Archivo de la categoría: Featured

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 6/15/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 6/15/2015.

Tech News RecapEMC eyes containers with Docker storage drivers, Google and Microsoft have both joined the government’s disaster response program, and many interesting announcements came out of Cisco Live 2015.

Tech News Recap

 The corporate IT department has evolved. Make sure you have kept pace.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Cisco, Featured, Network Infrastructure, wireless

Cisco Live 2015 Recap: IoT, Digital Age, Wireless Updates & More!

The GreenPages/LogicsOne Team landed at Cisco Live last week and spent the days soaking up new tech, new trends, and developing a sense of where the market is headed with everything Cisco.

Digital Age Keynote

John Chambers gave an incredible keynote (and also took a picture with my colleague Nick Phelps! See below). He’s a very commanding speaker with a great vision. He highlighted that 90% of companies believe that they should become digital and that only 7% have a plan in their head on how to do so. That is our market in a bottle. In 10 years, it’s estimated that 40% of enterprise companies won’t exist anymore. In 1950 the average company had a run time of 45 years. In 2010 it was only 10 years. The reason? People feel that they need to keep doing what they have been doing, for doing’s sake. It’s time to step up and make change, disrupt, or run the risk of being disrupted.

 

cisco live

 

 

 

 

 

 

IoE/IoT

The Internet of Everything and Internet of Things was once again a big hit overall with people at Cisco Live. They estimate that of the 7 billion people on earth, 4 billion have cell phones, 3.5 billion have toothbrushes. That’s how badly people want apps, app based lifestyles, and apps with sensors. And, on average, there are 50,000 new apps launching every week. The Internet of Things emphasized the different ways to apply the concept of everyone being connected to spark a generation of ideas and how to solve modern problems. Everything from providing a demo, to configuring a train to detect and change a signal to prevent a hypothetical crash, to a walking stick recently developed to enable the blind to see and feel their surroundings by detecting an announced crosswalk, traffic light status, and the number of stairs ahead to the user.

Meraki

Meraki is getting some serious development and is growing like crazy! They are continuing to provide the 2 week and up to 6 week Proof of Concept demo, risk and cost free for any size deal, from a single access point to an entire site design of 50 devices including Aps, switches, and firewalls. Of these Try and Buy situations, 75% of customers keep and possibly buy more gear.

  • The MX/Firewall appliance has had limitations with VPN support in the past, but has been updated to support 3rd party VPN connections, a visual dashboard with VPN traffic usage visibility, and a topology mode. GreenPages can enable the customer to manage and rapidly deploy this multisite VPN firewall solution out to hundreds of locations.
  • Cisco is applying its iWAN portfolio to the Meraki MX Firewalls! Cisco Intelligent WAN (iWAN) is a collection of Cisco technologies that provide redundancy similar to an MPLS network without much of the cost. Meraki will soon be supporting dual-active path support for VPN, and with PfR (Performance Based Routing) and PbR (Policy Based Routing) a customer with 2 circuits can utilize VPN over both circuits at once without a load balancer, while allowing for intelligent link selection based on things like policy, latency, or loss.
  • SourceFire’s AMP is coming to the MX firewall as well! This incredible anti malware protection centralized at the network firewall gives great visibility into what files, both malicious and non-malicious, are passing through.
  • Cisco ISE (Integrated Services Engine) is now compatible with all Meraki devices in addition to the traditional Cisco product line like switches, routers, access points. ISE allows a customer to centrally apply a profile-detecting policy that rivals Microsoft Radius for port level wired, wireless, and VPN security access. Hundreds to thousands of access points, site core switches, and remote site firewalls in an enterprise environment can be updated from a single dashboard for agility and dynamic security.

 

Wireless

  • Cisco is soon introducing full Wave 2 AC Wireless. The upcoming 1902i and 2902i access points introduce a max speed of 2.3Gbps, and more incredibly, the introduction of MU-MIMO wireless technology.
  • 2.3Gbps is a big deal. Think about it, 90% of customer client machines connect using existing 1Gb cabling, or the latest wireless of 1.3Gb. This new wireless is twice as fast, it can make more sense to go wireless instead of cabling for clients at all.
  • MU-MIMO means Multiple User wireless. Wireless clients currently have to “share the air”, transmitting one at a time across channels. This can lead to bottlenecks, complex configurations, and having to choose between coverage or capacity. MU-MIMO allows multiple wireless clients to communicate over wireless channels at once, allowing the entire wireless spectrum to be consumed constantly, leading to much more highway for all those packets. Combine that with increased wireless transmission speed, and I feel confident saying that wireless could possibly disrupt physical cabling and introduce a wave of the “All Wireless Office”.

cisco live

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nbase T

  • With wireless AP’s capable of up to 2.3Gbps comes the need for faster cabling, but no one is going to want to spend the time or money recabling. Let’s face it; ethernet is the last cabling we’re going to pull. Introducing Nbase-T, 2 additional speeds of ethernet that run on the existing copper ethernet cabling customers have now and can perform 2.5Gbps or 5Gbps speeds. This has the potential to be huge to allow high density wireless with very limited cabling, complementing the new wireless AP’s high density capabilities.
  • Also, think big picture here. Think how the market is going to respond to this. Manufacturers are going to want to build network cards for client workstations capable of using the same ethernet cabling at 2.5x or 5x the speed. We could see a huge shift to the end of a static 1Gbps wired speed to the client, with a move to an auto-detecting 100Mb to 10Gb spectrum. (.1Gbps) – 1Gbps – 2.5Gbps – 5Gbps – 10Gbs infrastructure all over existing cabling! This will let us keep up with the high bandwidth demands of our applications both internal and external. There are some cabling distance limitations, a chart showing that info is below.

 cisco live

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overall, it was a great event. If you’d like to talk in more detail about news that came out of the event or how you can take advantage of any of them in your environment, reach out!

 

By Dan Allen, Architect

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech New Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 6/8/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 6/8/2015.

Tech News Recap55% of enterprises predict cloud will enable new business models in 3 years. SDN, NFV and Network Virtualization markets are expected to grow at a CAGR of close to 60% over the next 5 years. VMware’s AirWatch has been named a leader in mobility by Gartner. VMware has also expanded its EVO Rail portfolio.

Tech News Recap

Windows Server 2003 End-of-Life is right around the corner! Learn more & create an action plan!

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Featured, Network Infrastructure, Network virtualization, SDN, VMware, VMware NSX

Real World Example: Deploying VMware NSX in the Financial Sector

I recently finished up a project implementing VMware’s NSX and wanted to take a minute to recap my experience. The client I worked with provides call center services in the financial sector. They have to be able to securely access systems that have the ability to see credit card information along with other personal, sensitive information.

VMware NSXThe customer is building out new facilities to host their primary, PCI-related, applications.  In this environment, they have to be able to provide the highest levels of security, while providing high performing networking services. To achieve the necessary requirements, they have had to purchase new infrastructure: blade center systems, networking infrastructure (Nexus 5672s, Nexus 6000s, Nexus 7710s, Juniper SRXs, F5 load balancers, etc.), Software licensing, among other things.

They came across the need to purchase additional pairs of F5 load balancers but were up against their budget. When this happened, the Director / VP in charge of the project evaluated VMware’s NSX technology. After some initial discussions, he realized that NSX could not only provide the type of security the environment needed to drive higher efficiencies but could also provide some of the general networking services he was looking for.

Previous network designs included the need for complete isolation of some workloads and, to achieve this, the design called for trusted traffic to traverse a separate pair of distribution/access layer switches to reach external networks. This design also made it necessary to acquire separate F5 load balancers, as specific traffic was not allowed to comingle on the same physical infrastructure due to the way the security team wanted to steer trusted and untrusted traffic. This meant that the team was required to purchase twice the hardware; separate Nexus 6000s and separate F5 load balancers.

Because of the NSX Distributed Firewall capabilities, security teams have the ability to place required rules and policies closer to applications than has previously been achievable. Because of this, networking designs changed, and allowed for infrastructure requirements previously deemed necessary to be alleviated. The ability to stop untrusted traffic before it ever reaches a logical or physical wire gave the team the opportunity to converge more of their networking equipment; eliminating the need to utilize separate Nexus 6000s. In addition, with the NSX Edge Services Gateway having the ability to provide network load-balancing, they were no longer required to purchase additional physical equipment to provide this service. With the budget they put towards NSX licensing, they were able to get the all the security and load balancing services they were looking for and also put money back into their budget.

The Engagement:

Over the span of approximately one month, the security team, networking team, server / virtualization team, and an auditing team worked together in designing what the NSX solution needed to achieve and how it would be implemented. I believe this to be an important aspect of NSX projects because of the misconception that the server / virtualization teams are trying to take over everything. Without each team, this project would have been a disaster.

As requirements were put forth, we built out NSX in building blocks. First, we identified that we would utilize VXLAN as a means to achieve desired efficiencies: eliminating VLAN sprawl, segregating trusted traffic in the logical, software layer, and allowing Disaster Recovery designs to become easier when using the same IP address space. Once networks and routing were implemented, we were able to test connectivity from various sites, while achieving all requirements by the security team. The next item was implementing NSX security. This item required new ways of thinking for most teams. With VMware NSX, customers have the ability to manage security based on vCenter objects, which provides more flexibility. We had to walk through what the contents of each application were, what types of communications were necessary, what types of policies were required, and, in identifying these items, we were able to build dynamic and static Security Groups. We then built Security Policies (some basic that could apply to a majority of similar applications, some application specific) and were able to re-use these policies against various Security Groups, speeding the deployment of application security. We applied weights to these policies to ensure application specific policies took precedence over the generic. In addition to Netflow, we applied “Flow Monitoring” as a means for the networking and security teams to monitor traffic patterns within the NSX environment.

All in all, this was a very successful project. Our client can now better secure their internal applications as well as better secure sensitive customer data.

Remember, NSX can be mislabeled as a server team product, however, the network team and security team need to know how it works and need to be able to implement it.

Are you interested in learning more about how GreenPages can help with similar projects? Email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com

 

By Drew Kimmelman, Consultant

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech New Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 6/1/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 6/1/2015.

Tech News RecapThe U.S. believes it could have been hit by the biggest data breach ever on the government’s computer networks. Microsoft buys Wunderlist as it continues to target mobile productivity. A nasty bug lets hackers into Apple computers. The Apple Watch is set to hit retail stores on June 26th. Attackers are using medical devices to bypass hospital security. Remember, there is a leap second adjustment happening at the end of June that could affect your IT environment. And much more!

 

Tech News Recap

 

The corporate IT department has evolved. Has yours kept pace?

 

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Featured, Miscellaneous IT

Leap Second Adjustment Reminder

Very quick post here. In case you haven’t heard, or to serve as a reminder, the International Earth Rotation & Reference Systems Service has called for an extra second to be added to Coordinated Universal Time on June 30th to ensure the correct alignment of astronomical and atomic time. It’s the 26th leap second adjustment since 1972. This could affect your environment!

Here is some more information on the leap second adjustment.

Let us know if you have any questions about the impact this could have on your organization.

leap second adjustment

 

 

By Chris Ward, CTO

 

Photo credit: blog.shareaholic.com

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech New Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 5/25/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 5/25/2015.

Tech News RecapMicrosoft’s discussions with Salesforce about a potential acquisition ended due to price issues EMC is buying Virtustream. The IRS reported that thieves stole tax info from 100,000 people. The Internet of Things market is projected to grow 19% in 2015 while the software-defined data center market is projected to hit $77 billion by 2020. Software-defined storage is reportedly gaining traction among businesses.

Tech News Recap

 

The corporate IT department has evolved. Have you kept pace?

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Citrix, Citrix Synergy, End-User Computing, Featured, XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile

Citrix Synergy 2015 Recap: Top News & Announcements

Last week was the annual Citrix Synergy event in Orlando Florida. This year was a little different with Citrix offering instructor-led learning labs prior to the start of the conference on Sunday and Monday.  I opted to attend three on Monday, each of them being about  three hours in length and very interesting. The labs I attended included:

citrix synergy

SYN622 – XenApp and XenDesktop design workshop – This workshop grouped teams together to review a design and to find the mistakes. This was a great way to meet people from different backgrounds and apply various skillsets to the design.  Afterwards, the Citrix consultants provided their recommendations.

SYN616 – Accelerate your NetScaler skills – This session provided overviews on new advanced features deployment scenarios, including GSLB, Clustering, AAA and Content Switching.

SYN623: This lab focused on how the new Citrix Workspace Cloud Lifecycle Management (CLM) service is used to deploy and manage Citrix infrastructure.  CLM provides SaaS based services to perform blueprinting, automation and management for the design and deployment of enterprise workloads.  Citrix has really extended the capabilities of the hybrid cloud. More to come on this later in the summary…

Keynote Tuesday May 12th

The day kicked off with Citrix CEO Mark Templeton.  Mark said this year’s event was the largest attendance ever (in person and online). Mark began with a discussion on his favorite rock bank, The Moody Blues, and the Software Defined Workplace! The concept of the Software Defined Workplace suggests that work is no longer a place; it is something you do anywhere the inspiration strikes.

Then, Mark talked about why we all love XenApp, and everyone got a drawstring backpack that said, “we love XenApp.”  This reinforced the continued emphasis on traditional XenApp.  We heard a lot of this at the Citrix Summit Partner event in January this year.

Next, Mark showed off script demos of the new X1 mouse that didn’t go well.  I think this was related to a room full of Bluetooth devices.  We also saw Mark’s Inbox with over 65,000 unread emails!  He said he has someone that manages his inbox; I can’t imagine dealing with that much email.

Some key announcements from Day 1:

Citrix is going to extend XenApp 6.5 lifecycle support until 2017.  Also announced was Feature Pack 3 for XenApp. This is expected to be out very soon and will include support for Receiver .Next, Storefront 3, profile management enhancements,  support for Citrix Director for help desk troubleshooting, and some improvements in the Lync optimization pack.

There was also an announcement of support for a Linux VDA, supporting both Red Hat and SUSE for XenDesktop.  These Linux virtual desktops are targeted at high performance Linux applications.  This will integrate directly within the existing XenDesktop toolsets.

HDX FramHawk will be directly integrated into receiver.  This is a technology Citrix acquired and is targeted at very high latency links, such as satellite, cellular and LTE networks.  It provides local-like experience over lossy networks!

XenServer 6.5 Service Pack 1:

XenServer is not going away and some big performance increases are coming.  I was sitting with one of my coworkers during this, and he quickly deployed it in his lab!  I continued to get text messages throughout the day telling me about the new features and performance and video performance improvements.  SP1 has new 64-Bit dom0, nVIDA vGPU scalability enhancements, with up to 96 vGPU sessions per host, new in-memory read-cache, Workload Balancing, big network, and storage performance enhancements.

Receiver x1 Mouse was released, and we all got one as a gift for attending Synergy.  If you haven’t seen this new mouse, it is pretty cool!  The x1 is integrated with Receiver and allows you to use the mouse with an iPhone and iPad.  This is important because Apple doesn’t support Bluetooth mice on these devices.  This gives you the precision, control, and usability needed for a better user experience.

XenMobile 10 is now out and the management stack has been consolidated into an easy-to-deploy virtual appliance.  Not only is it much easier to deploy, it’s also simple to make highly available through cloning by using just one tool to configure additional nodes.  This also gives administrators a single console to manage (which we have all been asking for).  There were also new announcements around Worx apps for Salesforce and WorxTasks.

Citrix Workspace Cloud.  Citrix Workspace Cloud is architecturally similar to ShareFile, in that Citrix provides the control plane allowing you to leverage on-premises cloud infrastructure and public cloud resource infrastructure of your choice.  This can provide companies with a SaaS based solution for cloud management.  Workspace Cloud has a number of services that make up the solution.

Lifecycle Management – see above in one of the instructor lead sessions I attended.  This has a simple SaaS based orchestration engine that allows drop and drag capabilities.  This is very easy to use, even for first time users.  It includes service blueprints, a unified interface for the management and deployment of applications services, service monitoring & alerting, self-healing, auto-scaling, and disaster recovery capabilities in the event of a primary site failure. Other features include:

  • Secure delivery of applications and desktops with XenDesktop and XenApp
  • Enterprise Mobility Management with XenMobile
  • Data Synchronization with ShareFile
  • Concierge Service targeted at improving end user experience with the ability to securely share their screens with support personnel

I think the most anticipated feature of the Citrix Workspace Cloud is the ability to host the traditional Citrix XenDesktop Infrastructure components in the Citrix Workspace Cloud.  This is achieved by separating the control plane from the data/resource plane, so all the traditional control devices such as, the Delivery Controllers and StoreFront, are deployed and managed in the Citrix Cloud.  A small connector is installed in your data center allowing for secure connections to the control plane.  Think of this as a scaled down XenDesktop Delivery Controller.  This allows for the very quick deployment of the infrastructure components, and then you provide the virtual resources for the XenApp and XenDesktop VMs in your data center or a cloud provider of your choice.  This could be a very compelling solution for customers looking for simplified administration of the Citrix infrastructure.

Day 2 Keynote with Mark Templeton:

Citrix AppDisk was announced with a tech preview expected in Q2.  AppDisk is an application layering technology that you can use to create individual application containerized in a disk.  This is different from Microsoft App-V.  Citrix will be competing with VMware App Volumes and Liquidware Labs FlexApp.  This should be pretty interesting, as Citrix has had a lot of experience with application virtualization.  Expect a lot more to come on this in the next few months.  Citrix will be integrating this with AppDNA, which should help to resolve problems and determine the best method to deliver applications.  The demo showed the direct integration with Citrix XenDesktop Studio and showed further commitment from Citrix to keep consoles minimized and leverage the investment made in these tools.  I did find it funny that Citrix had VMware in the Expo Hall demonstrating Horizon View and other competing products.

Citrix CloudBridge Virtual WAN was also announced.  The Virtual WAN will be able to add reliability and quality at branch office locations with multiple aggregate WAN connections all virtualized.

NetScaler with Unified Gateway – this seems like a collection of integrated features including the following:

  • Unified Remote Access Infrastructure – with web, mobile, cloud and SaaS based applications
  • Single URL for End User Access
  • Secure Single-Sign-On to applications with Active Directory and SAML
  • Visibility – enterprise security and compliance with end-to-end visibility on protocols in use
  • SmartControl, which is a new future on the NetScaler giving admins an easier way to set access controls for users with police

GoToMeeting Mobile Screen Sharing used through the new GotToMeeting app,  allows the user to share their screen on a mobile device.

Finally, the Workspace Hub and Project Octoblu were announced – this facilitates the integration and automation of complex technologies and automation with Octoblu, Amazon echo and the new Workspace Hub.  Mark demonstrated the way a conference call should ideally run.  The entire time all I could think about is the YouTube video “A Conference Call in Real Life” This is one of my favorites.  The concept of the Project Octoblu is that you can automate the workspace so that the complexities are removed.  For example, when you walk into the room the automation sets up the presentation, calls into the bridge, the software determines who is on the bridge and then emails, text messages etc. the missing people and gets the call moving more efficiently.  At the conclusion of the call notes or the recording is emailed to the participants all automatically.

In summary, another great Citrix Synergy event with lots of new features and technologies to keep us busy for another year!

 Are you interested in speaking with Randy about the latest Citrix technologies? Email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com

 

 

 

By Randy Becker, CTO

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 5/18/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 5/18/2015.

A data breach at CareFirst could leave up to 1.1 million customers affected. According to Gartner, the cloud IaaS market is a $16.5 billion market. Google released Chrome 43, addressing 37 bugs. There were good interviews with the CIOs of GE and Whirlpool around the internet of things.

 

Tech News Recap

  • Up to 1.1 Million Customers Could be Affected in Data Breach at Insurer CareFirst
  • Cloud Storage Provider: Azure Faster Than Amazon Web Services
  • Gartner: Cloud IaaS is a $16.5 billion market
  • Helping Businesses Scale Is The Catalyst of Cloud Service Provider Growth
  • VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: Which SDN solution is right for me?
  • Google releases Chrome 43, addresses 37 bugs
  • GE Capital CIO Jim Fowler On Driving The Internet of Things And Talent Development
  • Cloud seen as top IT priority
  • Drones could be the next big frontier for entrepreneurs
  • CIOs Get Clever About Finding Needed Skills as IT Talent Shortage Grows
  • Whirlpool CIO: The future of IoT demands a new IT paradigm
  • Cloud IaaS Market to Grow Nearly 33% in 2015: Gartner
  • The Cloud Revolution Requires High-Performance Attack Prevention
  • Many businesses lack adequate policies, controls over mobile workers
  • Transforming Technology Organizations By Investing in Culture and Practices
  • Why CFOs Are Collaborating More with CIOs
  • 5 Reasons Enterprises Have Difficulty Implementing New Technologies
  • Cloud Security: Transparency Is Crucial for Service Providers
  • How CIOs Can Ensure Their IT Teams Are a Good Fit

Have you been dragging your feet leading up to the Windows Server 2003 End of Life date? Read this whitepaper to get a better idea of migration options available to organizations.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Featured, Network Infrastructure, Software Defined Networking

Reader Question: NSX Riding on Physical Infrastructure?

There’s been a lot of traction and interest around software defined networking lately. I posted a video blog last week comparing features and functionality of VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI. A reader left a comment on the post with a really interesting question. Since I have heard similar questions lately, I figured it would be worth addressing it in it’s own post.

The question was:

“Great discussion – one area that needs more exploration is when NSX is riding on top of any physical infrastructure – how is the utilization and capacity of the physical network made known to NSX so that it can make intelligent decisions about routing to avoid congestion?”

Here was my response:

“You bring up an interesting point that I hear come up quite a bit lately. I say interesting because it seems like everyone has a different answer to this challenge and a couple of the major players in this space seem to think they have the only RIGHT answer.

If you talk to the NSX team at VMware, they would argue that since the hypervisor is the closest thing to your applications, you’d be better off determining network flow requirements there and dictating the behavior of that traffic over the network as opposed to reactive adjustments for what could be micro-burst type traffic that could lead to a lot of reaction and not much impact.

If you were to pose the same challenge to the ACI team at Cisco, they would argue that without intimate visibility, control and automated provisioning of active network traffic AND resources, you can’t make intelligent decisions about behavior of application flows, regardless of how close you are to the applications themselves.

I think the short answer, in my mind anyway, to the challenge you outline lies within the SDN/API integration side of the NSX controller. I always need to remind myself that NSX is a mix of SDN and SDN driven Network Virtualization (NV) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). That being the case, the behavior of the NSX NV components can be influenced by more than just the NSX controller. Through mechanisms native to the network like Netflow, NBAR2, IPFIX, etc. we can get extremely granular application visibility and control throughout the network itself and, by combining that with API NSX integration, we can evolve the NSX solution to include intelligence from the physical network thereby enabling it to make decisions based on that information.”

Like I said, an interesting question. There’s a lot to talk about here and everyone (myself included) has a lot to learn. If you have any more questions around software defined networking, leave a comment or reach out to us at socialmedia@greenpages.com and I’ll get back to you.

 

 

By Nick Phelps, Principal Architect