Cloud everywhere. The marketing hype promises simplicity. End equipment vendors claim their solutions can nearly rack themselves and applications mutate on their own or dynamically configure the network. But we’re a long way from five 9’s service in the wild-west of cloud. Public, private, hybrid, IaaS, SaaS, PASS (lol), infinitum… But what really makes a high-performance cloud tick? Read more »
Should server blade vendors be concerned with the software applications their customers are delivering? Conventional wisdom says no - just design the hardware to maximize performance on traditional axes: maximum compute power and maximum IO between CPUs, memory, network, and storage. But often surprises are found after hardware is in the field because designers don't anticipate how their customers intend to use the product. Trying to simply maximize hardware performance across all data paths can fail to address the key bottlenecks and issues that manifest themselves with emerging, rapidly evolving cloud computing use cases. Read more »
Application virtualization in a cloud environment is a compelling solution with economic, flexibility, and capacity benefits for enterprises of all sizes. The shared and distributed nature of cloud computing components, however, makes it extremely difficult to predict requirements and optimize performance. To measure the true capacity and quality of virtualized applications and infrastructures, a new and unique testing approach is required. Read more »
In 2003 Netli created their Application Delivery Network (ADN). This is considered by many to be the earliest "cloud-based WAN optimization" service. Now, "The Cloud" is a household word, and is being used as a platform for many business-critical services.
In the performance management arena, new tools and approaches have been and are being developed to address this rapidly-growing market. Netli has since become Akamai, and other cloud providers have appeared on the scene including Internap, Cloud Leverage, Virtela, and Aryaka. Read more »
If analyst predictions that virtual servers will run nearly 50 percent of server workloads by next year comes true, data center managers must be equipped to manage the issues that accompany the benefits.
The key technological advance that makes cloud computing financially viable is server virtualization – the ability to run many virtual machines, each with its own resources, on a single, powerful host.
The benefits of virtualization are clear: Read more »
The Lippis Report recently published the first test results of a series of open industry benchmarking tests on several 10GbE switches targeted for use in public/private data center clouds. Included in the newly published online report are comparative vendor measurements from the first round of testing. The following data center switch vendors participated in the first round of testing at Ixia’s iSimCity:
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Speared on by expanded network capacity, new converged application offerings and the cost savings associated with virtualization, the data center has become a focus for carriers, enterprises, and government agencies.
The question is, though, once the components of the data center are assembled, are they ready? Ready for 100’s of Gigabits of traffic with 5-nine’s reliability. Ready for 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet? Ready to defend against sophisticated security attacks? Ready with optimized virtual services? Ready for the convergence of fibre channel and Ethernet with FCoE? Ready to lower energy consumption? Read more »