Posts filed under 'Networking'
June 18th, 2007
PALO ALTO, Calif., June 18, 2007 Fat Spaniel Technologies, the leading provider of critical information services for renewable energy systems, has selected Replicates’s Rollout TestBed, after a thorough evaluation, in order to solve the problem of testing distributed applications in realistic environments. “Going live in real-time monitoring environments requires careful testing. By rehearsing the upgrade sequence in Replicate’s Testbed we cut our risk and allowed rapid upgrading,” says Brett Francis, Senior Director of Engineering and Architecture at Fat Spaniel Technologies.
“We have worked with a variety of enterprise, startup, and non-profit organizations who have extended their in-house infrastructure with our hosted service. Our customers love the “peace-of-mind from starting from a known good state” that we enable. Our “preserve” functionality allows the entire team to leverage and re-use “known good” VM models that key technical staff develop and preserve. Our patent pending networking capabilities allows a seamless path of rollout for physical upgrades,” says Ken Novak, CEO of Replicate Technologies.
About Replicate Technologies
The Replicate Rollout testbed is a next generation virtualization tool. It controls multiple Virtual Machines while providing accurate emulation of the WAN and LAN environment. It stores the combined configuration of a multi-system application in a database, which automates setup and tear down of testbeds in minutes instead of hours, and prevents corruption of testbeds during follow on testing.
May 8th, 2007
PALO ALTO, Calif., One early customer for the Replicate Rollout Testbed service is Eric Romero, Senior Applications Analyst at CGNET Services International, Inc. He commented, “Compared to using a physical testbed I think this has taken about 1/5 the time and allowed me to easily explore a number of potential configurations I just wouldn’t have had time to setup. I have been very pleased with the level of support and responsiveness of the Replicate team, and with the capabilities of their testbed environment.”
Georg Lindsey, CEO at CGnet observed “One key benefits of the Replicate service is that other technical staff members will be able to leverage and re-use a number of the configurations that Eric built. Replicate allows us to save and re-use his work.”
Eric Romero added “The challenge with coming back to a physical test bed for do additional testing is that you are not always certain what state it’s in. With Replicate, I have the peace of mind that I know the copy I saved was in a known good state. Also, I can checkpoint save before trying a new configuration and if I don’t get it right the first time, I don’t have to re-build my environment, just copy back a known good version. My time to get a new clean setup went from 3 hours to 5-10 minutes.”
About CGNET
CGNET Services International helps nonprofit organizations address human needs by providing them with comprehensive and reliable communications, anywhere in the world. CGNET does this by designing, implementing, maintaining and evaluating communications networks.
CGNET is a privately held company with its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and people on the ground on four continents. Since its founding in 1983, CGNET has interconnected international organizations at more than 300 locations in over 130 different countries, including some of the most difficult-to-network locations on Earth. URL: http://www.cgnet.com/
January 25th, 2007
Enter any data center and you’ll see a variety of boxes. Most are servers, and most of the rest are “network devices” that are single-function devices for translating and directing flows of bits: switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPN concentrators, compression engines, access controllers, e-mail filters, multiprotocol file servers, and more. These are appliances in the classic sense: pre-defined function, closed operating system, quick installation (usually!) — the opposite in these respects to the applications that run on servers.
The simple installation and operation are clear upsides. Others have listed the downsides of hardware appliances, and they apply here as well: issues when scaling up or down, issues with spare parts and data backups, and clumsy element-by-element configuration changes. Yet for all but switches, their functions can be reproduced in servers with 2 or more network interfaces (NICs) and, usually, open source software. So it’s no surprise that they make popular virtual appliances. In fact, most of the winners of the VMware virtual appliance challenge were network-oriented devices.
A notable example of a classic network appliance going virtual is the Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager. This is a high-quality load balancer with many extra “layer 7″ functions to route, filter, and cache traffic for web and application servers. It was built on a general-purpose Linux core, and is sold as a hardware appliance. Now it has been released as a virtual appliance. We’ve talked with our prospects here, and they are intrigued: they like the flexibility of starting off with a load balancer, and doing early application testing with one, and being able to smoothy upgrade to a dedicated hardware appliance as their load grows. Other companies whose products have similar values are the Open Source Router from Vyatta, Reflex VSA for intrusion detection, LoadBalancer.org, and Proofpoint’s email filter. (If you know others, please feel free to submit the name and link in the comments to this post.)
None of these will run as fast in a vm as they will in an engineered hardware appliance, where they could conceivably achieve wire speed of 100 mbps or even 1 gbps, instead of a vm’s more typical 25-50 mbps. But then again, it’s rare that most applications ever see that much demand for their services — under 20 mbps is more typical. In fact, there are cases where the traffic from many applications are forced through a single hardware appliance “because it’s there,” when a more logical network topology would separate the traffic and give each application its own appliance. For example, firewalls sometimes have extremely complex configurations because they manage security for many different applications in a single box, when they could be more easily managed with one firewall per application. Disaggregate the traffic and you may reduce complexity and configuration errors, while lowering the traffic rates to levels more suitable for a virtual appliance. As cores become more numerous in servers, it may become more appealing to use them for network functions, replacing hardware and cabling with software.
I’ve seen some data centers where the “network guys” and the “application guys” are different tribes and hardly understand each other. The network guys generally buy and wire up boxes, while the application guys mostly buy and configure software. It’s a little like the old days, with telephone and PBX guys separated from the computer guys (though not as bad, thankfully). The new options for network functions in virtual appliances could cause another wave of convergence, both in the equipment and the staffing in the data center.