and need some help. Riverbed Support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to answer your questions and to help solve your network problems when you have a current support agreement.

One of Riverbed Support's tenets is that we don't pass the buck or point fingers; we endeavor to be a good partner with everyone. If in the course of troubleshooting, the root cause appears to be another device in your network, we'll help to troubleshoot the issue as best we can and stay with you until the issue is resolved.

I had a case in which the customer reported that a particular application was breaking when optimized but only at one remote location; it worked fine everywhere else. This was a case in which we required traffic captures to perform a deeper analysis. Quickly, we were able to determine that shortly after the client's application began talking to the server, the WAN optimized traffic was getting dropped as we saw retransmits in the WAN data. Many times this turns out to be an MTU issue, but this was not the case here.

Traffic analysis is all about pattern recognition and knowing the protocol - i.e. expected behavior. The more you look at traffic data, the quicker and easier it becomes to spot the pattern or the breaking of a pattern. In this case, I noticed that the beginning of the conversation had no DCSP marking in the IP header, but after a short time the traffic was being marked with a DSCP value of 8. Any traffic that had this marking was unacknowledged by the receiver and retransmitted.  So we found why the application was breaking, but why was this traffic being marked?

I gave my analysis to the customer, and he was at a loss to explain why this traffic was coming into the Steelhead marked with DSCP 8. He checked with the local network administrator and found that he had enabled a feature on the LAN device called Adaptive QoS, a feature that is designed to limit high bandwidth connections when you have a slow WAN link that might become saturated. Once a connection reaches the bandwidth trigger threshold, it gets marked as DSCP 8, and then the WAN router drops the packets into a scavenger class. You don't want to know what happens to packets that end up there; it is not pretty.

Now that we understood that the customer's network equipment was doing this, he wanted to know why it only happened when the application was optimized by the Steelhead. The answer is one of the main reasons for installing Steelheads: the sending computer couldn't reach the throughput required to trigger adaptive QoS without a Steelhead optimizing the traffic!

Adaptive QoS, rogue DHCP servers, or solar flares; we'll hang with you until it's fixed.

The same, but different

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."   With all of the challenges and the increasing pace of decisions that need to be made in corporate IT these days, I suspect there are a lot of geniuses running enterprise networks!

Many of our customers tell me they have a similar dilemma -- "I have a lot of branch offices and sites, each with their own personality, requirements and expectations, yet I achieve a lot of benefit in IT by keeping things the same as much as possible, in terms of reducing complexity and costs."    For example, some sites may need an enterprise class firewall or a print server, while other more remote sites are not directly connected to the Internet or need fewer services.  Virtualization offers benefits here -- by increasing the flexibility by which software and services can be deployed, branch offices can be deployed as a uniform framework across many sites, while enabling administrators to clearly define where customization can and cannot be deployed.

Riverbed has been shipping a technology called RSP, the Riverbed Services Platform, for quite some time now -- I love to bring this up this solution with customers who are facing this problem of managing multiple heterogeneous sites.   One of Riverbed's strengths is that our technology can optimize almost anything that travels across a customer's WAN, so by standardizing on Riverbed Steelheads for their WAN performance needs, they keep costs and complexity low.

Now, enter RSP:  by adding additional services running virtually on Steelheads deployed at the branches, each site can be changed to suit the individual needs of that site, while still maintaining a consistent virtualized platform across the enterprise.   I like to think of RSP as the Swiss Army knife of the branch.  We have customers running everything from Windows Server 2008R2, to Linux, to one of our numerous technology partners on RSP, all to satisfy the specific requirements of each site.  Some examples are:

• DNS, DHCP, Print, and other services on Windows Server.  This is a common use case that allows you to run lightweight services at the branch virtually, without additional hardware.  You can even add additional storage to the Windows VM with iSCSI, or enable Branch Cache on the VM to add one-way file caching.

• Steelhead Mobile Controller Virtual Edition (SMC-VE) Sites that have mobile users that need acceleration can benefit by consolidating and simplifying deployment, management and reporting functions.

• Cascade Sensor VE.   Often, Steelhead appliances sit near the branch gateway and have a bird's eye view of traffic entering and exiting the branch.  By adding a Cascade Sensor VE, this information can be visualized, analyzed and reported.

• Firewalls and Security Technologies:  including McAfee Firewall Enterprise Virtual Edition and Check Point Secure Gateway.

• Branch Office Routing:  by using Vyatta on RSP, you can easily turn your Steelhead into an OSPF or IS-IS router, for example, for sites that need more sophisticated routing needs.

All in all, you can run up to 5 virtual machine instances on each RSP platform, and manage all of them under one interface using the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC).  This is an easy way by which you can make your branch offices the same, but different enough to fulfill the diverse requirements of the distributed enterprise.

Why Speed Matters

In our series on Zeus Technology, we’ve spent the last few weeks introducing Zeus and demonstrating why its software-ADC will be a huge boon to the Riverbed community. With the benefits of soft-based ADC established, let’s consider why ADC’s end-game of accelerating and stabilizing web applications is so critical for businesses.

As a quick refresher, ADCs ensure that an organization’s online applications are up and running through its load balancing and traffic management functionality.  This is crucial for businesses that offer products and services online, because a simple one-second delay could result in seven percent fewer conversions, 11 percent fewer page views, and even a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction, according to recent article in ClickZ. And it’s not just conversions that are jeopardized by slow websites, last year Google incorporated Web speed into its search rankings algorithm, giving faster websites an SEO advantage. Considering the staggering amount of information on the Web (according to some estimates there are at least a trillion Web pages in existence) – companies should optimize their website for every possible competitive edge. 

But the bottom line remains: faster websites result in more sales. Case in point, earlier this year USA Today conducted a 15-month survey that reveals that many travel sites take more than two seconds for their home pages to load. While two seconds might not seem long, online shoppers expect pages to load in less than two seconds – and worse, 40 percent say they’ll give up on a site that takes three seconds or more to load, according to Forrester.  These are factors that Zeus customers take very seriously. In fact, when the hugely popular student travel website, STA Travel, realized just how much a slow website could hurt its sales, it sought to mitigate this risk with Zeus’ ADC.

STA manages more than 400 branches worldwide and over six million travelers each year use STA. Before incorporating Zeus, STA’s global users (especially those in Australia) experienced major latency (or lag time) when connecting to its UK-based data center. On top of that, if STA was running a travel promotion on its website and its traffic jumped significantly, the site would slow to a crawl and risk losing revenues. In those days, STA had a hardware-based ADC solution in place, which required a hefty investment to scale– especially if the added bandwidth was just for a short-term boom. So STA decided to look into open source options, but found they required too much configuration and lead time for set-up, making Zeus “the obvious choice,” according to Andy Mills, CIO at STA Travel Group.

“We had major issues with our website and know that customers won’t hesitate to go elsewhere if their needs can’t be met quickly and efficiently. STA Travel has built a reputation for being the one-stop shop for every student’s travel needs, so we need a high-performance website to match,” Mills points out.

After deploying Zeus, STA Travel noticed a 50 percent increase in its website performance and now has the capacity to handle just about any spike in traffic. And the solution cut the website load time for Australian visitors by half. 

“If Zeus hadn’t resolved our issues, we would have needed a new datacenter in Australia. So, without the need to buy additional hardware, duplicate licenses and recruit more technical staff, we have saved ourselves significant sums of money,” Mills adds.

It’s worth noting that Zeus isn’t the only new member of the Riverbed family that can optimize website performance. Aptimize, a web content optimization company, also joined Riverbed in July.  In fact, Zeus and Aptimize together form the new cornerstone of Riverbed’s asymmetric optimization strategy. For additional reading, we’d recommend looking at some nifty research that Aptimize recently did on websites with the fastest and slowest load times. You can download the paper here.

So yes, speed does matter – and Riverbed knows how to make it work for you.

An afternoon with Riverbed customers in Toronto

We launched our Riverbed User Group (RUG) program a few years ago as a way for our customers to get together in person to share best practices on how to get the most out of their Riverbed product deployment.  The RUG platform has also been a great way for Riverbed to get feedback on what we can do better and what products and features our customers are interested in.

The RUG takes place across various cities in the US, Canada, and in the UK.  Yesterday afternoon we had our 7th meeting in Toronto.  Toronto is a great city and our customer base is especially vibrant with between 25 to 50 customers attending each event.  This was the scene 30 minutes before the user group meeting was scheduled to start.

By the time the meeting started, we had a jam-packed room of customers ready to discuss Riverbed products, get demonstrations of new features, get a roadmap presentation, and participate in a roundtable discussion.  We also had a "rock the vote" session, which is a tradition at Riverbed.  This is where we essentially give our customers the opportunity to vote for features that are on our roadmap. This ultimately helps our proeuct management and development teams prioritize what needs to be focused on next.

Yesterday's meeting in Toronto was also special as we introduced Gerry Holmes from Canadian Cancer Society as user group president. In his new role, Gerry will be the Riverbed champion representing Toronto and will be responsible for hosting future meetings, determining what topics to discuss, and communicating with his peer Riverbed users about user group activities.

If you are interested in attending a user group meeting and/or are interested in being considered for the role of user group president, please visit http://www.riverbed.com/us/communities/rvug.php

 

Riverbed Technical Lead Steve Riley Q&A on Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative

It's the final countdown – not only for 2011 Federal Fiscal Year, but also for a major phase in the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), which is integral to the 25-point plan for reforming federal IT. By September 30, officials at federal agencies are required to complete their data center consolidation plans and to-date progress reports. The following week, the plans will be posted to CIO.gov. And, every quarter, agencies must post data centers they plan to close, as well as provide an update on what has already been closed or consolidated. A list of the data centers planned for closure to date is available here.

If you're not familiar with the FDCCI, which was launched in February 2010, the high-level on this initiative is federal agencies are required to close 800 of the U.S. government’s 2,094 data centers by 2015. To make good on that goal, 373 federal data centers will be closed by the end of 2012. 

Why is there a push to consolidate data centers? One of the key objectives is to save $3 billion annually, mainly from gaining efficiencies in energy consumption, maintenance and management of data centers. Another objective is to gain IT efficiencies across agencies and foster greater collaboration. But, this should not be done at the cost of performance, especially to the user experience.

Today's video kicks-off the first in a series of video interviews, in which I ask Steve for his perspective on a federal IT initiative – FDCCI, cloud first and cloud computing, data protection, telework and mobility, and desktop virtualization — what should federal IT leads take into consideration, and how Riverbed address challenges around IT performance for helping ensure success.

Below is the first video interview on data center consolidation. Steve discussed key areas of consideration for how to determine which data centers to consolidation based on applications and information type. He also outlined the challenges associated with moving applications and information farther away from a user, as well as how to ensure that the user experience is optimized, let alone not affected. The takeaway: when data centers are further dispersed across great distances, yet the user is staying put or they are used to accessing an application that is located on-premises, then the WAN becomes even more critical. In order to make FDCCI a success, and not impact the user experience, then federal IT leaders will want agents to feel like the application is hosted locally. In short, Riverbed accelerates the movement of data, information and applications, and eliminates latency that is often associated with computing over great distances. Why is this a consideration? With all the strides to bring efficiencies and reduce costs, ensuring that an agent's productivity is not impacted should also be tops on the list of considerations.

 

Be sure to tune in every week over the coming several weeks for more interviews with Steve.

 

Cloud computing for government, part 1 of 3

One of Vivek Kundra's most significant contributions in his position as first CIO of the United States was to introduce a "cloud first" policy for government computing projects. Mr. Kundra's replacement, Steven VanRoekel, vows to continue this policy, which will help numerous government agencies streamline their missions and improve citizen services.

Recently I was interviewed as part of a series of technology provider perspectives on government cloud computing. I'd like to share that interview with you, our blog readers. I plan to post the questions and answers in a three-part series, the first of which follows here. As always, we welcome your thoughts and reactions.

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Agencies are under a “cloud first” mandate for procuring IT services, so awareness of the cloud should be there. But what's the level of understanding about how agencies can benefit from it?

Cloud providers love to wax rhapsodic about the benefits of utility computing, and you can find plenty of appealing goodness on their marketing web pages. What’s missing, I think, is a way for agencies to translate the generic promises into specific benefits that they can then measure. Of course, this means you already need a fairly good understanding of what you have, what works well, and what doesn’t work well. From this you can then more easily evaluate the benefits of the cloud in general and also compare specific benefits of various providers. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a good idea of what you’re already doing, it’s difficult to truly know whether moving to the cloud will bring positive results.

Is moving to the cloud a “no brainer” for agencies, and they should just go ahead and do it? What process do they need to go through to decide if they are ready?

Assuming you can accurately translate the promises into measurable benefits, I’d say yes, agencies should adopt cloud computing as the new default deployment model for new projects and for existing projects that are planned to undergo a refresh cycle. I don’t like characterizing it as a “no brainer,” though. To wring maximum value from a cloud deployment requires a fair amount of brains: cloud architecture is fundamentally different from traditional on-premise architecture, and this is reflected in how you develop applications, where you locate data, how you plan for disaster recovery, and how you implement information security controls.

Are there any agency applications or services that should never move to the cloud, or is everything an agency does open to that move? In either case—why?

One way to influence change is to set new defaults. For example, in states where applicants for driver licenses have to opt in to organ donation, only 20% chose to do so—vastly limiting organ availability. Some states have reversed this; drivers are organ donors by default unless they opt out. 80% stick with the default, and all residents of these states benefit from the greater availability of organs. So the “cloud first” mandate along with the mental shift to cloud as default requires that an agency must obtain an exception if it wishes to deploy a project on premise. If you make the exception process sufficiently painful, this will discourage agencies from inventing convenient excuses to continue doing things the old (meaning familiar) way. Clearly there are certain exception criteria that will prevent some workloads from moving to shared infrastructures. But does each one need its own dedicated data center? Could, perhaps, all these workloads share a single private “top secret” cloud? I’d imagine so.

How can agencies decide which flavor of cloud—private, public, or hybrid—is right for them?

It doesn’t make much sense to choose a deployment model from the start and then attempt to force all workloads into that one model. Different workloads can use different models—that’s one of the neat things about cloud and emerging technologies that make it easy to port workloads between clouds. So I’d say that the decision of which deployment model to use for any particular workload is driven by the answer to the previous question and, of course, the following question.

Many potential agency users of the cloud believe it's not yet secure enough for their needs. Are they right?

Perhaps we should let General Keith Alexander, chief of the US Cyber Command, answer that one for us:

“This architecture would seem at first glance to be vulnerable to insider threats—indeed, no system that human beings use can be made immune to abuse—but we are convinced the controls and tools that will be built into the cloud will ensure that people cannot see any data beyond what they need for their jobs and will be swiftly identified if they make unauthorized attempts to access data... The idea is to reduce vulnerabilities inherent in the current architecture and to exploit the advantages of cloud computing and thin-client networks, moving the programs and the data that users need away from the thousands of desktops we now use—up to a centralized configuration that will give us wider availability of applications and data combined with tighter control over accesses and vulnerabilities and more timely mitigation of the latter.”

These are quotes from his testimony to Congress in March 2011. His statements reveal a remarkably keen understanding of where risk to information lies and how to mitigate those risks. If the world’s largest online retail company stores and retrieves its entire product catalog from the public cloud, if Treasury.gov, Recovery.gov, and NASA all use the public cloud, if major pharmaceutical manufacturers use public cloud resources for testing the protein folding sequences of trade-secret chemical compounds, if the world’s largest movie streaming/subscription service runs its whole business—front and back office plus its intellectual property—from the public cloud, then just who are these people who claim “oh, the cloud isn’t secure enough for me”? Cloud providers are under constant pressure to prevent their services from becoming attractive to bad guys and to make it exceptionally difficult for one customer to interfere with another. And they’re constantly striving to obtain ever more stringent certifications. That’s a lot of work, more work than most private or single-purpose data centers have the staff or budget to undertake. Now, having said all that, if your cloud provider refuses to be transparent about how they manage their security, I suggest you take your business elsewhere.

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Part 2 will follow two weeks from today, and part 3 will follow two weeks after that.

What impresses me most about Cascade…

As a new Riverbed employee (just finished my third month) who previously worked at a Cascade competitor, I have to say I’m really impressed with Cascade, the application-aware network performance management product from Riverbed. It provides some unique features, like automated discovery and dependency mapping, as well as an elegant and simple design the makes it easy to deploy and use. It’s also very flexible. The feedback I’ve heard from Cascade users supports my opinions, and they typically add that it has helped them significantly reduce the time to diagnose and troubleshoot network performance and security issues. In fact, Cascade reduces MTTR (mean time to resolution) by an average of 83%, according to IDC. Making something as complex as Cascade look easy but still provide depth and flexibility is no mean feat and is definitely a feather in the cap of our engineering team.

Here are some of the things I love about Cascade – the features and capabilities that make it easy to use and which also set it apart from other solutions:

• Discovery and dependency mapping – My absolute favorite feature is discovery and dependency mapping (DDM). DDM automates the process of mapping transactions and applications and their interdependencies to the underlying infrastructure. It is an essential component of the Cascade solution because so many other features use the service models it creates to provide richer information. For example, service models become the basis of the Cascade service dashboards, and service maps provide location awareness to speed troubleshooting and are also invaluable tools for planning and validating IT change, such as data center consolidations.

• Service dashboards – Cascade’s service dashboards provide a quick view into the end-to-end health of an application or service. Application services are created using a wizard that automates the discovery process. It identifies the users, web servers, application servers, databases, authentication and DNS servers, etc. that make up today’s common applications. Because the discovery process is automated (unlike our competitors who must manually define service components), it means that service definitions are detailed, accurate and easy to keep up to date. Red-yellow-green health status indicators are driven by Cascade Profiler’s advanced analytics which automatically detect and alert on meaningful changes in performance, providing proactive notification of emerging issues.

• Automated analytics – Cascade’s advanced behavioral analytics are both mature and feature rich. I know analytics have gotten a bit of a bad name in competing products, but Cascade analytics have been stable since day one and they really work. Cascade Profiler track dozens of performance and security metrics, building and updating historical baselines and alerting upon meaningful changes in behavior. Cascade analytics give IT staff the warning they need to identify and fix problems before users even notice them.

• Distributed packet capture / centralized analysis – Cascade Shark appliances can be distributed throughout the network; they should be placed wherever continuous packet capture and storage is needed. While competitive products often require export of large trace files across the network for local packet analysis – often slowing network performance even further – Cascade Pilot analyzes trace files directly on remote Cascade Shark appliances, refining the data to send only the specific packets of interest to Wireshark for decoding. Distributed packet capture / centralized analysis means that when the network is experiencing issues, Cascade is not part of the problem!

• Integrated Packet/Flow (iP/F) – Cascade is the only network performance management solution to combine flow data and packet data into a single logical record. iP/F is the secret sauce that enables broad visibility with minimal instrumentation as well as facilitates the seamless transition between flow-based information in Cascade Profiler and packet-level information in Cascade Shark. The advantage of this architecture is that it provides greater visibility and management at a significantly lower cost, and it reduces the time it takes to identify, diagnose and resolve complex performance issues.

• Wireshark integration – Everybody loves Wireshark. In fact, Wireshark is downloaded more than 500,000 times a month. Tight integration and seamless hand off from Cascade Pilot to Wireshark takes advantage of the network staff’s expertise with Wireshark and further simplifies and streamlines troubleshooting. Why ask your network managers to use anything other than Wireshark, the tool they know and love?

• Steelhead WAN optimization analysis – Of course being a Riverbed product means that Cascade has to play nice with Steelhead appliances. Cascade does that in a variety of ways: it provides a deep understanding of utilization and performance; it enables you to reconstruct response time and normalize it across optimized and non-optimized environments; and it automatically identifies and alerts on changes in the experience of remote users. In addition, you can use Steelhead appliances to provide cost-effective visibility into branch LAN performance without have to add expensive probes. Cascade and Steelhead provide a one-two punch against WAN performance issues!

So, I’ve told you what I like about Cascade, now it’s your turn…What’s your favorite Cascade feature? Tell us your thoughts about Cascade and what role it has played in helping manage your network and application performance.

Riverbed CEO rings Nasdaq opening bell

A photo from the event yesterday.

And a video...

  

 

Making Hybrid Work for You

Last week in our series introducing Zeus Technology, we discussed how the company is the only suitable ADC provider for flexible environments. This unique benefit has ultimately made Zeus the industry’s leading software-based ADC. This week, we’d like to take a closer look at why using a software-based ADC offers so many advantages for organizations that have their eye on the cloud.

Let’s start by taking a quick - and realistic - look at the cloud. There’s no doubt that nearly every organization has, at the very least, considered transitioning some aspect of its IT infrastructure to the cloud. And while some organizations have gone 100 percent virtual, the vast majority continues to use a hybrid infrastructure, which means some pieces of their infrastructure are software while others remain anchored to hardware. In particular for SMBs and mid-sized companies, taking the hybrid approach allows them to reap benefits from the cloud, but in a measured and controlled way. But taking the hybrid approach can result in unexpected costs – if you’re not savvy about the technology you use. The first rule to know, contrary to what some believe, is that going hybrid shouldn’t require additional infrastructure investments. After all, most organizations move to the cloud for scale and to cut back on hefty hardware investments. But you can easily lose the cost advantage if moving to cloud requires redundant investments, like purchasing two ADC solutions – one for your physical infrastructure and one for the cloud. In fact, this redundancy is not only costly, but actually can jeopardize the end user experience.

The solution to this problem seems simple enough, right? Invest in ADCs that are versatile enough to be deployed seamlessly across hardware and virtual environments. Unfortunately, with nearly all ADC appliances, this simply isn’t possible. However, because Zeus’ solution is software-based, it can do this — and it’s largely the reason why Zeus was the favorite ADC among organizations considering bringing the cloud into their infrastructure. 

Let’s go through a real-life scenario to illustrate this further. A common scenario that we’ve come across is companies that want to move some, but not all, of their applications to the cloud. For example, e-retailer Gilt Groupe adopted a hybrid approach to ensure customer security. The company moved many of its applications to the cloud, but to ease Payment Card Industry Data Security (PCI DSS) compliance, the online retailer continued using two of its Zeus servers in a datacenter environment, deploying Zeus’ Application Firewall Module (Zeus AFM), which the company offers as an add-on to its ADC. When Zeus AFM is correctly deployed, it meets the specific requirements of PCI DSS. If you’re interested in learning more about Zeus’ ADC and PCI DSS, you can download a whitepaper on the topic here.   

Going back to the Gilt Groupe scenario, the company was able to deploy Zeus’ ADC for both its physical and virtual applications – rather than investing in redundant technology. Herein lies the remarkable feat of Zeus’ flexible and versatile software. You can deploy the solution on hardware, hypervisors, or cloud platforms. There is no need to change vendor or your approach, should you want to transition to one – or all – of these platforms.

And while it’s wise to select versatile solutions across your IT infrastructure, this is particularly important for ADCs, considering how crucial this technology is to the end-user experience. Zeus’ ADC, for example, can tell the difference between someone who is trying to make an online purchase versus someone who is just browsing – rerouting and prioritizing resources, as necessary. On top of that, it offers global load balancing – so businesses’ customers are routed to the server nearest to them, eliminating frustrating lags. In fact, Phong Nguyen, founder of the Gilt Groupe, says, “Zeus Traffic Manager is really an extension of our applications because of what it enables us to do.”

This is why cobbling together a network of disparate ADCs is not only costly, but it can also result in an inconsistent and unreliable customer experience. And ultimately, this is why Zeus emerged as the true leader in providing customers with the most versatile and dynamic ADC solution. And, of course, it’s also why Zeus fits right in with the Riverbed family of solutions.

Video: Introduction to Riverbed Cascade Pilot and Cascade Shark

Betty DuBois recently recorded this nice video that provides an introduction to Riverbed's packet capture and analysis products.

 

 

The WAN of Your Dreams

Look, I know it isn't easy. Nobody likes to put themselves out there, face the fear of the unknown. Why rock the boat, right? You're probably thinking to yourself, "I'm happy with my WAN. It's a decent, hard-working WAN. Sure, there are problems, but no WAN is perfect." Now tell me something, don't you think you deserve better? Don't you deserve a WAN that makes you truly happy?

Imagine a WAN that goes above and beyond for you. A WAN that doesn't make you wait an interminable 30 seconds every time you transfer a file. A WAN that doesn't hinder your consolidation efforts with it's insufferable latency. A WAN that gives you superior application performance without dictating where your servers are?  This isn't too much to ask. 

The Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS)

The Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) is the only solution within the WAN optimization industry to  utilize four different technologies to create your perfect WAN. RiOS software powers Steelhead products through a combination of patent-pending data reduction, TCP optimization, and application-level protocol optimizations. Together, these technologies provide a comprehensive solution for true WAN compatibility. (Streamlining descriptions excerpted from the Riverbed Steelhead Product Family data sheet).

1. Data Streamlining

Data streamlining – RiOS data streamlining works across all TCP applications to reduce bandwidth   utilization, typically by 60% to 95%. Data streamlining works across file sharing, email, CAD, ERP, web-based HTTP and HTTPS applications, databases, virtual desktops, and all other applications that use TCP.

 

2. Transport Streamlining

Transport streamlining – RiOS transport streamlining reduces the number of TCP packets required to transfer data by 65% to 98%. Transport streamlining also enables the acceleration of SSL-encrypted traffic throughout the enterprise to eliminate the security and performance trade-off.

3. Application Streamlining

Application streamlining – RiOS application streamlining offers the broadest support of application-specific modules for key enterprise applications to provide additional application performance improvements on top of the data streamlining and transport streamlining optimizations performed on all TCP traffic.

4. Management Streamlining

Management streamlining – RiOS enables easy deployment through auto-discovery of peers and auto-interception of traffic, with no reconfiguration of clients, servers, or routers. Simple integration into the network has led to Riverbed deployments in a vast array of network environments and topologies including, but not limited to, MPLS, VoIP, video conferencing, QoS, VPN, satellite infrastructure, ATM, frame relay, microwave, and wireless. 

Riverbed is committed to helping you find the WAN of your dreams, and with over 10,000 customers, we are confident that we can.  So begin your Riverbed experience register today for a free trial. After all, over 80 of the Fortune 100 can't be wrong. Hurry, your perfect WAN is waiting!

Does tape measure up?

Today's guest blogger is Thomas Bakewell, Riverbed's CIO.

Does Tape Measure Up?

I admit I have a small group of friends, mostly IT types.  Recently at dinner, three of the four adults were all IT executives (the kids smirked when we tried to talk techie).  The subject came around to IT disaster recovery preparedness.  Clearly there was either not enough, or too much wine.  As you can imagine the conversation started with the right idea, but the wrong media; tape.  Since this is my BLOG, I get to say what three things I hate about tape:

1. Tape measure home runs hit against the Giants;
2. That thing I use to confirm I ate too many slices of pie at Thanksgiving;
3. The false sense of security you get thinking that tape is the first form of data protection.

Beginning with the right idea is always a good start, and that is with a simple and fundamental question:  “What will your response be when disaster hits your organization, or your legal team wants to examine and hold all documents relating to pending litigation, or one of your executives has lost all of their email?“  Our response typically revolves around risk management, data protection, recovery point and recovery time objectives.  Necessary components of any DR plan to be sure, but wholly insufficient in terms of maintaining the health, operation and overall viability of your company.  Each of us in IT understands a few well-kept secrets about technology.  One of which is the efficacy of tape. We all know that a tape measure has an increasing scale – think of magnetic tape the same way.  Tape is simple to think about, easy to use, growing ever more expensive to maintain, and absolutely problematic to rely on.

Under today’s, and likely tomorrow’s economic conditions – spending pressures, global competition, always on environment and ever increasing urgencies around time to market – the current metaphor of data recovery is no longer acceptable.  The role of IT therefore can no longer be confined to DR, but rather to overall business continuity.  The questions raised above need to be re-thought.  We must now ask a different set of questions; “when a disaster strikes, how do I continue to service my customers, electronically interact with my partners, develop and market product all while I restore my IT world behind the scene?”  Data protection is my first order of business, not tape.

As the head of IT in an IT performance company I get the opportunity to use our products, provide feedback and ultimately help in the overall quality and direction that we take.  You all know of our market-leading WAN optimization products.  And yes, of course, I use our Steelhead’s throughout my infrastructure.  In addition to Steelheads and Cascade, our network performance management suite of tools, we have recently completed the implementation of Whitewater, our new cloud storage product.  Whitewater is one of those products that come along every so often that has an immediate and sustained impact on IT. 

Like all of you, I have a backup strategy and set of tools that are in place and with a trained staff to support.  Like most of you, the target for my backup tools has been tape.  As I have said earlier, tape cannot be thought of as the first form of data protection.  In reality, moving data from your production data center to a DR data center is the first form of data protection.  And yes, we move our data very efficiently through our Steelheads from one data center to the other.  That said, moving data is just the first step.  With Whitewater I have been able to back both my production and DR data to the cloud.  We began with backing up our DR data.  This exercise took about an afternoon to setup two Whitewater appliances, provision storage and begin backing up the data.  Not too bad for a half day’s work!  Today, we are backing up our production data as well.  Some key points to consider:

• We have deployed Whitewater without any change to our existing backup software.  No loss of knowledge and no new technology to learn.
• We’ve reduced our data protection costs and at the same time met accelerated recovery SLA’s.  We can recover from virtually anywhere.
• We have simplified and secured our data storage for DR and recovery. 

While no one wants a disaster and each of us does all we can to avoid them, I know that while others are waiting for tapes to be retrieved and mounted, I am already restored.  While others are testing and hoping that the tape is viable, Riverbed is meeting the needs of our customers.  And, while others are struggling with making sure they have restored all of their data in the right order, we are continuing to operate globally, competing and winning even in the toughest of times. 

My migration from tape is complete, with the possible exception of that Thanksgiving thing… Maybe my next BLOG will be in January.  News Year resolutions of a CIO… now that’s a dinner conversation just waiting to happen.

 

 

Zeus Partner Perks

Continuing our series of posts introducing one of our latest acquisitions, Zeus Technology, today we thought we’d take a look at the robust partnerships Zeus has established that further advance the flexibility and performance of our new ADC offering.

Zeus’ partner program, which includes resellers, cloud providers and technology partners, helped make its ADC technology increasingly accessible for users all over the world through partners in Japan, Africa, India, and beyond. With the growing uptake in cloud services, however, it was in this area where Zeus really gained traction.

Adoption of cloud computing is expected to reach 80-90 percent in the next five years, according to an AFCOM survey, so, naturally, more and more companies are looking for solutions to keep their applications and services up and running in the cloud, even during high spikes in demand. As a pure-software solution, Zeus was the only suitable ADC provider for such flexible environments, making it the ideal solution and, thus, the leader in cloud-based ADC. Steve Steinke, 451 Group Analyst, even called Zeus the “poster child of software DCCAs” (data center communication accelerators).

By partnering with leading cloud providers, including Amazon, RightScale, Joyent, GoGrid, SunGard, Voxel, etc. -  the list goes on and on - businesses have access to Zeus’ flexible and easily-deployable load balancing technology, so they can better deliver fast, secure and available Web applications. Having such a flexible solution helps Zeus meet cloud providers customers’ varying cloud needs, particularly those that have multi-cloud environments or advanced cloud requirements, such as cloud bursting or cloud balancing. With such capabilities, end users can easily scale cloud capacity to meet various traffic demands, as well as shift capacity to another cloud in the event of an outage.

One reason cloud balancing is becoming increasingly important is because it ensures customers have uninterrupted service for their cloud-based applications. And, with all the recent cloud outages plaguing companies across a wide range of industries, this is becoming all the more important. By partnering with Zeus, cloud providers can prevent customers from suffering downtime by balancing resources and incoming requests across different availability zones within their own cloud, with another cloud provider, or even with the customer’s own data center. It’s the simple “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” approach and cloud providers, like those partnering with Zeus, are quickly catching on and realizing the benefits of such intelligent ADC technology.

Zeus’ partnerships, enabled by the technology’s flexibility, scalability and reliability, have been a critical factor in the company’s success, especially with the continued growth and adoption of cloud computing. But, don’t take our word for it; check out this video of what Zeus’ partners are saying.