While the focus and objectives of IoT initiatives are many and diverse, they all share a few common attributes, and one of those is the network. Commonly, that network includes the Internet, over which there isn’t any real control for performance and availability. Or is there? The current state of the art for Big Data analytics, as applied to network telemetry, offers new opportunities for improving and assuring operational integrity.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jim Frey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Kentik, discussed tactics and tools to bridge the gap between IoT project teams and the network planning and operations functions that play a significant role in project success.
Cisco Live 2017: Kinetic Launch, ACI Updates, & More!
GreenPages Solutions Architect, Kevin Dresser, recently attended Cisco Live 2017 in Las Vegas. Here are his hightlights and thoughts from the conference:
I arrived a day early to Cisco Live to attend a technical seminar on Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) which is their software-defined-networking solution for the Nexus Data Center platform. ACI has been out for over two years, however, this year’s conference had a great deal of emphasis on the fundamentals of ACI and taking these beyond just the data center. The theme this year was “The Network. Intuitive.” and just a week prior to CiscoLive was a major announcement of intent-based networking solutions under the Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) portfolio.
The graphic below shows the core ACI fundamentals that tie together the analysis services, the defining of network functions and the provisioning and configuration of devices.
The opening keynote highlighted three core challenges that Cisco’s vision is now focused on: Scale, Complexity, and Security. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins stated that “in 2020, as many as 1 million new connections will be added to the internet every hour”. The reality of this type of continuous growth of connected devices is where reducing complexity becomes a necessity. And as that network footprint grows, so does the threat surface. The emphasis on security was paramount and needs to be built into everything. The messaging from Cisco around this new era of networking is that their intuitive network, “powered by intent and informed by context”, will provide a secure, intelligent and adaptable platform. At the core of this intuitive network is the vast amount of data points that are available from these network connected devices. Last year’s Tetration and AppDynamics acquisitions are now integrated into the network to bring analytics to the DNA portfolio and leverage the huge amounts of data points that are available from these network connected devices. One example of how this will work is “Encrypted Traffic Analytics” which will look at network traffic and perform packet analytics that can accurately detect threats in encrypted traffic with more than 99 percent accuracy. ETA will accomplish this by looking at packet meta data and flow dynamics without needing to decrypt the data which has always been a resource intensive bottleneck. Another major benefit of network data analytics is in the information learned about the network to help significantly reduce the time administrators spend on problem identification, troubleshooting, and resolution.
One last item to mention regarding the keynote was the announcement of the Cisco Security Connector for iOS. Apple CEO Tim Cook joined the stage with Chuck Robbins to discuss the Cisco/Apple partnership and how they are committed to enterprise network security. The Security Connector for iOS app will deliver visibility, control, and privacy to enterprise owned iOS devices and use existing solutions like Umbrella to prevent access to malicious sites whether on the corporate network, public wifi or cellular data connections.
Here’s a summary of some of the new products and solutions:
The DNA Center is a management dashboard and command center for all network functions. This is where Scale and Complexity are addressed by eliminating the need to configure individual devices through the traditional CLI. Auto provisioning and policy definitions are all centrally managed through the DNA Center.
Data Analytics and Assurance –
The analytics and assurance platform continuously collects data from NetFlow, SNMP and Syslog sources to monitor device, user and application performance. The analytics and correlation of data help reduce troubleshooting time determining root cause and remediation of issues. Network traffic patterns and trends are also identified to help proactively plan changes before performance issues impact users.
The new Catalyst 9300, 9400 and 9500 switches come with custom built ASICs that are programmable, enabling software developers to leverage network resources to optimize their applications. The Catalyst 9000 is the ACI solution to the Enterprise as the Nexus 9000 is to the Data Center.
SD-Access will bring SDN to the Enterprise access layer. Segmentation policies for users, devices, and applications will provide greater security to the access network devices. Identity Services Engine will ensure user and device security policies are enforced as they move between wired and wireless connections. The DNA Center will provide auto-provisioning and management through the centralized UI and will tap into the network analytics platform for performance monitoring, management, and troubleshooting.
The following hardware platforms are supported for SD-Access:
Switches: Catalyst 9300, 9400, 9500, 3650, 3850, 4500E, 6500, 6800 and Nexus 7000
Routers: 4000 ISR and 1000 ASR
Wireless: 3800, 2800, 1850, 1830 and 1815 APs; 8540, 5520 and 3504 Controllers
Although not available until Fall 2017, Encrypted Traffic Analytics can accurately detect threats in encrypted traffic without needing to decrypt the data. The technology uses NetFlow and Stealthwatch to feed packet flow dynamics and meta data flow analysis to pick out threats with 99.9% accuracy.
Threat Intelligence Director on Firepower –
The Threat Intelligence Director will be available on the FMC in Fall 2017 to enable 3rd party threat intelligence feeds beyond the current Talos services.
The Jasper service provides real-time control and visibility of IoT deployments using cellular data connections. New features include improved reporting, integration with other Cisco products such as Spark and Umbrella as well as an analytics package.
Kinetic is another IoT tool that compliments Jasper by working with wifi and wired endpoints and runs on the new Catalyst 9000 switches.
My takeaway from this year’s Cisco Live conference is that Cisco has really turned a corner on their movement towards providing software solutions for the network. Most significant is how they are integrating the analytics, automation and security solutions across many different network platforms. Changes are coming in the way we design, implement and support networks.
By Kevin Dresser, Solutions Architect
Announcing @Massive1Network to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud #DataCenter
SYS-CON Events announced today that Massive Networks will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Massive Networks mission is simple. To help your business operate seamlessly with fast, reliable, and secure internet and network solutions. Improve your customer’s experience with outstanding connections to your cloud.
AWS, Azure, and the state of play right now
A few headlines in the tech and business press over recent months have attempted to shed light on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the public cloud.
As reported by The Street last week, Brent Bracelin, senior research analyst at Pacific Crest, wrote: “We estimate that in the second half of this year, Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud segment could surpass Amazon Web Services in absolute revenue, becoming the largest public cloud platform for the first time in 10 years and firmly marking its transition from cloud laggard to cloud leader.”
Later that week, as reported by Business Insider, Deutsche Bank sounded a cautious note towards AWS, moving its price target down from $1,150 to $1,135. While noting the bank remains generally bullish towards AWS, criticism came from a ‘first-ever downtick from partners around the pace of large European enterprise cloud migrations.’
Amazon is expected to disclose its most recent financial results this week, while Microsoft posted overall revenues of $23.3 billion last week, as well as announcing new products in the shape of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack. So what does all this mean for both companies?
Comparing clouds
First of all, it is important to distinguish between clouds. AWS holds its most significant lead over Microsoft in infrastructure as a service (IaaS). According to Synergy Research figures from October last year, AWS held more than double the market share in public IaaS of Microsoft, Google, and IBM – the three nearest challengers – combined. AWS also holds the lion’s share of the public PaaS (platform as a service) market, although in this instance the combined market share of Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM amounts to slightly more than AWS’ total.
It is in software as a service (SaaS), however, where Microsoft holds the aces. According to more Synergy figures from March this year, Microsoft now leads the ‘burgeoning’ market ahead of Salesforce, with top three placings in collaboration and CRM software. As recently as April last year, again according to Synergy, Salesforce was the market leader, but with only 21% annual growth compared to 70% from Microsoft, and a continued push to the enterprise side, it was not a huge surprise when the overtake occurred.
To put all of these figures into context, Gartner’s analysis of the overall public cloud services market puts SaaS at 18.8% share, ahead of IaaS at 14%, and PaaS at 3.6%. By 2020, those numbers are expected to change to 3.7% for PaaS, 18.7% for IaaS and 19.8% for SaaS.
Comparing revenues
As previously mentioned, Microsoft posted overall fourth quarter revenues of $23.3 billion last week. Yet Bracelin mentioned Microsoft’s ‘commercial cloud’ segment was set to overtake AWS.
Microsoft does not disclose specific product revenues, but instead gives a guide. For IaaS, Azure revenue went up 97% year over year, according to the figures last week, with Office 365 commercial revenues, for SaaS, up 43%.
Here’s where things get a little confusing. Microsoft does not use ‘commercial cloud’ as one of its buckets for financial results. Instead, the company uses the categories ‘productivity and business processes’ – largely the Office 365 portfolio – which hit $8.45bn in the most recent quarter, compared with ‘intelligent cloud’ – largely where Azure and server products sit – at $7.43bn. According to Mary Jo Foley, Azure, Office 365 business services, Dynamics 365, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) form the lion’s share of ‘commercial cloud’.
AWS, in the most recent quarter, had net sales of $3.66 billion, with Brian Olsavsky, Amazon chief financial officer, telling analysts at the time: “We break out very clearly our AWS segment revenue and operating income, and you’ll also keep in mind that there’s price decreases that are part of the business, and we’re pretty public when we do those. In general, we’re very happy with that team and the progress they’re making.” The overall run rate for AWS, based on that quarter, is approximately $14.6bn.
Apples and apples?
It is no wonder therefore that Melanie Posey, research vice president at 451 Research, tells CloudTech it is ‘tricky’ to compare revenue across the hyperscale cloud providers. “If one broadens the market scope to include SaaS and PaaS…this is probably how you get to Azure surpassing AWS in revenue, but then it’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison,” she explained.
In April, Posey was lead analyst on a study which found that Azure was closing the gap on AWS for infrastructure. In Europe, Azure was cited by 43% of the more than 700 respondents as the primary IaaS provider, compared with 32% for AWS – although globally, the figure for the latter rises to 55%.
Posey says that AWS should not be worried by the various analyst notes, but does identify a couple of ‘could do better’ areas. “AWS could focus more on enterprise engagement,” she said. “For example, it could develop a framework for more solutions-focused engagement with enterprise customers – similar to Google Cloud Platform’s Customer Reliability Engineering program – rather than leaving the customer to figure everything out themselves or building their own partner network for broad-based solutions.”
The real potential, however, could come through Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack. Announced at the Inspire conference earlier this month, Microsoft 365 former brings together Office 365, Windows 10 and EMS to ‘deliver a complete, intelligent and secure solution to empower employees’, while Azure Stack is an ‘extension of Azure’, effectively bringing Microsoft’s cloud into a company’s own data centre.
Javed Sikander, CTO of NetEnrich, a company which does a lot of its work with the Azure platform, puts it this way. “Azure Stack is an interesting offering, and has been in the works for years,” he told CloudTech. “For organisations that want to move to a cloud architecture but cannot move to a public cloud due to privacy, security or governance concerns, Azure Stack is a compelling offering.”
Posey says Azure Stack ‘uniquely bridges the old world and the new’. “No other firm has such a complete offering,” she added. “With Azure Stack, Microsoft is bringing the cloud on-premise rather than taking on-premise to the cloud.”
[video] @Nutanix’s #DevOps Journey | @CloudExpo #Nutanix #CloudNative #Serverless #DX
«At the keynote this morning we spoke about the value proposition of Nutanix, of having a DevOps culture and a mindset, and the business outcomes of achieving agility and scale, which everybody here is trying to accomplish,» noted Mark Lavi, DevOps Solution Architect at Nutanix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
[video] @Systena_America’s End-to-End IoT Solutions | @CloudExpo #AI #IoT #SmartCities
«We provide IoT solutions. We provide the most compatible solutions for many applications. Our solutions are industry agnostic and also protocol agnostic,» explained Richard Han, Head of Sales and Marketing and Engineering at Systena America, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
[video] Value Stream Management | @DevOpsSummit @CollabNet #CloudNative #DevOps
«I think DevOps is now a rambunctious teenager – it’s starting to get a mind of its own, wanting to get its own things but it still needs some adult supervision,» explained Thomas Hooker, VP of marketing at CollabNet, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
[video] Jumpstart to #DigitalTransformation | @CloudExpo @EARPintegration #DX #ERP #FinTech
«We are still a relatively small software house and we are focusing on certain industries like FinTech, med tech, energy and utilities. We help our customers with their digital transformation,» noted Piotr Stawinski, Founder and CEO of EARP Integration, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
[video] Scale-Out Storage with @StorageCraft | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Security #Storage
«We were founded in 2003 and the way we were founded was about good backup and good disaster recovery for our clients, and for the last 20 years we’ve been pretty consistent with that,» noted Marc Malafronte, Territory Manager at StorageCraft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
[video] Digital #Monitoring with @Catchpoint | @DevOpsSummit #CloudNative #DevOps
«With Digital Experience Monitoring what used to be a simple visit to a web page has exploded into app on phones, data from social media feeds, competitive benchmarking – these are all components that are only available because of some type of digital asset,» explained Leo Vasiliou, Director of Web Performance Engineering at Catchpoint Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.