Massive changes are occurring to how applications are built and how they are deployed and run. The benefits of these changes are dramatically increased responsiveness to the business (business agility), increased operational flexibility, and reduced operating costs.
The environments onto which these applications are deployed are also undergoing a fundamental change. Virtualized environments offer increased operational agility which translates into a more responsive IT Operations organization. Cloud Computing offers applications owners a complete out-sourced alternative to internal data center execution environments. IT organizations are in turn responding to public cloud with IT as a Service (IaaS) initiatives.
For applications running in virtualized, distributed and shared environments, it will no longer work to infer the “performance” of an application by looking at various resource utilization statistics. Rather it will become essential to define application performance as response time – and to directly measure the response time and throughput of every application in production. This paper makes the case for how application performance management for virtualized and cloud based environments needs to be modernized to suit these new environments.
This whitepaper provides an overview of Citrix AppDNA with Liquidware Labs FlexApp.
Zerto Offsite Backup in the Cloud
What is Offsite Backup?
Offsite Backup is a new paradigm in data protection that combines hypervisor-based replication with longer retention. This greatly simplifies data protection for IT organizations. The ability to leverage the data at the disaster recovery target site or in the cloud for VM backup eliminates the impact on production workloads.
Why Cloud Backup?
A simple truth: Current application delivery and deployment solutions for Windows®-based desktops are often not fast enough, and the methods employed introduce complexities and limitations that cost enterprises valuable time, money and productivity. There is a strong need for a solution that is faster to deploy, simpler to use, and improves productivity rather than degrades it. In fact, the best solution would seamlessly and instantaneously personalizing the entire desktop, from profiles and printers to applications and extensions, while supporting license compliance and cost optimization. And, of course, it wouldn’t matter if the target desktops were physical, virtual, or cloud-based. FSLogix is delivering that solution today.
UNIQUE, CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY
Vembu has grown its revenue 35% annually over the past two years and is on track to meet that mark in 2014. Key product additions this year include a suite of CRM applications and the introduction of onpremises virtual appliances (with physical appliances to come in the near future). The latter move puts Vembu in more direct competition with relatively well known players in the hybrid cloud backup battle.
Vembu is celebrating its 10 year anniversary by exceeding the 60,000 customer milestone, sold mainly through its 4,400 channel partners. That compares with 55,000 customers and 4,000 resellers in February 2014. The company has added 400 resellers so far this year, and has begun to emphasize VARs in addition to its traditional target market of MSPs. Notable serviceprovider partners include Verizon's Terremark subsidiary, mindSHIFT Technologies, HostPapa and Hitachi Data Systems. The profitable Vembu claims to have exceeded 35% revenue growth in each of the past two years, and is on track for similar gains this year.
The company expects to have 200 employees by the end of 2014 (up from 160 in February), and 300 by the end of 2015. Most of its employees are near its headquarters in Chennai, India (with 65% engaged in R&D), but Vembu has been steadily expanding internationally. It opened an office in London this year, and relocated its US headquarters to Addison, Texas, where it expects to grow its workforce from 15 employees this year to 50 next year Vembu's worldwide distribution of partners roughly equates to its worldwide revenue distribution: 70% North America, 20% Europe and 10% AsiaPacific – a distribution that has remained fairly steady over the past year. However, although about 30% of its revenue comes from outside North America today, Vembu hopes to increase that to 50% in 2015. Key target markets for 2015 include the EU5 countries, Scandinavia, Brazil and China
Backup is just not about storage. It’s the intelligence on top of storage. Typically when businesses think of backup, they see it as a simple data copy from one location to another. Traditional file systems would suffice if the need were to just copy the data. But backup is the intelligence applied on top of storage where data can be put to actual use. Imagine the ability to use backup data for staging, testing, development and preproduction deployment. Traditional file systems are not designed to meet such complex requirements.
With the advent of information technology, more and more organizations are relying on IT for running their businesses. They cannot afford to have downtime on their critical applications and need instant access to data in the event of disaster. Hence, a new type of file system is necessary to satisfy this need.
VembuHIVETM manages the metadata smartly through its patent-pending technology, in a way that is agnostic to the file system of the backup, which is why we call VembuHIVETM, a file system of file systems. This helps the backup application to instantly associate the data in VembuHIVETM to any file system metadata, thereby allowing on-demand file or image restores in many possible file formats. The data and metadata storage, harness cluster file system and computing and storage.
This is a really powerful concept that will address some very interesting use cases not just in the backup and recovery domain but also in other domains, such as big-data analytics.
The key to the design of VembuHIVETM is its novel mechanism to capture and generate appropriate metadata and store it intelligently in a cloud infrastructure. The increment data (the changes with respect to a previous version of the same backup) are treated like versions in a version control system (CVS, GIT). This revolutionary way of data capture and metadata generation provides seamless support to a wide range of complex restore use cases.
This document contains the steps required to install a Proof-of-Concept (POC) environment for RDSH Full Desktop with FSLogix Apps. POC environments created according to this install guide can be used to test applications controlled by FSLogix Apps in a reproducible way. We build the environment in the cloud in order to minimize costs associated with required hardware, and to streamline the build process.
The testing environment is built entirely in Azure and contains an IaaS RDSH deployment including the supporting network and domain infrastructure. A non-Azure based client component accesses the RDSH deployment.
OVERVIEW
The virtualization of physical computers has become the backbone of public and private cloud computing from desktops to data centers, enabling organizations to optimize hardware utilization, enhance security, support multi-tenancy and more. These environments are complex and ephemeral, creating requirements and challenges beyond the capability of traditional monitoring tools that were originally designed for static physical environments. But modern solutions exist, and can bring your virtual environment to new levels of efficiency, performance and scale.
This guide explains the pervasiveness of virtualized environments in modern data centers, the demand these environments create for more robust monitoring and analytics solutions, and the keys to getting the most out of virtualization deployments.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
· History and Expansion of Virtualized Environments
· Monitoring Virtual Environments
· Approaches to Monitoring
· Why Effective Virtualization Monitoring Matters
· A Unified Approach to Monitoring Virtualized Environments
· 5 Key Capabilities for Virtualization Monitoring
o Real-Time Awareness
o Rapid Root-Cause Analytics
o End-to-End Visibility
o Complete Flexibility
o Hypervisor Agnosticism
· Evaluating a Monitoring Solution
o Unified View
o Scalability
o CMDB Support
o Converged Infrastructure
o Licensing
· Zenoss for Virtualization Monitoring
With so many organizations looking to find ways to embrace the public cloud without compromising the security of their data and applications, a hybrid cloud strategy is rapidly becoming the preferred method of efficiently delivering IT services.
This guide aims to provide you with an understanding of the driving factors behind why the cloud is being adopted en-masse, as well as advice on how to begin building your own cloud strategy.
Topics discussed include:• Why Cloud?• Getting There Safely• IT Resilience in the Hybrid Cloud• The Power of Microsoft Azure and Zerto
You’ll find out how, by embracing the cloud, organizations can achieve true IT Resilience – the ability to withstand any disruption, confidently embrace change and focus on business.
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Trinsic Technologies is a technology solutions provider focused on delivering managed IT and cloud solutions to SMBs since 2005.
In 2014, Trinsic introduced Anytime Cloud, a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) designed to help SMB clients improve the end user computing experience and streamline business operations. To support Anytime Cloud, the solution provider was looking for a desktop delivery and endpoint management solution that would fulfill a variety of different end user needs and requirements across the multiple industries it serves. Trinsic also wanted a solution that provided ease of management and robust security features for clients operating within regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services.
The solution provider selected the IGEL Universal Desktop (UD) thin clients, the IGEL Universal Desktop Converter (UDC), the IGEL OS and the IGEL Universal Management Suite. As a result, some of the key benefits Trinsic has experienced include ease of management and configuration, security and data protection, improved resource allocation and cost savings.
Virtualizing Windows applications and desktops in the data center or cloud has compelling security, mobility and management benefits, but delivering real-time voice and video in a virtual environment is a challenge. A poorly optimized implementation can increase costs and compromise user experience. Server scalability and bandwidth efficiency may be less than optimal, and audio-video quality may be degraded.
Enabling voice and video with a bundled solution in an existing Citrix environment delivers clearer and crisper voice and video than legacy phone systems. This solution guide describes how Sennheiser headsets combine with Citrix infrastructure and IGEL endpoints to provide a better, more secure user experience. It also describes how to deploy the bundled Citrix-Sennheiser-IGEL solution.