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.
Optimizing the way applications are delivered and managed has been an ongoing challenge in enterprise IT, and the variety of approaches over the years have been received with varying degrees of success. While every method has pros and cons, some of the most stubborn issues include time-to-deliver, application conflicts, plug-ins and licensing. The too-frequent result is high IT overhead, too many gold images and excess spending on application licenses.
Too many companies are settling on less than optimal solutions because that is all they are presented with and they are unaware of the true state of the art for application management. It is possible to dramatically reduce the number of Windows gold images, in some cases to a single image. It is possible to deliver exactly what each and every end user needs to do their job, and nothing else. It is possible for a user to log into a random system and instantly be presented with their personal desktop, all the right applications, plugins and add-ons, the right printers, and the right fonts. It is possible and it is simple.
Citrix AppDisk, when integrated with FSLogix Apps, provides a unique set of features that can improve end-user productivity, reduce IT overhead and lower the cost of desktop management. With FSLogix patent pending Image Masking technology, AppDisk gains very granular and powerful user-based policy control over every aspect of a user’s desktop and applications, and enhances the ability to distribute applications on network attached disk images. FSLogix Apps also enable AppDisks to scale to a much greater degree than any other similar technologies available today.
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.
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
Fulton Financial Corporation has a long and storied history that began in 1882 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where local merchants and farmers organized Fulton National Bank. The bank’s name was chosen to honor Lancaster County native Robert Fulton, the inventor and artist best known for designing and building the Clermont, the first successful steamboat.
In an effort to optimize the productivity of its employees and enable them to have more time to focus on their customers, Fulton sought to upgrade the thin clients for its Citrix application virtualization infrastructure, with the help of its Citrix partner and IGEL Platinum Partner, Plan B Technologies.
In selecting a desktop computing solution to support its Citrix application virtualization infrastructure, Fulton had one unique business requirement, they were looking for a solution that would mirror the experience provided by a Windows PC, without actually being a Windows PC.
During the evaluation process, Fulton looked at thin clients from IGEL and another leading manufacturer, conducting a “bake-off” of several models including the IGEL Universal Desktop (UD6). Fulton like the fact that IGEL is forward- thinking in designing its desktop computing solutions, and began its IGEL roll-out by purchasing 2,300 IGEL UD6 thin clients in 2016 for its headquarters and branch offices, and plans to complete the roll out of IGEL thin clients to the remainder of its 3,700 employees in the coming months. The bank is also leveraging the IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS) to manage its fleet of IGEL thin clients.
Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union is more than just a bank. It is a financial cooperative intent on helping its members save time, save money and earn money. Over the years, the credit union has grown from providing financial resources to military service members and their families to serving hundreds of thousands of members across Texas and around the world. RBFCU has a presence in three major market areas — Austin, Dallas and San Antonio — and has more than 55 branches dedicated to serving members and the community.
First and foremost, RBFCU is people. It’s the more than 1,800 employees who serve members’ needs each day. It’s the senior team and Board of Directors that guide the credit union’s growth. It’s the members who give their support and loyalty to the credit union each day.
To help its employees provide the credit union’s members with the highest levels of services and support, Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union relies on IGEL’s endpoint computing solutions.
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.
All IT managers understand the critical role they play in ensuring that the enterprise computing infrastructure under their control is effective in meeting the business goals of the organization. Indeed, staying competitive in the rapidly evolving world of today requires that businesses take a proactive mindset towards leveraging their IT investments to deliver key insights through big data initiatives.
The adoption of this mentality is often reflected by the inclusion of dedicated data science teams capable of driving these projects. These groups apply advanced analytical algorithms and artificial intelligence to large datasets with a goal of deriving competitive advantages for the organization.
The specific implementations vary and may impact a variety of business processes such as product development, marketing initiatives, sales management, etc. However, as the adoption of these practices continues to increase, IT teams need to be prepared to effectively support them. While on the surface it may seem that big data workloads are simply another application to deploy and manage, in practice they entail multiple challenges.
In this paper, we demonstrate the ability to implement a big data use case in practice using a hybrid cloud deployment strategy. We provide an overview of our sample scenario, followed by a detailed deployment walk through that enables users to easily replicate the scenario in their own environments. By the end of this paper, readers should have a clear understanding of how big data use cases can be implemented using the underlying technologies covered and how the adoption of hybrid cloud computing environments enables IT leaders to successfully meet the needs of these initiatives within their organizations.
With hardware-based thin client shipments in the region of 4–5 million units annually, this market is still a drop in the ocean compared to the 270 million PCs shipping each year, though the latter figure has been declining since 2011. And within the thin client market, Igel is in fourth place behind Dell and HP (each at around 1.2 million units annually) and China’s Centerm, which only sells into its home market.
However, the future for thin clients looks bright, in that the software-based segment of the market (which some analyst houses refuse to acknowledge) is expanding, particularly for Igel. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology has stimulated this growth, but the greatest promise is probably in the embryonic DaaS market, whereby enterprises will have standard images for their workforce hosted by service providers.
Modern enterprise IT teams are increasingly adopting cloud computing technologies as a foundational component of their strategy to deliver business value for internal stakeholders.
While public cloud infrastructures are often an initial launching point for experimenting with these environments, private cloud solutions are an attractive alternative due to their ability to meet specific functional and security requirements while extending comparable benefits. To truly realize the potential of these investments, however, organizations need to be able to instantiate their high value use cases via private cloud capabilities such as those offered by Stratoscale’s solution.
A critical area of responsibility for IT teams is that they identify appropriate solutions for line-of-business (LOB) applications to meet the requirements of the business units that they support. As part of this, they take on the ownership of deploying, managing, and accommodating the customization of these workloads as needed. Many applications capable of meeting LOB requirements today are packaged and delivered as web services due to the fact that these configurations offer multiple operational advantages including scalability and resiliency. In addition, they allow providers to meet demands from users that they be able to access application functionality seamlessly across their various screens including desktops and mobile devices. For IT teams, this translates into the need for deploying internal facing web services using their private cloud infrastructures.
As opposed to traditional desktop software which may be updated on an infrequent basis, web services engender a model where functionality is continuously under development. This implies that IT teams work closely with developers to ensure that application improvements are released to users in a methodical and timely manner. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines can be built to accommodate this interaction so that value created by developers can be rapidly and safely delivered to users in an iterative manner.
The technology of cloud computing has caught up with virtual desktop infrastructures. Tapping into the agility and flexibility of cloud-hosted infrastructures, Citrix Cloud enables organizations to simplify digital workspace delivery. With many of the critical components of the Citrix delivery infrastructure hosted in the cloud and managed by Citrix, organizations can speed up deployment, lower hardware footprint, increase ROI, simplify IT operations. Despite the many benefits of Citrix Cloud, the performance management challenges still persist, just as they do in traditional on-premises Citrix deployments.
Read this eG Innovations white paper, and understand: