NetApp - Absolute Architect

Arista’s done it again.

What do you get when you combine chocolate and peanut butter?  A delicious combo worthy of the best dessert sinner.  What do you get when you combine the industry’s top heavy hitters to lead a company of unsurpassed technology?  A competitor killer.  Also known as Arista Networks, the “Glamour Startup” of Silicon Valley and NetApp’s Advantage Alliance Partner.  The recipe for a pseudo Reese’s cup may be simple, but the ingredients that have made Arista an even more complimentary combination is its stellar leadership team, engineering, and best of breed 10 GbE technology, which now even allows you to bridge not only physical, but also virtual and cloud networks .  You’ve got Andy Bechtolsheim, Jayshree Ullal – and a list of other stellar rock stars that keep wowing us in the networking industry.  Well... now they’ve done it again.

In order to address the growing challenges of managing virtual and physical infrastructures with multiple network operating systems, our strong partner, Arista Networks has developed the first management system to bridge physical, virtual and cloud networks.  With this solution, network administrators now have the ability to treat existing Virtual Distributed Switches as an extension of the physical network and manage them with industry standard CLI and SNMP while at the same time relieving the burden of network configuration from VM host administrators. 

This is HUGE and will be one of the most significant solutions in the virtual/cloud space given that one of the biggest networking challenges with server virtualization is the management of virtualized network and security profiles along with VM configurations as they migrate across physical hosts.  Achieving this in a way that scales is very difficult and usually ends up with enterprises to take their server virtualization efforts beyond server consolidation and into dynamic resource allocation.  Now, Arista has solved this problem… and very elegantly and cost-effectively, I might add.

vEOS (virtualized Extensible Operating System) is an integrated networking software that peers with VMware’s vSphere to link physical and virtual machines to network policy and profiles. With vEOS, IT organizations can now move applications from physical servers to virtual machines and to cloud infrastructures while maintaining segmentation, trust boundaries, and policy.  vEOS is a single system image that runs on the Arista 7000 Family of switches or as a VMware virtual appliance running on any host.  It is an implementation of Arista EOS that manages VMware vNetwork Distributed Switches (vDS).  vEOS also provides an industry-standard and familiar network interface to the administrator for configuration and monitoring, without disrupting the virtualized infrastructure.

 Arista vEOS Workflow and Operation

NetApp believes that since there are numerous elements that must come together to create a cloud infrastructure, no single vendor is able to adequately address every single layer.  This is why it’s vital that customers identify the right partners that can provide the services, technology, and integration necessary for their unique cloud needs.  We have some best-of-breed partners that not only help our customers, but also help validate our technology offering for the cloud.  NetApp has long been a Cloud Enabler and with Arista being a Advantage Alliance Partner of ours, I am very excited to see how their vEOS will help enable NetApp to continue as a leader in this space.  I feel this is especially evident given the fact that we have two very strong common partners – VMware and Citrix. 

“With VMware® vSphere™ 4 and NetApp storage technologies, enterprises can build and operate a virtualized, services-based data center to more rapidly address changes in business requirements, meet the demand for 24x7 business resiliency, and drastically reduce costs. VMware vSphere 4 allows IT to virtualize and allocate resources on demand and complements the special cloud benefits of NetApp storage. VMware and NetApp together help enable the next generation of flexible, reliable enterprise IT services with the efficiency, control, and choice that cloud computing offers.”  - Parag Patel, vice president, Alliances, for VMware

"Customers like the idea of seamlessly managing their heterogeneous datacenter environments. The new Arista vEOS complements VMware vSphere 4 and existing management frameworks so that customers can move workloads across mixed deployments without the headache of manual configurations" - Shekar Ayyar, Vice President, Infrastructure Alliances, VMware.

“Citrix Cloud Center (C3) integrated with NetApp storage systems provides cloud providers with a robust platform for delivering infrastructure as a service. As the foundation for Citrix C3, XenServer and Citrix Essentials enable cloud service providers to seamlessly leverage the advanced NetApp storage capabilities across their cloud platform, reducing the time and cost to deploy highly scalable and elastic services.” - Frank Artale, vice president of business development for Citrix Systems, Inc.

"We are excited to be working with Arista Networks to define important, emerging standards for cloud networking solutions. NetScaler VPX is a revolutionary technology enabling critical application delivery services to be deployed throughout datacenter and cloud networks." -Klaus Oestermann, Vice President & General Manager, NetScaler Product Group, Citrix Systems.

So, Arista’s done it again with adding another component to their best-of-breed products and you can be sure that I’ll be following how well this is going to be deployed and received in the industry just as soon as they start their Open Beta program in October/November 2009.

Is your head in the clouds like mine?  If so, visit NetApp to float some of your own ideas.

It's all about the Benjamins.

In 2008, Cloud Computing was more popular than what A-List celebrities wore on the red carpet.   As the worst economic year since 1931 came to a close, why does Cloud Computing remain such a hot topic for 2009?  The driving force?  Arista Networks Chairman and Co-Founder (& Sun Microsystems Co-Founder), Andy Bechtolsheim, said it best in one word – Economics.    It’s all about the “Benjamins” and what a cloud computing infrastructure can do for your wallet.   

Analysts tend to agree; according to IDC, the market for cloud spending is expected to grow 6x faster than traditional IT spending in the foreseeable future and will reach $42 Billion by 2012.  That’s huge and definitely something worth exploring for vendors.   

Additionally, IDC predicts that Total IT Spending will grow an average of 7% per year from 2008 to 2012 whereas Cloud Spending will grow a staggering 27% per year.  The pie chart from IDC below shows that over half of IT Cloud spending will be for the application side.  By moving the application layer to the Internet, vendors can implement a “software-as-a-service” business model due to its ease of deployment across multiple sites while at the same time separating the user and the physical datacenter location.  Companies such as Facebook and Yahoo have already been reaping the benefits from a vendor perspective.

Here are some FACTS, not opinions, about what Cloud Computing  can do for vendors:

Easier for application vendors to reach new customers.

Delivering & supporting applications is easier and cost effective.

Using commodity server & storage hardware costs less.

Driving down data center operational costs saves money.   

Everything above in bold == economics.  Nuff said.

Today Will Go Down in History for Cloud Networking!

As I sit here catching up on email in a high-rise penthouse tonight in downtown Dubai, I can’t help but feel the excitement and hype that is going on in the Valley right now as if I were back home halfway across the globe.  Today marks a day that will forever go down in history!  Arista Networks has appointed very well-respected industry veteran Jayshree Ullal, (check out her blog), as their President & CEO while founder Andy Bechtolsheim leaves Sun Microsystems to focus whole-heartedly on this latest and greatest venture. 

Arista Networks is gaining ground and rising to the very top on being known for having best-of-breed 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches that deliver Cloud Networking Solutions for large scale datacenter and computing environments.  (I've been watching them very closely and you should too!)  If you need a refresher, check out this 10GigE whitepaper. 

Why is this so cool? With all that is going on with Cloud Computing & Networking, it’s really awesome to see such strides in innovation with some of the best & brightest people in the world leading the charge – literally.

As discussed in my previous post, In order for this to work, and work well, you need to have better cost-performance over your current network infrastructure.  You also need better capacity to store everything and improved latency for the users who are depending on it to deliver their application delivery.  The diagram below from the up-and-coming leader sums it up nicely:

 

source Arista Networks

So, as I look out my high-rise window at the Burj Dubai, which is twice as tall as the Sears Tower FYI, I can’t help but think of it as a metaphor for what’s to come in the world of 10Gbit and Cloud Networking. I guess the sky really is the limit & I can’t wait to follow along and see where this best-of-breed technology takes us!

NY Times | BusinessWeek | Forbes | CNET | GigaOM | Huliq | MarketWatch

Every Cloud Has A Silver Computing Lining.

Cloud Computing has been getting a lot of hype lately... and rightfully so.  NetApp refers to a form of it as Grid Computing and ever since it's conception, my heads been in the clouds thinking about it and how it's going to change the way we run IT and our businesses.  This particular topic has been on the forefront of my mind recently...

According to Wikipedia, Cloud Computing is based development and use of computer technology where the cloud is a metaphor for the Internet and an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.  It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them.

For those of you who are still into Sunny Computing, wouldn't it be more logical to use services and not have to know anything about the infrastructure that supports it?  This is one of the main benefits I think consumers will feel.  Who wouldn't want to access their apps and technology-enabled services via the Internet?  After all, you don't need to bother yourself with knowing the infrastructure in which it resides since you simply get to use what you need as you normally would via the network.  Some common cloud computing applications today are Facebook, Google Apps, & Microsoft Online. 

My very good friend and colleague, NetApp's CTO-at-Large , Val Bercovici feels that Cloud Computing represents a promising intersection of technical and economic trends to form a new kind of ‘information chain’ akin to supply chains in the manufacturing industry.  Networking improvements, web services, grid computing and  scalable storage solutions are enabling new economies of scale for service providers.  They are leveraging huge capital equipment investments to offer virtual computing infrastructure rentals with common interfaces, just-in-time availability and granularity billing.  This gives IT consumers of all sizes new options for shifting large capital infrastructure costs towards more incremental operational expenses in order to better enable their businesses.

This is what I like to hear.  The ability to leverage your equipment investments into virtual computing rentals is, what I feel, to be around in the present and near future.  It is the most cost-effective and logical way for service providers to do business.

As I think about my NetApp customers and consumers in general, I realize the need for them to not own the infrastructure per se, but rather simply access and use resources as a service and pay as they go for what they use (as long as the storage infrastructure is NetApp, of course) The payment model for this type of offering is similar to that of a utility computing model where you are billed on a subscription basis.  You share your city's water and electricity with your neighbors and similarly you'll share you computing power between multiple users.  The cool thing is that since we're sharing resources, servers out there wont be left idle and hence utilization rates will improve and costs will decrease.

Someone is going to be the leader in all of this... and I'm watching closely and doing my own research to find out just who the front-runner is going to be.  Somewhere... over the rainbow... Cloud Computing is the wave of the future.