Before founding software-defined networking startup PlumGrid and then moving to VMware when it bought his company in 2016, Pere Monclus spent almost 12 years with Cisco Systems at a time when while much of enterprise networking was still in the corporate datacenter, the shift to network virtualization and the migration to the cloud were getting underway.

Cisco was dominant in the datacenter networking space and fed organizations with a steady stream of hardware, from routers to switches to silicon. The company carried an expansion view of its role in networking.

At Cisco, we were thinking always we have to control the end-to-end of the network, Monclus, vice president and chief technology officer of VMwares Networking and Security business unit, tells The Next Platform. The idea was we have to control the edge of the network so the core doesnt fall, because the core was where most of the markets were. We would have core routers, core switches and then take it all the way to the access to create the end-to-end networking as a principle, because from a Cisco perspective, what we were delivering was an end-to-end connectivity solution with our protocols.

About a year after Monclus left Cisco to found PlumGrid, VMware bought Nicira for $1.26 billion, a move that allowed the company that already was a significant datacenter presence through its server and storage virtualization to absorb networking into its increasingly software-defined world. NSX and networking have evolved over the past ten years to become a key part of VMwares own adaptation to an IT world that has broken well beyond the datacenter boundaries and out to the cloud and the edge. With containers, microservices and Kubernetes, software now dictates to hardware rather than the other way around.

Its also a world where the network is now tie that binds this increasingly decentralized IT environment, becoming the main thoroughfare for applications and data moving between the datacenter, cloud and edge and a central focus for organizations security measures. All this was on full display this week at VMwares Explore 2022 conference, which allowed the company to tout its ongoing expansion into the cloud and out to the edge and its networking portfolios central role in helping to make this happen.

The evolution of networking at VMware has taken several steps, Monclus says. At the time of the Nicira acquisition, enterprises would spend weeks or months putting the network in place before applications that would run top it could be put into production.

When VMware got into networking, the company heard from customers that they could quickly create and application and get a server up and running, but it takes them weeks to configure the network, he says. We started that journey with network virtualization and the first story [for networking] was about automation and agility. The question was, If I create a VM, could I just connect it to the network and give it an IP address? That was kind of the early days of network virtualization.

As more workloads and data were making their way out of the datacenter, security of the network became increasingly important, which is why VMware embraced micro-segmentation, a way to manage network access and separate workloads from one another to reduce an organizations attack surface and more easily contain breaches by preventing the lateral movement of attackers. The acquisition two years ago of network security startup Lastline helped fuel the vendors distributed IDS/IPS technology to complement the east-west protection delivered by micro-segmentation.

In June, the company added to its lateral security for network and endpoint technologies with a broad threat intelligence capability called Contexa. It sits in the infrastructure and offers visibility into both traditional and modern applications.

VMware over the years has put networking and security capabilities into the hypervisor and made them available as services in its own cloud offering and those of hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Its also making NSX, and its expanding growing security capabilities including those from Carbon Black, which it bought in 2019 for $2.1 billion key parts of the multicloud strategy.

The vendor at Explore rolled out a broad range of enhancements to its networking and security portfolio all aimed at making it easier for enterprises to manage and secure their multicloud environments. It also gave a look to what the near-term future looks like with the introduction of a number of network- and security-focused projects.

VMware is embedding network detection and visibility capabilities into Carbon Black Clouds endpoint protection program, a move that is now in early access and brings together visibility into both the network and endpoints. It also is adding threat prevention tools like IDPS, malware analysis, sandboxing and URL filtering to its NSX Gateway Firewall and enhanced bot management to the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB). The last two along with Project Watch, which aims to offer a continuous risk and compliance assessment model to multicloud environments are part of VMwares Elastic App Secure Edge (EASE), a strategy announced last year to offer a range of data plane services around networking and security.

As we noted earlier this week, VMware also is embracing data processing units (DPUs) from Nvidia for a number of its cloud-based offerings, including vSphere 8 and, for this case, NSX. Cloud providers like AWS and Oracle already are using DPUs and many in the industry believe that servers and other hardware in the near future will routinely include the chips. Monclus says customers that will gravitate toward DPUs or smartNICs for performance and security. For organizations like telcos that demand high performance and where their datacenters are revenue-generating facilities enabling CPUs to offload networking or compute tasks to DPUs is attractive.

There is a tradeoff they may save 15 percent in CPU utilization, which they can sell back to customers, but there also is the cost of the DPUs themselves. However, where datacenters are a cost factor, increasing security by leveraging the workload isolation offered by the DPUs and that likely will be a fast-growing use case for the chips, Monclus says.

Looking to the near future, VMware offered a look at Project Northstar and Project Trinidad, along with the aforementioned Project Watch. Project NorthStar is in technical preview and is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) network and security offering that will deliver services, visibility and controls to NSX users who can manage them via central cloud control plane.

The services include VMwares NSX Intelligence, ALB, Network Detection and Response and Web Application Firewall.

We are taking the control plane of NSX and turning it into a SaaS service to enable true multicloud solutions, Monclus says. When we have a policy as a service, it works on vSphere environments but it works across VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Network, AWS, Google, Azure, and we have the same advanced protection, we have the same load balancer.

Both Project Trinidad and Project Watch are aimed at addressing the needs of modern workloads, he says. Theyre not tied to physical endpoints; instead, the API becomes the endpoint, he says. Project Trinidad uses AI and machine learning models to understand what are normal and expected east-west API traffic patterns between microservices so that if something anomalous pops up, it can be quickly detected.

We basically discover all the API, the schemas, API data and we create a baseline and we can start from the baseline, Monclus says. Project Trinidad introduces is AI/ML deep correlations between workflows and microservices.

As noted, Project Watch brings continuous security, compliance and risk assessment as well as automated and encrypted connectivity across clouds AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure virtual private clouds (VPCs) and virtual networks (VNETs) and security operations and integrates workflows from such areas as security and cloud operations and lines of business onto a single platform.

It also addresses the challenge of not only enabling networks and security to adapt to modern workloads but also to ensure that legacy hardware that cant make that change are secure.

VMware will assess and report the security risks enterprises face, giving the necessary data to make decisions, he says, adding that the vendor wants to create a continuous monitoring model in the same way as high availability, which uses the metric of three 9s, four 9s, and so forth, he says. We are trying to create a metric of how well youre running your datacenter or your applications from across security points.

Read more here:
The Network Binds The Increasingly Distributed Datacenter - The Next Platform

Back in September 2020 VMware announced what it called Project Monterey as a material rearchitecture of infrastructure software for its VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) a suite of products for managing virtual machines and orchestrating containers. The project drew in a host of hardware partners, as the virtualisation heavyweight looked to respond to the way in which cloud companies were increasingly using programmable hardware like FPGAs and SmartNICs to power data centre workloads that could be offloaded from the CPU in the process freeing up CPU cycles for core enterprise application processing work and improving performance for the networking, security, storage and virtualisation workloads offloaded to these hardware accelerators.

Companies including numerous large VMware customers looking to keep workloads on-premises had struggled to keep pace with the way in which cloud hyperscalers were rethinking data centre architecture like this. Using the kind of emerging SmartNICs, or what are increasingly called Data Processing Units (DPUs) was requiring extensive software development to adapt them to the users infrastructure. Project Monterey was an ambitious bid to tackle that from VMwares side in close collaboration with SmartNIC/DPU vendors Intel, NVIDIA and Pensando (now owned by AMD) and server OEMs Dell, HPE and Lenovo in order to improve performance.

This week Project Monterey bore some very public fruit, with those server OEMs and chipmakers lining up to offer new products optimised for VMware workloads and making some bold claims about total cost of ownership (TCO) savings as well as infrastructure price-performance ultimately, by relieving server CPUs of networking services and running infrastructure services on the DPU isolated from the workload domain, security will also markedly improve, all partners emphasised, as will workload latency and throughput for enterprises.

NVIDIA, for example, thinks using its new data processing units (DPUs) can save $8,200 per server in total cost of ownership (TCO) terms or $1.8 million in efficiency savings over three years for 1,000 server installations. (A single BlueField-3 DPU replaces approximately 300 CPU cores, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has earlier claimed.) Customers can get the DPUs with new Dell PowerEdge servers that start shipping later this year and which are optimised for vSphere 8: This is a huge moment for enterprise computing and the most significant vSphere release weve ever seen, said Kevin Deierling, a senior VP at Nvidia. Historically, weve seen lots of great new features and capabilities with VMwares roadmap. But for the first time, were introducing all of that goodness running on a new accelerated computing platform that runs the infrastructure of the data centre.

(The BlueField 3 DPUs accelerating these VMware workloads feature 16 x Arm A78 cores, 400Gbit/s bandwidth and PCIe gen 5 support accelerators for software-defined storage, networking, security, streaming, line rate TLS/IPSEC cryptography, and precision timing for 5G telco and time synchronised data centres.)

Certain latency and bandwidth-sensitive workloads that previously used virtualization pass-thru can now run fully virtualized with pass-thru-like performance in this new architecture, without losing key vSphere capabilities like vMotion and DRS said VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram. Infrastructure admins can rely on vSphere to also manage the DPU lifecycle, Raghuram added: The beauty of what the vSphere engineers have done is they have not changed themanagement model. It can fit seamlessly into the data center architecture of today

The releases come amid a broader shift to software-defined infrastructure. As NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has earlier noted: Storage, networking, security, virtualisation, and all of that all of those things have become a lot larger and a lot more intensive and its consuming a lot of the data centre; probably half of the CPU cores inside the data center are not running applications. Thats kind of strange because you created the data center to run services and applications, which is the only thing that makes money The other half of the computing is completely soaked up running the software-defined data centre, just to provide for those applications. [That] commingles the infrastructure, the security plane and the application plane and exposes the data centre to attackers. So you fundamentally want to change the architecture as a result of that; to offload that software-defined virtualisation and the infrastructure operating system, and the security services to accelerate it

Vendors are lining up to offer new hardware and solutions born out of the VMware collaboration meanwhile. Dells initial offering of NVIDIA DPUs is on its VxRail solution and takes advantage of a new element of VMwares ESXi (vSphere Distributed Services Engine), moving network and security services to the DPU. These will be available via channel partners in the near future. Jeff Boudreau, President, Dell Technologies Infrastructure Solutions Group added: Dell Technologies and VMware have numerous joint engineering initiatives spanning core IT areas such as multicloud, edge and security to help our customers more easily manage and gain value from their data.

AMD meanwhile is making its Pensandu DPUs available through Dell, HPE and Lenovo. Those with budgets for hardware refreshes and a need for performance for distributed workloads will be keeping a close eye on price and performance data as the products continue to land in coming weeks and months.

More:
VMwares Project Monterey bears hardware-accelerated fruit - The Stack

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Watch here.

Database analytics giant Teradata has announced cloud-native database and analytics support. Teradata already had a cloud offering that ran on top of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) infrastructure, enabling enterprises to run workloads across cloud and on-premise servers. The new service supports software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment models that will help Teradata compete against companies like Snowflake and Databricks.

The company is launching two new cloud-native offerings. VantageCloud Lake extends the Teradata Vantage data lake to a more elastic cloud deployment model. Teradata ClearScape Analytics helps enterprises take advantage of new analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) development workloads in the cloud. The combination of cloud-native database and analytics promises to streamline data science workflows, support ModelOps and improve reuse from within a single platform.

Teradata was an early leader in advanced data analytics capabilities that grew out of a collaboration between the California Institute of Technology and Citibank in the late 1970s. The company optimized techniques for scaling analytics workloads across multiple servers running in parallel. Scaling across servers provided superior cost and performance properties compared to other approaches that required bigger servers. The company rolled out data warehousing and analytics on an as-a-service basis in 2011 with the introduction of the Teradata Vantage connected multicloud data platform.

Our newest offerings are the culmination of Teradatas three-year journey to create a new paradigm for analytics, one where superior performance, agility and value all go hand-in-hand to provide insight for every level of an organization, said Hillary Ashton, chief product officer of Teradata.

MetaBeat 2022

MetaBeat will bring together thought leaders to give guidance on how metaverse technology will transform the way all industries communicate and do business on October 4 in San Francisco, CA.

Teradatas first cloud offerings ran on specially configured servers on cloud infrastructure. This allowed enterprises to scale applications and data across on-premise and cloud servers. However, the data and analytics scaled at the server level. If an enterprise needed more compute or storage, it had to provision more servers.

This created an opening for new cloud data storage startups like Snowflake to take advantage of new architectures built on containers, meshes and orchestration techniques for more dynamic infrastructure. Enterprises took advantage of the latest cloud tooling to roll out new analytics at high speed. For example, Capital One rolled out 450 new analytics use cases after moving to Snowflake.

Although these cloud-native competitors improved many aspects of scalability and flexibility, they lacked some aspects of governance and financial controls baked into legacy platforms. For example, after Capital One moved to the cloud, it had to develop an internal governance and management tier to enforce cost controls. Capital One also created a framework to streamline the user analytics journey by incorporating content management, project management and communication within a single tool.

This is where the new Teradata offerings promise to shine. It promises to combine the new kinds of architectures pioneered by cloud-native startups with the governance, cost-controls and simplicity of a consolidated offering.

Snowflake and Databricks are no longer the only answer for smaller data and analytics workloads, especially in larger organizations where shadow systems are a significant and growing issue, and scale may play into workloads management concerns, Ashton said.

The new offering also takes advantage of Teradatas various R&D into smart scaling, allowing users to scale based on actual resource utilization rather than simple static metrics. The new offering also promises a lower total cost of ownership and direct support for more kinds of analytics processing. For example, ClearScape Analytics includes a query fabric, governance and financial visibility. This also promises to simplify predictive and prescriptive analytics.

ClearScape Analytics includes in-database time series functions that streamline the entire analytics lifecycle, from data transformation and statistical hypothesis tests to feature engineering and machine learning modeling. These capabilities are built directly into the database, improving performance and eliminating the need to move data. This can help reduce the cost and friction of analyzing a large volume of data from millions of product sales or IoT sensors. Data scientists can code analytics functions into prebuilt components that can be reused by other analytics, machine learning, or AI workloads. For example, a manufacturer could create an anomaly detection algorithm to improve predictive maintenance.

Predictive models require more exploratory analysis and experimentation. Despite the investment in tools and time, most predictive models never make it into production, said Ashton. New ModelOps capabilities include support for auditing datasets, code tracking, model approval workflows, monitoring model performance and alerting when models become non-performing. This can help teams schedule model retraining when they start to lose accuracy or show bias.

What sets Teradata apart is that it can serve as a one-stop shop for enterprise-grade analytics, meaning companies dont have to move their data, Ashton said. They can simply deploy and operationalize advanced analytics at scale via one platform.

Ultimately, it is up to the market to decide if these new capabilities will allow the legacy data pioneer to keep pace or even gain an edge against new cloud data startups.

VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings.

Read this article:
Teradata takes on Snowflake and Databricks with cloud-native platform - VentureBeat

Next to computer processing and applications, data storage is one of the most important IT activities. Data storage ensures all information created by a private user, small business or multinational corporation can be stored in a safe and secure location for future retrieval and use. Data storage technology is also essential from a DR perspective, as properly backed up files and information can help businesses recover operations if a disruption affects their ability to conduct business.

Before choosing a storage option, IT administrators should examine how NAS and server-based storage address planning, evaluating, selecting and implementing data storage.

NAS provides cost-effective and easy-to-implement options to increase storage capacity. As the term network-attached storage implies, the storage device attaches to a network -- most often, Ethernet or other TCP/IP-based networks -- and can be launched quickly into production. Other devices on the network use NAS storage capabilities. NAS devices are freestanding devices that typically have at least two bays into which storage modules are inserted. The more bays there are, the more storage can be implemented.

NAS devices typically come with their own OS and network interface software, so devices can be easily connected to an existing LAN, powered up and quickly placed into service. NAS devices are typically file-based, as opposed to server-based devices that can be either block- or file-based. This makes them compatible with most OSes. Capacities can range from a few terabytes to dozens of terabytes. NAS is ideal for individual users and SMBs that need easy-to-use storage with flexibility, convenience and moderate investments.

Server-based storage typically connects to a primary file server; uses the file handling functions of the server and its processing power; and connects either directly to the primary server(s) or via a network, such as Ethernet or a SAN designed for high-capacity data transfers among users and storage arrays. Other servers, such as application servers, coexist in the infrastructure.

Server storage is the vehicle of choice for large organizations because capacities can be dramatically expanded by adding more capacity to existing servers known as scale-up storage -- or by adding more physical storage servers to the infrastructure called scale-out storage. Server-based storage can support block and file storage formats, which makes them ideal for larger organizations with a variety of storage requirements.

Unlike NAS, storage servers are typically implemented in different forms, such as standalone towers or rack-based devices. In these situations, IT management must ensure the servers have enough power, are physically secure and are properly cooled. These and other criteria -- such as additional floor space to place server racks -- typically make server storage more expensive than NAS. Given the need to potentially manage dozens and possibly hundreds of storage arrays, the need for experienced storage technicians is significant; NAS devices are more of a DIY platform.

While the focus of this article is NAS and server-based storage, cloud-based storage offerings can accommodate virtually any storage requirement. NAS and server-based requirements can be implemented in cloud environments and offer the following advantages:

Cloud storage can serve as primary storage, secondary storage for specific operational requirements and backup storage for DR planning.

The table below provides a more detailed comparison of NAS and server storage based on specific criteria. It's important to note that, before any storage offering is selected, user and storage requirements -- now and in the near to long term -- must be defined, as well as the type of storage activities that will need to be supported, for example, primary storage or data backups.

Depending on the business requirements, both NAS and server-based storage can occupy the storage infrastructure. Both can be used for primary file storage for specific applications and backup storage for DR.

NAS can work alongside server storage, potentially for specialized requirements, such as secure data storage and retrieval.

Server storage can work alongside NAS; the key is to define the requirements and select the appropriate storage offering.

Read the original here:
NAS vs. server: Which storage option should you choose? - TechTarget

China's next wave of cloud migration is expected to be spearheaded by critical industrial and manufacturing sectors. [Photo/VCG]

China's next wave of cloud migration is expected to be spearheaded by critical industrial and manufacturing sectors, and the country's public cloud market will more than double from $32 billion in 2021 to $90 billion by 2025, said global management consulting firm McKinsey& Company.

According to the latest report from McKinsey, despite a relatively late start, China has made enormous progress in terms of cloud migration speed and has become the world's second-largest cloud market.

Over the next few years, the speed of cloud migration in China will be broadly in line with the rest of the world, with a 19-percentage-point increase expected in IT workloads shifting to the cloud between 2021 and 2025.

However, China differs from other countries in its high proportion of private cloud, which is expected to reach 42 percent by 2025, compared with 36 percent for the public cloud.

McKinsey's survey suggested that only 11 percent of the companies surveyed plan to be mostly on the public cloud. The remainder will continue to use a private cloud with traditional servers or use a hybrid cloud.

"Cloud adoption is strongly correlated with digital transformation. By 2025, 78 percent of all IT workloads will be on cloud in China," said Kai Shen, partner at McKinsey. "But when we look across the cloud adoption of business use cases with P&L impact, we find that adoption rates are much lower at between 0 percent to 25 percent."

P&L is an indicator that can show a company's ability to increase its profit, either by reducing costs and expenses or increasing sales.

"It demonstrates that Chinese companies still have enormous opportunities to develop, adopt and scale use of cloud, for example in dynamic pricing and personalization, digital twins and three-dimensional simulations, sales forecasting and inventory optimization," he said.

In terms of industries, the report also pointed out that sectors with numerous tech-savvy and digital-native companies, such as e-commerce and education, have already shifted a significant portion of their IT workloads to the cloud in China.

Labor-intensive industrial and manufacturing sectors, on the contrary, have not done that. But that could quickly change given the latest national policy guidance, it added.

The rest is here:
Public cloud to double to $90b by 2025 in nation - China Daily