wan optimization
In-Path WAN Optimization for your Cloud Deployments with CloudSwitch and Riverbed
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BuzzBy Pavan Pant
As our enterprise customers embrace the cloud, we’ve been hearing a growing demand to help them optimize enterprise network connectivity as they scale their cloud deployments. At CloudSwitch, we’ve been thinking about the issue of network optimization for quite some time now and working with partners like Riverbed to tackle network performance in the cloud.
Today we are pleased to announce our support for Riverbed’s Cloud Steelhead® to help customers optimize their hybrid cloud deployments. Many of our existing customers have already invested in Riverbed infrastructure in their data centers, and want to extend these trusted resources into the cloud. The primary drivers for WAN optimization in hybrid cloud architectures are twofold:
- Improving network performance between data centers and the cloud for better end-user experience
- Reducing bandwidth between the data center and the cloud, thereby reducing cloud costs
In a hybrid model the public cloud acts as a remote data center, making infrastructure resources available to distributed teams of users, but requiring connectivity back to corporate data center resources. Riverbed’s WAN optimization technology can reduce bandwidth requirements and accelerate a number of applications and protocols including Windows file shares, NFS servers and Oracle forms. Riverbed’s innovations in data compression, de-duplication, and other techniques enable much more efficient data movement between customer data centers and the cloud, while freeing up bandwidth for other applications. In our testing we have seen anywhere from a 5 to 100x improvement in your application’s performance, and 60-80% reduction in bandwidth costs.
Simple and Secure Deployment in the Cloud
Our joint solution allows customers to easily select Riverbed’s Cloud Steelhead from CloudSwitch’s network library and launch it unmodified in the Amazon EC2 and Terremark clouds. The user can simply select the cloud networks they would like to optimize, and the Riverbed appliances will take it from there – automatically selecting the network traffic and applications to optimize.
Once Riverbed’s Cloud Steelhead is running in the cloud on CloudSwitch’s isolation technology, customers simply enable automatic peering through Riverbed’s user interface. This ensures that network traffic is optimized as soon as servers in the data center try to communicate with servers in the cloud or vice-versa. In addition, CloudSwitch ensures that all communication and data are automatically encrypted so that your extension of infrastructure into the cloud is always protected, end to end.
CloudSwitch allows Cloud Steelhead to be deployed in-path so that all network traffic on the optimized LAN for your servers in the cloud runs through Cloud Steelhead. This allows the WAN optimizer to accelerate cloud traffic automatically without requiring any additional modifications (no agent installations, no drivers, no changes) to your servers in the cloud. This is the unique advantage CloudSwitch offers– simplicity, security, and the ability to offer WAN optimization with full configurability and control by the enterprise.
Our mission at CloudSwitch has always been to make it easy and secure for customers to launch virtual machines in the cloud. Last year, we enabled public IP access to cloud resources by adding an open-source firewall to our network appliances library. As we learn more from our customers about their requirements, we continue to build our library of partner offerings, demonstrating the strength of our platform and our ability to act as a cloud gateway. We’re excited to support Riverbed’s Cloud Steelhead and are hard at work integrating with market-leading firewalls, load balancers, storage appliances and other devices. Our software lets joint customers easily deploy these virtual appliances in the cloud with secure, in-path configurations to enable much more efficient data movement and scalability in the cloud.
To learn more about how enterprise customers are optimizing the cloud today, please join our upcoming webinar with Riverbed, “Optimizing Your WAN Connectivity for Hybrid Cloud Deployments.”
Hubs, Spokes and WANs
By Ellen Rubin
Recently, we’ve had a number of discussions with enterprises about how they’d like to use the cloud. The basic use case is around capacity on-demand (not surprisingly), but the specifics have raised some interesting issues. The companies have distributed branch offices that need the capacity for a range of applications, including dev/test environments as well as back-office and web apps. Today, these distributed groups are relying on corporate IT to meet their scaling and infrastructure needs, and they are frequently bottlenecked. This is both in terms of overall challenges in getting new capacity approved in a timely way, but also from a network bandwidth perspective. At a panel this week at Interop, Riverbed noted that 2/3 of their enterprise customers have a hub and spoke model that requires the “spokes” to backhaul to the “hub” for connectivity to the internet, and thus to cloud computing services. Only the remaining 1/3 have direct connections. At the same panel, Blue Coat agreed with the stats but commented that the branch sites are trending towards a direct-connect model as new sites are added.
All this is interesting to us at CloudSwitch since we have been hearing more and more frequently from enterprises that want more “edge” computing, and to empower the branch offices to add capacity on-demand in a controlled but self-service way. This creates a set of new requirements around cloud computing, in terms of both networking and security. In the hub and spoke model, corporate IT maintains control over all access to the cloud, which has benefits on the security and permissions side, but creates potential bottlenecks – both in terms of the need for self-service management tools to increase agility, as well as in bandwidth constraints where the backhaul traffic starts to strain the corporate networks. Backhauling also creates strain on the branch offices since it often adds significant latency to their internet connections.
Most of the vendors at the Interop panel (including Akamai, Riverbed, Ipanema and Blue Coat) claimed to be developing or are already offering WAN optimization products – increasingly in the form of virtual appliances and/or software versions – to help alleviate these bottlenecks. These will surely help, but will become even more important as the branch offices start to have more direct connectivity to the cloud. WAN optimization offerings at the “edge” will be increasingly needed, and cloud service providers are focused on building out these capabilities at their end of the network. Security in a more distributed model will also require some new thinking, since users in the branches will want to maximize flexibility and agility, while corporate IT will still need a way to limit potential threats and exposure created by opening these direct connections.
Underlying all these discussions is the fundamental issue of the laws of physics. As enterprises start to embrace the cloud model, they’ve realized that the major choke-point will be their network bandwidth. Innovation around addressing these issues, especially in the virtualized world of the cloud, will definitely be required. At CloudSwitch, we’re staying closely involved in discussions around customer requirements and vendor offerings to increase performance for workloads moving to the cloud.
