Simplify Integration Of L4 - L7 Services With OpenStack and NetScaler

Many organizations are building private cloud platforms as a way to increase the agility of IT infrastructure and to increase the efficiency of operations to support their business critical applications. Over the past few years we have seen an increasing move towards deploying OpenStack, which is an open source cloud management platform, in production environments.
As organizations use OpenStack to automate the deployment of servers, storage and networking, they are also looking to automate the provisioning of L4 – L7 services. To do this, they need their networking equipment vendors to provide integration of their devices with OpenStack in a way that addresses deployment challenges involved in offering infrastructure-as-a-service. These challenges include scalability, elasticity, performance and flexibility/control over resource allocation.
To enable the automated deployment of application delivery services with OpenStack, Citrix has built NetScaler Control Center as a way to integrate with the LBaaS service in OpenStack. The Citrix LBaaS solution enables IT organizations to guarantee performance and availability service level assurances (SLAs) as well as provide redundancy and seamless elasticity while rapidly deploying line of business applications in OpenSack.

The Challenge with Resource Deployment

OpenStack has come a long way in simplifying the provisioning of computer, storage and networking resources as part of an application deployment workflow. Neutron, which is the networking project for OpenStack, automates the creation and management of L2/L3 networks, as well as the associated L4/L7 network services such as firewalling, load balancing and VPN services. While Neutron has made rapid advancements in enabling a self-service consumption model for networking, there are still operational gaps that need to be addressed for successfully deploying business critical workloads. Some of these gaps include providing for service-aware resource allocation, resource elasticity on demand, monitoring and visibility, fault tolerance and high availability. It is important that cloud providers have complete control over policies that control these operational characteristics, even in fully automated environments.

Simplifying the Network is the Key to Improving Application Performance

In order ensure application performance and increase productivity across the organization while trying to keep budgets under control Enterprise organizations have been increasingly evaluating and implementing a series of new technologies for the past few years. These technologies hold out the promise of increasing the agility of new application rollouts that deliver game changing services, and meeting the needs of the organization to understand the business and make timely and well informed decisions as well as meeting the changing needs of the organization as they adapt to moves, consolidations and mergers.

The first one of these technologies is server virtualization which is now reaching the middle of the bell curve of the adoption cycle with more than half of organizations at the pervasive or fully virtualized stage according to IDG. The next is cloud computing where investments are up over last year, and the year before, with private cloud now as the preferred model over public cloud. Lowering TCO is a top selling point for both private & public cloud. Cloud solves challenges around business continuity and disaster recovery by providing resources on demand, often in a pay as you go model. It also becomes more popular as organizations begin to see it as an alternative to large capital expenditures for infrastructure.

My 2011 Update and Thoughts on What’s Coming in 2012

An Eventful Year with Many Changes
It’s been an eventful year for me and I thought an update was in order. On the work front there have been a lot of changes. I joined Juniper Networks in November. I’m focused on technical marketing for data center and cloud. This is a return for me as I was at Juniper before moving to Cisco in 2007. It’s interesting how the world turns, and I’m excited to be back.

When I was interviewing at Juniper I was asked what attracted me to the jobs that I had. Of course there are many things, but being a techie what stands out for me is working on market leading products and I’ve been fortunate to have worked on some firsts. At Lucent it was the Portmaster (formerly Livingston), the first digital remote access server. At Redback it was the SMS (Subscriber Management System), the first broadband aggregation platform. At Entone it was a suite of products for IPTV that preceded FIOS and UVerse. When I first went to Juniper in 2005 it was the Peribit WX, the first WAN Optimization devices. At Cisco I got into cloud computing and marketed data center solutions including virtualized network services that ran on the UCS compute platform. At VCE I marketing the first pre-engineered converged infrastructure platform for private cloud computing.

So the question is what brought me to Juniper? Working at a company that continues to innovate in the networking space was a big draw. The opportunity to be on a newly formed team that is focused on critical areas of the network and to be the lead for data center and cloud computing was important. My role in technical marketing is to bridge the gap between the capabilities of the networking equipment and the value delivered to the business in terms of application performance and availability. I believe that the network design is critical to delivering a superior user experience and enabling applications architected for the cloud. As I looked at how applications are becoming more complex and more highly distributed I saw how Juniper’s innovative QFabric switching platform was ideally suited to meet the requirements of this trend in application architecture. So the short answer is the opportunity to market data center solutions based on QFabric.

Here are a few areas of interest that I expect to be writing about in the coming months.

Vblock: Accelerating the Journey to Private Cloud

In the continuing quest for a fully virtualized data center, IT professionals have a new tool that promises to dramatically simplify the journey: the Vblock. This 60-minute TechWiseTV episode explores this latest advancement in unified computing and shows how it will make it easier for organizations to build out data centers.



You will learn how Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms simplify the acquisition and deployment process by integrating best of breed technology from Cisco, EMC and VMware into prepackaged units of infrastructure that are optimized for a wide range of virtualized solution deployments and how since each Vblock is pre-built and ready for deployment and the modular design is highly scalable to meet growth needs, your projects will get completed faster and you will have investment protection, and lower total cost of ownership.

Backstory: This video was created by TechWiseTV, a team at Cisco and features my collegues from VCE. I used social media including the Cisco Data Center blog, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook to promote it and increase the views many fold. While at Cisco I created the Cisco Cloud Facebook page and managed the Cisco Cloud Linkedin Group. This also appeared on the Cisco Data Center blog site.

Are Cloud Service Models Created Equal - Which One is Right for You?

Trouble Raises Concerns
Organizations are utilizing the cloud in growing numbers, but given the news a few months back about cloud outages, first with Amazon AWS, then Google Blogger and GMail and finally Microsoft BPOS, some organizations are rethinking their strategy and trying to decide how to choose a cloud service model that works best for them. See this article in the NYT for example - Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts.

Even with the outages there is no doubt that the Cloud works for many use cases, however not all cloud is the same. There are different considerations for different applications and choosing the right cloud model is critical to the business. If you are thinking about which cloud model is right for you there are a few things to consider. The primary consideration is whether to go with public or private cloud.

When to use the Public Cloud
With public cloud compute resources are shared and they are accessed over the internet at best effort. When choosing to get services from the public cloud you would consider if regulations concerning data protection will allow it, and if it fits with your corporate goals for availability and recovery. This last concern might be the key deciding factor in cloud service adoption.

Any business that is looking to outsource their IT infrastructure to the cloud must consider the whole of their business before taking the plunge. There is a benefit in having access to resources that are elastic and available on demand. The public cloud can work well for batch work, seasonal, periodic, one-time and some public facing uses cases.

The Vblock Solution For Cisco Unified Communications

To succeed in today’s fast paced, global economy, businesses must be able to communicate and collaborate. This requires access to a range of voice, video, and messaging communication tools. While the essence of communication is to break down barriers, organizations today must contend with the barriers imposed by increasingly complex communications environments.

The VCE solution enables rapid deployment of Cisco® Unified Communications applications on Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms to provide an integrated hardware and software solution that connects people, information, and teams, helping to enable comprehensive and effective collaborative experiences.

Watch the video “Cisco UC ‘As-A-Service’ Offers on Vblock Platform” which provides an overview of the solution, and what customers can expect and then read more to get the details on the solution.




Read more to get the details on the solution.

The Vblock Solution for Cisco Hosted Collaboration

The Market Challenge
Hosted Collaboration is a growing opportunity for Service Providers to expand their portfolio and meet customer needs. Cisco provides Unified Communications applications using the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) that enables service providers to deliver a range of services from IP telephony and voicemail to WebEx® conferencing. One of the biggest challenges facing service providers is getting services to market and meeting time to revenue goals. Revenue opportunities are missed when time is lost reviewing product specifications, testing configurations and determining the appropriate scale for a particular application.

The Vblock Advantage
The Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms solution for Hosted Collaboration makes Cisco® Unified Communications and Collaboration applications and capabilities available in a hosted environment. Vblock™ platforms provide standardized units of best-of-breed IT infrastructure that can be managed as a single entity and easily scaled as a cohesive, multi-tenant system. With the Vblock solution service providers can bring hosted collaboration service to market rapidly and meet their time to revenue goals.

Video: Cisco HCS "As-A-Service" Offers on Vblock Platform

The Role of the Platform in Cloud Service Delivery

The Service Provider Challenge
To differentiate their cloud services and attract customers service providers need to offer service-level agreements (SLAs) to their enterprise customers for whom performance, security, and availability are paramount. To do this they need a converged infrastructure platform that allows them to address the concerns and challenges of their enterprise customers who might be reluctant to move their data center operations and applications to the cloud.

The Cloud Service Opportunity
The emergence of the cloud delivery model has created an opportunity for service providers to develop new services that meet the changing needs of their customers for consuming applications that support their business processes. To succeed in this evolving marketplace, service providers must offer added value when competing with established Over-the-Top (OTT) providers. The key to delivering a compelling service is to build it on a converged compute platform that is optimized for the cloud and uses its capabilities to offer SLAs that meet the needs of potential customers for assurances of application performance and availability. These SLAs can reassure customers that their applications are hosted on optimized platforms and delivered from reliable data centers, so that they will be consistently available, which is a motivator to enter in to longer-term contracts for organizations that are considering moving to the cloud-computing environment.

The Need for Service Assurance
In today’s business environment, service assurance has become more than a luxury for organizations that want to migrate to the cloud. Service assurance has become the primary differentiator that organizations are looking for when seeking support for delivery of their business-critical applications. With increasing concerns over service interruptions and the availability of workloads, companies might be reluctant to move their business-critical applications to the cloud or to move to Software as a Service (SaaS) applications without the backing of comprehensive SLAs that set high standards for service delivery and hold the service provider accountable for service outages. OTT providers have built their service on commodity platforms using their own set of tools for service creation. Their primary concern has been to keep costs down so that they can serve a broad public market, and quality of service guarantees have been an after though or are not available at all.

The Benefits of a Virtualized Approach to Advanced-Level Network Services

Advanced-Level Services
Advanced-level network services are a necessity for a scalable virtualized data center and a key to cloud service delivery. These services provide application acceleration and server load balancing to improve user productivity, and ensure optimal resource utilization, and they monitor quality of service. They also provide security services that can isolate applications and resources in logical zones in virtualized data centers and cloud environments to ensure regulatory compliance and reduce risk of data breaches.

Deploying Services
While enterprises have been adopting server virtualization and cloud computing in order to realize the benefits of reduced server sprawl, reduced operating costs, and greater levels of application availability, they are doing so while struggling with inflexibility in the underlying network. Deploying advanced-level network services in a virtualized data center environment is challenging. It has been done using dedicated hardware in static network topologies. This does not provide the flexibility to support virtualized workloads, and as a result organizations are challenged to support on-demand virtual machine (VM) provisioning, workload mobility, and public or private cloud deployments. This limits organizations' ability to efficiently deploy new applications, increases operational costs, and acts as a roadblock to adoption of virtualization and cloud computing.

The Solution
While enterprises have been adopting server virtualization and cloud computing in order to realize the benefits of reduced server sprawl, reduced operating costs, and greater levels of application availability, they are doing so while struggling with inflexibility in the underlying network.The solution is to implement virtualized advanced-level network services that run as software on a compete platform. Such virtualized services can provide the same features and functionality as appliances, but in a more scalable, unified, and cost-effective manner. A complete solution needs to provide visibility and support for the virtual applications and allow for application mobility and on-demand capacity expansion. IT organizations have been pushed in to taking a piecemeal approach to adding these services by cobbling together solutions using point-products, and deploying physical appliances in each data center. This is because a virtualized network services solution that implements services in a standardized, holistic way has not been available.

Addressing the Need for Cloud Service Assurance

The Enterprise Goal
Enterprises are continually striving to reduce their IT costs and optimize utilization of their compute resources. The demand for compute, storage and networking resources to support business applications can be difficult to predict, leading to risks of overbuilding or underestimation of demand. As a result Enterprises are looking to adopt cloud services that are available on-demand, and are flexible and scalable to meet their IT service needs in a predictable and cost effective manner.

The Service Provider Advantage
Communications service providers are in a unique position to meet the needs of the Enterprise for service assurance as they develop cloud services. With considerable experience in managing data centers, and with an IP NGN MPLS network spanning from their data centers to enterprise locations around the globe, as well as having back office systems, including billing and support, communications service providers have what it takes for success in the cloud services market. Given the critical role of both the data center and the network in application delivery the development of cloud-based services represents an opportunity for the communications service provider to work with the enterprise to help them overcome their challenges for delivery of business critical applications throughout the organization, while meeting their business goals to contain costs, protect data assets, and ensure employee productivity.

Leverage The Network
Too meet these challenges and deliver reliable cloud-services communications service providers can leverage their IP NGN MPLS network and data center assets and apply their considerable expertise and experience to deliver service level agreements that align with the business processes of the enterprise, so that the enterprise can adopt cloud services with confidence, knowing that their applications will have the performance and security that they need as they are delivered over the WAN.

Enabling the Network Service Layer for Virtualized and Cloud Infrastructure

The Need for Virtualization
In their quest to reduce administrative and hardware costs and to increase the availability of server resources IT administrators are embracing server virtualization to the point that it has become a fundamental data center technology. Server virtualization makes it possible for IT administrators to move virtual server instances, and the applications that run on them, from one physical machine to another as needed, and have to them running at the new location within moments. This mobility allows IT administrators to optimize server utilization or to take advantage of idle compute resources as well as to recover from server failures almost instantly.

Workload Availability
The mobility of virtual servers is what makes server virtualization so appealing. This mobility not only enables movement of virtual machines from one server to another within the same data center, it also enables movement of virtual machines from one data center to another. Mobility of virtual machines between data centers is critical as it enables IT administrators to make use of available resources in another data center and to recover from data center outages, maintaining availability to applications and business services seamlessly.

The Network Can Help
In the data center application performance, availability and security is enhanced by a number of network services such as server load balancing, WAN Optimization and firewalls, which have been delivered by physical appliances. As IT administrators take advantage of the benefits of server mobility that is enabled by server virtualization they seek to have the same mobility available in the network services that benefit those virtual servers and their applications. While it’s possible to have the same network services appliances running in all data centers the challenge is with configuring them to recognize the specific virtual server instances that have been moved between data centers.