As Mobility trends continue to transform the way we communicate, collaborate, and access information, enterprises are taking a wireless-first approach to connectivity. They need mobile networking solutions that allow enterprises to easily accommodate smartphones, tablets, and other personal devices on internal networks, while keeping them safe with the most robust security features available.
While “bring your own device” is great for the user, CIOs are faced with the challenge of transitioning legacy systems to the wireless edge while providing enterprise-class security and an optimized mobile application experience.
At the same time, the industry is about to go through the next major wave of wireless protocol roll-out with 802.11ac, ushering in another significant change in wireless performance. Over the next 3-5 years, we believe this wave will drive a massive network refresh not just to customers’ wireless access points, but to their campus switches as well.
All of this creates a tremendous opportunity in the industry – and that’s where HPE comes in. About a year ago, HPE acquired Aruba Networks, a leading provider of next-generation network access solutions for mobile enterprise. Aruba designs and delivers best-of-breed mobility solutions and WLAN products and employs a software approach that extends mobility intelligence across wired and wireless networks all the way to users through devices and apps.
Combining Aruba and HPE will create a leader in enterprise mobility, positioning HPE to enable and accelerate customers’ transition to a converged campus network. The two companies are highly complementary – Aruba brings best-of-breed mobility software and WLAN hardware, and HPE has a leading networking portfolio. This potent combination will enable enterprises to easily, quickly, and securely deploy end-to-end mobile solutions, including the latest multi-gigabit wireless technology, across their campus. Together, HPE and Aruba will offer a unified solution with value-added software features, including policy management, security, and orchestration.
According to Antonio Neri, Executive Vice President and General Manager – Hewlett Packard Enterprise Group, “Ultimately, with Aruba’s leading wireless LAN technology and differentiated software solutions, coupled with HPE’s robust switching portfolio, HPE Networking will have market leadership in the $18 billion and growing campus networking market. HPE will be an innovative, agile vendor ideally positioned to solve customers’ toughest challenges in mobility, security and networking.”
As Mobility trends continue to transform the way we communicate, collaborate, and access information, enterprises are taking a wireless-first approach to connectivity. They need mobile networking solutions that allow enterprises to easily accommodate smartphones, tablets, and other personal devices on internal networks, while keeping them safe with the most robust security features available.
While “bring your own device” is great for the user, CIOs are faced with the challenge of transitioning legacy systems to the wireless edge while providing enterprise-class security and an optimized mobile application experience.
At the same time, the industry is about to go through the next major wave of wireless protocol roll-out with 802.11ac, ushering in another significant change in wireless performance. Over the next 3-5 years, we believe this wave will drive a massive network refresh not just to customers’ wireless access points, but to their campus switches as well.
All of this creates a tremendous opportunity in the industry – and that’s where HPE comes in. About a year ago, HPE acquired Aruba Networks, a leading provider of next-generation network access solutions for mobile enterprise. Aruba designs and delivers best-of-breed mobility solutions and WLAN products and employs a software approach that extends mobility intelligence across wired and wireless networks all the way to users through devices and apps.
Combining Aruba and HPE will create a leader in enterprise mobility, positioning HPE to enable and accelerate customers’ transition to a converged campus network. The two companies are highly complementary – Aruba brings best-of-breed mobility software and WLAN hardware, and HPE has a leading networking portfolio. This potent combination will enable enterprises to easily, quickly, and securely deploy end-to-end mobile solutions, including the latest multi-gigabit wireless technology, across their campus. Together, HPE and Aruba will offer a unified solution with value-added software features, including policy management, security, and orchestration.
According to Antonio Neri, Executive Vice President and General Manager – Hewlett Packard Enterprise Group, “Ultimately, with Aruba’s leading wireless LAN technology and differentiated software solutions, coupled with HPE’s robust switching portfolio, HPE Networking will have market leadership in the $18 billion and growing campus networking market. HPE will be an innovative, agile vendor ideally positioned to solve customers’ toughest challenges in mobility, security and networking.”
The central nervous system consists of the brain, spinal cord, and nerves running throughout the body. Just as the central nervous system coordinates and influences every activity of all parts of the human body, Active Directory is a database that coordinates the servers, client computers, printers, shared files, and other resources, as well as securing network resources in a Microsoft Windows network. Active Directory accomplishes these tasks by providing a hierarchy of management elements enabling administrators to organize resources, advertise these resources accordingly, and control the users who access them.
Medical doctors suggest a checkup or physical at least once a year, as well as personal monitoring of your health. Even if you are healthy, the purpose of these visits is to screen for diseases, asses risk of future medical problems, encourage a healthy lifestyle, update vaccinations, and maintain a relationship with doctors in case of an illness.
The comparison to Active Directory here can also be made. Proper monitoring and periodic checkups can keep the database functioning smoothly and without issues. It can definitely benefit from checkups, or health checks. (Download our free infographic to see what questions you can ask to see if your Active Directory could use a health check!)
Should You Engage in a Zunesis Network Health Check?
The purpose of an Active Directory health check could be for the same reasons listed above:
Just like the human body, proper monitoring and care can assist in keeping Active Directory healthy. Active Directory and the Windows network can only benefit from these periodic “doctor” visits. The Zunesis Active Directory Health Check will assess your current Active Directory Infrastructure and deliver a report providing a third-party review, validation, and recommendations for improvement of the current database design and implementation, based on Microsoft best practices. The assessment can also be used as a template by which you can provide your own regularly scheduled “checks” of the environment.
Zerto is taking the IT world by storm, providing a simple, yet fully functional, replication and data protection Disaster Recovery (DR) solution.
Zerto Virtual Replication 4.5 was recently released, and this blog provides a description of some of the additional functionality provided in 4.5. (If you would like to learn more about Zerto aside from the newest features released in 4.5, please reach out to Zunesis.)
Zerto Virtual Replication 4.5 builds upon their always-on replication, with no snapshots, replication and orchestration capabilities by adding granular recovery. Now, a single file or folder can be recovered from the journal, improving the average time to recovery for files, folders, VMs, applications, and sites.
Many other improvements were made to simplify disaster recovery operations, further reducing ongoing management and maintenance, and to automate more DR operations to ensure consistency and repeatability.
File and Folder Recovery from the Journal – What is the most common disaster that administrators must recover? It isn’t natural disasters or site outages; it is actually lost or accidently deleted files or folders. In release 4.5, Zerto solves this most frequent disaster problem by adding the ability to recover a single file or folder from up to 14 days in the past, from increments in seconds from the journal with just a few mouse clicks. With other solutions, the file is pulled from nightly infrequent backups, which could result in data loss and missed user expectations.
Improved Role-Based Access Control – The security of your business continuity and disaster recovery plan is of the utmost importance. It is imperative that those who are making changes or updates fully understand the impact of these changes in the event that recovery is needed. In addition to the already robust permissions available from Zerto Virtual Replication, these have been added.
View Only – The ability to log into Zerto Virtual Replication and view the settings and configurations of the BC/DR processes. This permission level does not allow for changes to be made.
Manage Workload Protection – The ability to modify virtual protection group (VPG) settings and update BC/DR plans and processes.
Recover and Migrate Workloads – The ability to actually execute the BC/DR or migration plan. Workloads will move according to the execution plan.
With 4.5, Zerto introduced new APIs to further automate VPG creation, protecting VMs and simplifying BC/DR operations:
In summary, Zerto Virtual Replication 4.5 ensures the continuous protection of applications, VMs, folders, and files. This increased granularity gives organizations unprecedented control over recovery operations. New APIs and role-based controls ensure the right commands are accessed and executed, further increasing control of critical IT operations.
To learn more about Zerto or to see a technical demonstration, please contact Zunesis at info@zunesis.com.
I’m sure there will be no surprised reaction when I state that we live in a data driven world. For proof you have to look no further than the people around you as you go throughout your day. Unless you’re hiking through the desert, you’re going to see many people with their heads down, looking at their smartphones as the read and send emails, texts, and tweets. From this same smartphone they will search for information, store notes, review documents, and the list goes on and on (what can’t a smartphone do these day?!)
Here’s the thing about this: All of the information they are creating and accessing is stored somewhere. It is this unabated demand for immediate and reliable data access that has created an unprecedented evolution in Storage technology. And it is the technology industry’s response (an explosion of Storage options) that makes the task of choosing your next Storage Array so difficult.
As businesses look to refresh their storage technology today, they are met with a dizzying menu of features including thin provisioning, deduplication, compression, iSCSI, File, Fibre Channel, All Flash, Hybrid, Tiering, etc.
Of course, the question is which of these features will be relevant for any given environment. The final answers will, of course, vary by environment. However, even after you’ve assessed your needs and ranked your requirements, you will still be faced with an increasingly crowded field of solution options from both established manufacturers and those who are new to the industry.
In my view, if you aren’t including HPE 3PAR StoreServ in your short-list, you may want to reconsider. Not only is HPE an established manufacturer, the 3PAR StoreServ is a mature array family and will match all the features/functionality of its competitors.
What’s more, the family of arrays included in the StoreServ solutions include options that will fit price/performance for Entry level, Midrange, and Enterprise arrays – all of these with the same features and functionalities. Furthermore, you’ll find both All Flash and Hybrid models to suit your requirements.
Here are just a few of the features and functionality you’ll find in the HPE 3PAR StoreServ family:
And, if you want some validation of how well the 3PAR Family stacks up against its competition, you may want to look at the publications from DCIG, Storage Magazine, Gartner, and TechTarget. Links to these publications and more detailed information about the HPE 3PAR StoreServ can be found at www.hpe.com/us/en/storage/3par.html.
And, of course, Zunesis is ready to help you understand the benefits of 3PAR for your environment. In fact, if you’d like to spend some time on a 3PAR array, we have three HPE 3PAR StoreServ arrays in our Lab and would love to host you for a POC in our Englewood, CO facility. Please contact us if you are interested in taking a closer look at this technology.
Using Data to Determine the Best Way to Store Your Data
Numbers can be made to say many things. To quote one of the most innovative thinkers of our time: “Aw, you can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forty percent of all people know that.” – Homer Simpson
True, numbers can be spun in numerous ways, but data can’t be denied. Along those lines, decisions in IT revolve around very expensive purchases – and buyers need facts to support every purchase.
So, here are some facts:
In storage, what we see is a market slowly slipping, with all the stalwarts declining faster than the overall market (2.3% in 2015)… all except one: Hewlett Packard Enterprise. 2015 Revenue was down for EMC by 5.9% and NetApp 14.3% (ouch!). Dell Revenue was down 5.6% last fiscal year as well. IBM is now an anecdote.
Smaller players are not to be overlooked. Pure is on fire with Q4 showing a 152% gain in revenue, but those numbers come at an awful price. 2015 saw a $213.7 million loss actually up from $183.2 million loss in 2014.
HPE has a really good story right now. Split into two companies, the infrastructure enterprise is slimmer, more nimble (pun intended) and it’s the only major storage player growing. HPE is up 7.9% in Q4. That alone is pretty good; but in a segment down 2.2% in the same period, that’s even more impressive.
DCIG rated 3Par as the best Enterprise midrange array. On March 8, 2016, the Storage Performance Council (SPC) released a new SPC-1 result for the 3PAR StoreServ 8450 All-Flash Array, where it achieved a world-leading result of $0.23 SPC-1 $/IOPS™ – making it THE most affordable external all flash array on the planet.
3Par is the only array in Gartner’s magic quadrant for solid state and general purpose – and those are both managed from the same interface.
To put this all into context, if you’re a decision maker looking to make a large investment that’s going to last for the next several years, doesn’t it seem wise to at least look at the only major storage provider that’s healthy, growing, and that also happens to be racking up major accolades?
In fact, Data Protection and Fault-tolerance are considered to be fundamental components of any professionally run IT environment. The basic level of Data Protection is, of course, defined by file backup and recovery solutions. When we talk with our clients about Data Protection, these discussions typically start with questions about the software used and the type of media employed to store the backups. For Fault-tolerance, the conversation revolves around discussions of redundancy in your hardware, clustering, and RAID levels.
In contrast to Data Protection and Fault-tolerance, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity have, for years, been part of the annual budgeting discussion but usually end up in the “nice to have” pile and are set aside until the next budget cycle. The cost and complexity of these solutions ended up being too expensive and require too many resources to implement. However, within the past 3 to 5 years, we have seen many of our clients elevate the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity conversations from the “nice to have” to a “must implement” discussion.
There are many factors contributing to the change, but I would contend the two biggest reasons are:
With the ubiquity of virtualization today, discussions about all of these issues has changed significantly. Where once we drew well defined lines between the solutions for Data Protection, Fault-tolerance, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity, we are now starting to see those lines blur. To be clear, each of these issues still addresses distinctly different solution requirements. However, technology is allowing us to combine some of these requirements under one toolset.
Even though one solution may cover multiple requirements defined by Data Protection, Fault-tolerance, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity, it’s important to go into discussions of these issues understanding the major differences between them.
As I mentioned earlier in this post, technology today has made implementation of solutions to these four issues far easier than it used to be. However, defining the requirements and navigating through the many solution options can still be a daunting task. At Zunesis we have Solution Architects, with decades of experience, who are ready to help our clients design solutions to protect their Business. With all the options available today it is important to have a partner with the expertise to design, acquire, and implement these essential solutions.
In addition to experienced Solution Architects, Zunesis partners with some of the most respected names in the industry to provide the hardware and software needed to implement a Business Protection plan. Our partners include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, VMware, VEEAM, Commvault, Zerto, Dakota Cloud Recovery, and others. Click here for a full list of partners.
In future blog posts we may delve into some of the discovery process and solutions more deeply. Until then, you can be sure that, with our experience and our strong partnerships, Zunesis can help achieve your objective of protecting the business today.
In an effort to move toward an Idea Economy, IT must now be able to support two operating environments.
A new category of infrastructure is needed to power the Idea Economy. In the traditional model, Application and Operations optimization took months to deliver. Converged Infrastructure took days, Hyper-converged took minutes, and now Composable takes seconds.
Composable Infrastructure, also known as HPE’s new Synergy, simplifies Infrastructure as a Service by providing the following:
Composable Infrastructure is the new engine for the Idea Economy allowing customers to take leaps and bounds:
HPE’s Composable Infrastructure multi-year vision empowers IT to create and deliver new value instantly and continuously for traditional business and the Idea Economy.
The path to Composable Infrastructure allows an ease of management and interoperability across the entire infrastructure. Converged Blocks with Composable attributes provide value to your existing infrastructure. With HPE’s fully Composable Infrastructure, you receive continuity and investment protection of tools, integration, and process. HPE’s Composable Infrastructure transforms cost to value creation with infrastructure that bridges traditional and new.
There was a time when IT was the gatekeeper of everything enterprise and ruled with a combination of strict policies and purpose-built technologies. There was no need for technologies like ClearPass. Those days are over. Today, billions of Wi-Fi enabled smartphones and tablets are pouring into the workplace. Users are armed with more than three devices or more, and each contains over 40 business and personal apps.
Users have far more flexibility to connect their own smartphones and tablets to the network and download the apps of their choice. The expectation is that the mobility experience just works whether you are at home or in the office.
The boundaries of IT’s domain now extend beyond the enterprise, and the expectation is that users can connect from anywhere. The goal is to provide anytime, anywhere connectivity without sacrificing security.
How does IT maintain visibility and control? As a foundation, IT must have a firm understand of these three things:
The next key is for IT to decide what happens when users and devices are not in compliance.
The ClearPass Policy Management Platform from Aruba Networks, an HPE Company, takes a fresh approach to solving the mobility challenge – an approach that provides IT a simple way to build a foundation for enterprise-wide policies, strong security, and an enhanced user experience.
From this single ClearPass policy and platform, contextual data is leveraged across the network to ensure that users and devices are granted appropriate access privileges, regardless of access method or device ownership.
Mobility policies need to include user roles, devices types, available MDM data and certificate status, location, day-of-week, and time of day.
ClearPass Benefits
Providing a seamless mobility experience for today’s mobile workforce has created a host of new challenges. ClearPass solves these challenges by providing a platform that delivers policy control, workflow automation, and visibility from a single cohesive solution. By capturing and correlating real-time contextual data, ClearPass enables you to define policies that work in any environment: wireless, wired, or VPN.
Denver just got hit with a huge snow storm, and there’s plenty more where that came from this winter. I noticed while slipping and sliding my way to work yesterday that there were very few other cars on the road – unusual for 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. That’s because in today’s world of technology, employees can work just as well from the safety of their homes as they can from the office. When icy roads hit, they can avoid braving the streets and still get just as much done.
However, in order for this to be a viable option, someone has to make sure that remote access is working….
The ability to function at a high level from remote locations has become a need over the past several years. Working offsite has helped countless companies to allow their workers to tend to sick children, evade driving in horrible conditions, or just to take some time away from the office while still getting work done.
As you might imagine, at Zunesis, we spend much of our time working remotely for one reason or another. Therefore, we are experts at providing remote access solutions for our clients. From basic VPN solutions, remote desktop, or VDI solutions, we can make working remotely/remote access work for you. Whether your company has one employee or hundreds, there is a need and a solution for you.
In our always-connected world, working remotely can take many forms: working from a plane, train, or car while en route somewhere, or working from a coffee shop or your home office. It could mean working from the beach, from the ski resort, or from your grandma’s house over a holiday weekend. In addition, BYOD could also become an option at the office.
Being that there are so many options for remote access, listing all of the different options would get boring in a hurry. Instead, we would like to offer a moment to talk about what we can offer to make sure that you’re ready for the next snow storm (or any type of disaster).
Let us:
– Work with your IT department to plan a remote access solution for you. This will include all the documents on how to connect and use your remote access solution. We can even train your staff.
– Health check your existing solution for remote access. If it can’t handle the demand when employees need to work remotely, it won’t help you on bad weather days. Certain companies lost hours of productivity during the last snow storm due to the inability of their remote access systems to handle the extra work load. We can test and verify your existing solutions to make sure they are up to your company’s needs.
– Help prepare you for the next snow day or DR emergency. Under many circumstances, you and your employees will have a pretty good idea of when you will need to be working remotely. There is no need for anyone to have to run into the office to troubleshoot or turn on remote access.
We can help make sure you are prepared and don’t have the same issues you did with the last snow storm. After all, it’s only December, folks. We’ve got a lot of winter left.