Saturday, September 29, 2012

Getting on the Path to SDN with Juniper Networks

A number of IT trends—including the consumerization of IT, cloud computing, and social media— present significant opportunities for businesses to improve productivity. Before adopting these technologies, however, organizations try to fully understand the impact they will have on the underlying infrastructure and, more specifically, the network environment, since it is a critical enabler for all of these services. As a result organizations are looking to innovation in the network to meet their business needs.

Trends Impacting the Network
As organizations continue to innovate and expand their virtualized environments beyond the simple benefits of consolidation to a more agile infrastructure, they have begun to build out private clouds. These agile IT environments enable business managers to rapidly turn up new services to meet unexpected demand or requirements. However, this abstraction layer can create blind spots in the infrastructure and make meeting compliance requirements difficult.

Social media applications present another challenge as the explosion in the number of network-connected devices opens up avenues to new applications and collaboration tools. Well known applications such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter often blur the lines between business and personal usage and video create demands on the network. The question is how to ensure performance, while protecting data ensuring privacy.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Juniper’s Internet Edge Implementation Guide is Here

Juniper has created an implementation guide that will help network designers create a simplified Internet edge solution using Juniper Networks MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers, SRX Series Secure Services Gateways, and EX Series Ethernet Switches. This guide details specific design considerations, best practices, and Juniper tools that can be used to build the optimal solution. It concludes with a real-world deployment example that illustrates the solution and recommended configurations in detail.

The Role of the Internet Edge
The Internet edge acts as the enterprise’s gateway to the Internet. It provides connectivity to the Internet for data center, campus, and branch offices, and it connects remote workers, customers, and partners to enterprise resources. It can also be used to provide backup connectivity to the WAN for branch offices, in case the primary connection to the enterprise WAN fails.

Today’ s Internet edge must enable access to a variety of applications such as cloud computing solutions, mission critical applications, and bandwidth hungry applications such as video. The Internet edge must also scale seamlessly to support growing application performance and bandwidth needs, while supporting a rich set of routing and security features. This guide will help you reach this goal.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Is it Time to Rethink Your Business Continuity - Disaster Recovery Plan?

Have you been thinking about the need to update your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan? You are not alone. According to recent research by The 451 Group disaster recovery planning is top of mind for the Enterprise and data replication is a top 2 storage initiative for IT organizations. Data replication has always been important but it was often seen as too expensive to implement. With virtualization technology data replication can be easier to implement than before and BC/DR is seen as a major motivator for implementing server virtualization. With virtualization in place you can replicate data at the Virtual Machine level. In many cases you can even put your database in a virtual machine. This makes it much easier to control the back up process and to keep track of your applications and data as well as to get them up and running at the new location.

Business Continuity is a Top Concern
It’s no wonder that BC/DR planning is getting more attention. We remember the outages and financial loss that occurred from disasters ranging from floods, to tornadoes and hurricanes to the tsunami in Japan. You have probably seen the statistics warning that 75% without business continuity plans fail within three years of a disaster, and 43% with no emergency plan never reopen. Government regulations have also dramatically increased the Data Replication and compliance requirements. These situations have increased the awareness of the need to maintain productivity within a company, sustain value chain relationships, deliver continued services to customers and partners, all of which can be difficult if we are moving applications and user connections to a new data center location.