The Universal Quest for Speed
Business innovation has always been key to the success of organizations, especially for those willing to adopt new solutions. From the first abacus and the invention of double entry bookkeeping to the introduction of the ticker tape to copy machine, technology has one thing in common – it has always enabled business to function faster and more efficiently, saving money and increasing productivity.Today’s digital innovation is no different. Applications and device functionality continue to accelerate business. And underlying those functions is the need for performance. Organizations literally spend trillions of dollars upgrading their networks and devices to generate more computing capacity to accommodate evolving business solutions. As a result, a single end user device today has more processing power, generates more data, and requires access to more digital resources than existed in the entire world just a handful of decades ago.To read this article in full, please click here
The data center must rapidly change. Companies are increasingly moving toward hybrid IT models, with some workloads in the cloud and others staying on premises. The burden of ever-growing apps and data is placing pressure on infrastructure in both worlds, but especially the data center.Organizations are struggling to reach the required speed and flexibility — with the same public-cloud economics — from their on-premises data centers. That’s likely because they’re dealing with legacy systems acquired over the years, possibly inherited as the result of mergers and acquisitions.These complex environments create headaches when trying to accommodate for IT capacity fluctuations. When extra storage is needed, for example, 67% of IT departments buy too much, according to Futurum Research. They don’t have the visibility into resources, nor the ability to effectively scale up and down.To read this article in full, please click here
Back in 1960, a Lockheed engineer named Kelly Johnson coined the acronym KISS for “keep it simple stupid.” His wise—and simple—advice was that systems tend to work better when they’re simple than when they’re complex. KISS became an essential U.S. Navy design principle and captures the crux of any WAN transformation initiative.So many of the challenges of today’s WANs stem from the sheer number of components involved. Each location may require one or more routers, firewalls, WAN optimizers, VPN concentrators, and other devices just to connect safely and effectively with other locations or the cloud. The result: multiple points of failure and a potential uptime and troubleshooting nightmare. Simply understanding the state of the WAN can be difficult with information spread across so many devices and components. Managing all the updates required to protect the network from new and evolving threats can be overwhelming.To read this article in full, please click here
WAN edge infrastructure is one of the most rapidly changing areas of IT, driven largely by the unabated migration of business applications to SaaS offerings and to public clouds or IaaS instances. As reported recently by Forbes, 83 percent of enterprise workloads will be hosted in the cloud by 2020[1]. No longer centrally hosted solely in corporate data centers, applications are now hosted anywhere, and often in multiple locations. SaaS and IaaS providers strategically host their services in multiple data centers around the globe in metropolitan cities where business users are located. Connecting users to the closest SaaS and IaaS instances minimizes data transmission latency or delay and delivers the highest cloud application performance to end users. To read this article in full, please click here
This is the first installment of a multi-part blog series that will provide an overview of how technology is dramatically reshaping the healthcare industry and how the wide area network (WAN) can significantly affect innovation acceleration and customer satisfaction in this sector.Like many other industries, the healthcare industry is also undergoing a digital transformation. And, despite being always considered “behind the times” in leveraging information technology, the delivery of healthcare services is becoming more and more modern and data-driven each day. The evolution in data, mobile and cloud technologies is driving healthcare providers to shift from a provider-driven toward a patient-centric business model. Patients today have the same expectations of healthcare providers as they have of any retailer or any other product or service, and they want healthcare on their own schedule and even on-demand.To read this article in full, please click here
For Michael Soler, a senior infrastructure manager at Westcon-Comstor, a major IT distributor, moving to a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) was as much about taking control of the network as it was about saving money.The move accomplished both, according to Soler. “It’s been a very successful story,” says Soler. “We have gained visibility, and this means control. I can see which users are using which applications, and we can look at bandwidth. We wanted to save money and we greatly succeeded.”Of course, there is more to the story than that. Soler says moving to an SD-WAN platform, built by Silver Peak, accomplished many goals at once. These included:To read this article in full, please click here
A few years ago, a blind man rode in a car in Austin, Texas. Normally, such a trip would not make national headlines. However, this blind man was alone in the car. That might sound like the set up for a joke, but it’s actually a pointer toward the future. The car was one of Google’s self-driving cars. After the ride, the gentleman exited the vehicle and entered history.That’s just one story in a never-ending stream of prognostication, commentary and “gee whiz” quips about the coming era of autonomous vehicles (AV). AVs are burning rubber in media of all kinds (you can find video of the blind man’s spin around the block here). Some of these stories address concerns about AVs and I don’t mean to discount them. Yet, AVs have an air of inevitability about them, don’t they? It’s not a question of “if” it happens, but “when.”To read this article in full, please click here
I just left another CIO meeting with a Fortune 100 prospect who was wondering, “why Silver Peak versus the 800-pound gorilla in the networking space that offers several different ‘SD-WAN’ offerings?” The challenge she faced wasn’t about whether it was the best solution or not - Silver Peak cruised through the technical evaluation, easily winning the technical recommendation. What she really wanted to know is if she should trust the future of her next Wide Area Network (WAN) to a private company.This is a challenge we at Silver Peak face in seemingly every account we earn. The technical part isn’t the hard part, as we consistently win product evaluations and bakeoffs. What we have to prove is that it’s actually less risky to choose Silver Peak as the platform to build their next generation WAN on when compared to trying to stretch a Cisco router-centric model. To read this article in full, please click here
HPE GreenLake is a true pay-as-you-go, consumption-based approach to hybrid IT. It’s different from anything else on the market, so it’s not surprising that customers tend to have lots of questions. Here are some that I hear quite often:Do I have to purchase the infrastructure?No. HPE GreenLake is an “as-a-service” model, so we own and manage the equipment for you at your site, and we provide a buffer of capacity right-sized to your business. Then we measure how much you use, and we charge based on that usage.What if I run out of capacity?To read this article in full, please click here
Data is at the center of everything we do today. It’s a massive resource that you can use to fuel innovation, steer the business with greater insights, and rev up people to do their best work. But data overload, unpredictable workload demands, and growing maintenance and security requirements can stall important initiatives when storage systems lack the performance, scale, agility, and efficiency to keep up.But there’s good news. The agility and economics of HPE storage combined with HPE GreenLake let you run IT like a finely tuned engine:
Improve economics with no up-front payment and 100% economic storage utilization
Reduce risk of running out of capacity or wasting money by overprovisioning
Accelerate value with on-demand storage solutions aligned to your workload needs
Ensure control over performance, security, and compliance.
Click here to view the complete infographic. To read this article in full, please click here
We’re hearing a lot these days about how CIOs are becoming more strategic partners with executive management – how IT is moving closer to the core of the business and earning a seat at the table in strategy discussions. I’m a bit skeptical that it’s happening on anything like a broad scale. It’s certainly true that there’s an awareness that IT is “mission critical,” that you absolutely cannot afford to have the network go down even for a second, or a security slip-up that results in losing hundreds of thousands of credit card records. Those are hugely important discussions, but they’re not seen as directly related to business outcomes.Many in the C-Suite still see at least a percentage of IT expenditures as almost like a tax on the business. When IT leaders get into investment conversations, their colleagues are often about as excited as the rest of us are when it’s time to pay our personal income tax bill.To read this article in full, please click here
This video is hosted by Owen Rogers of 451 Research and discusses key considerations for workload placement, cost control, and management of hybrid cloud environments. It is based on research conducted for HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud. Click here to watch the video.
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In an age when every company is a technology business, digital transformation becomes imperative for enterprises to remain competitive. The first wave of digital transformation focused on moving workloads to the cloud. Enterprises undergoing large-scale digital transformations centralized data processing and storage by migrating entire operations to public or private cloud services. The recent influx of connected devices and the resulting data explosion is putting a strain on this model, and now companies are looking toward the next wave of transformation that will move them closer to the edge and their customers.Today, the explosion of IoT devices, autonomous vehicles, robotic systems, and other digital platforms has resulted in a deluge of data and a vast expansion at the edge of the network. This is putting a strain on the network and requires new ways of processing, analyzing, and acting on this data in real time. This intersection of new technologies and the massive amounts of data they produce put us at an inflection point when we consider the architectures that will help us manage the global economy.To read this article in full, please click here
The software-defined movement keeps marching on. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is redefining the branch edge by displacing legacy technologies like MPLS, WAN optimizers, and routers. Software-defined Perimeter (SDP) is displacing whole network access via mobile VPN with secure and optimized access from any device to specific applications in physical and cloud datacenters. These seem like unrelated developments, despite the “software-defined” buzz, because enterprise IT thinks about physical locations, mobile users, and applications separately. Each enterprise edge, location, person, or application is usually served by different technologies and often by different teams.To read this article in full, please click here
Now that the technology has been with us for some time, interest in and adoption of software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) is heating up. It’s a good time to look at what’s driving organizations to implement SD-WAN and what type of organizations the technology is best suited for. The technology has clearly taken off. A 2018 survey of 225 IT professionals by SevOne found 66% of respondents already had at least some percentage of their WAN software-defined, and nearly 50% had active SD-WAN projects. Perhaps most impressive, 17% of respondents said they’d connect 100 or more remote sites within 12 to 18 months.To read this article in full, please click here
Keeping an SD-WAN in Harmony with the Business Requires a Great Orchestrator
According to Merriam-Webster, orchestration is defined as 1: the arrangement of a musical composition for performance by an orchestra (a group of musicians including especially string players organized to perform ensemble music); 2: harmonious organizationIf you’ve ever attended the symphony, you have probably noticed the vibrant movement of the conductor waving his baton in front of the orchestra. The conductor has one of the most visible jobs in the music world, but despite this, many concertgoers are likely unclear about what the conductor is really doing. The conductor’s job is to assign different instruments to the musicians that play the different elements that make up the musical composition. The primary goal of the conductor is to orchestrate harmony across all of the instruments so that every instrument is audible. However, the conductor doesn’t simply keep the orchestra in time or harmony, most importantly, he serves as a messenger for the composer. The conductor intrinsically understands the music and communicates it to the musicians using his baton so that the orchestra can transmit a cohesive view of the music to the audience.To read this article in full, Continue reading
There’s little question that software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) have taken off, as companies look for increased network resiliency and control. But there’s still significant confusion about SD-WAN, including some benefits that are more myth than reality.In this post, we’ll explore three common misconceptions that surround SD-WAN, starting with what is probably the most important one.Misconception #1: SD-WAN will replace services such as MPLS
SD-WAN doesn’t necessary replace any existing network service, be it MPLS, broadband Internet, or anything else. In fact, it requires some kind of network service to work at all.To read this article in full, please click here
Software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technology can bring myriad benefits to companies of nearly any size or stripe, but as discussed in a previous post, it can be complex to deploy. For many IT teams, the solution means opting for a managed SD-WAN service. But this may lead to another issue: how to assess providers.After conversations with CenturyLink executive Michael Lawson, General Manager of SD-WAN Solution Architecture for CenturyLink– I’ve come up with eight considerations when assessing SD-WAN managed service providers.To read this article in full, please click here
An earlier three-part series of blog posts examined a series of questions to ask to determine whether your company may be a good candidate to implement Software-Defined Wide-area Network (SD-WAN) technology. What the series did not cover was whether you’ve got the personnel in-house that it takes to architect and implement an SD-WAN and manage it for the long-term. That requires assessing a different series of questions. While SD-WAN has been talked about for years, it is still a relatively young technology that has not yet seen widespread implementation, notes Michael Lawson, General Manager of SD-WAN Solution Architecture for CenturyLink. “There’s still a lot of learning going on,” he says.To read this article in full, please click here
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with coining the adage “change is the only constant in life” – a saying that certainly applies to enterprises in 2019. With change as a given, it’s crucial for businesses to be agile and flexible in order to keep up.Employing software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technology is one way to promote business agility. SD-WANs abstract the network control layer from the underlying forwarding plane and physical transport. Users can employ most any wide-area network service – leased lines, MPLS, broadband wireless, Internet – and still apply policy-based control and other SD-WAN features.To read this article in full, please click here
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