F5 Synthesis: How SDAS are delivered - Converged systems
#SDAS The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The premise of cloud is based, like other emergent technologies, at least partially on the notion of abstraction. Cloud providers are able to achieve what appears to be boundless compute, limitless storage and never-ending network capacity by being able to simply "plug and play" the hardware necessary to expand capacity when needed. Enterprises, too, looking to achieve similar capabilities are desirous of a means to achieve this level of simplicity of scale. And by desirous I mean "really, really, REALLY want" it. At least that's how I read the fact that the number one "emerging trend" identified by our State of Application Delivery in 2014 survey was - you guessed it - private cloud. In case that's not enough to convince of its significance, when asked for which initiatives organizations had purchased technology in the past 12 months the number one answer (with 45% of respondents) was - you guessed it - private cloud. So getting a "plug and play" or Lego-like infrastructure building blocks that can improve the time to deploy and reduce costs while adding value is pretty important to a whole lot of organizations today. Technology, of course, has a ready answer. IDC calls it "Integrated Infrastructure." Gartner names it "Integrated systems." Others have their own terms but they're all describing essentially the same thing: combinations of server, storage and network infrastructure bundled together with management software that facilitates the provisioning and management of the whole. Offered as a holistic system, these integrated offerings act as the Lego-like building blocks of a rapidly scalable data center or private cloud implementation. While each is self-contained, as it were, the management and orchestration that powers each integrated "rack" enables a broader, more holistic view of the entire set. They are designed to be repeatable and provide the consistency necessary in a cloud computing environment to enable a truly transparent and non-disruptive scale of the compute, storage and network resources that underpin every data center, everywhere. As a building block for private cloud, converged systems provide a componentized approach to enabling organizations to deliver the services essential to a cloud computing environment in which applications will be deployed: scale, security and performance. Those services should be delivered in such a way as to support the business demands of converged systems: reduced capital and operational costs while improving reliability. After all, if you're deploying all the components necessary to deliver applications then you have to deploy all the components, including the application (layer 4-7) services. That's where F5 comes in. F5 Software Defined Application Services (SDAS) via Converged systems F5 delivers Software Defined Application Services (SDAS) in a number of ways: in the data center via F5 Synthesis, in the cloud and thanks to F5 Silverline, our cloud-based service delivery platform, as a service. But they can also be delivered via Integrated Systems like that of VCE Vblock or Microsoft's Cloud Platform System (CPS) Converged systems take advantage of F5 programmability to ensure simplified management and orchestration of F5 SDAS through the central command and control software such systems rely on to reduce operational costs across the entire application deployment spectrum. The pre-validated approach means eliminating integration after delivery and offers a much faster time to ready deployment. Converged systems offer greater agility in deployment, better economy of scale with reduced operational and capital costs and ensure a better consumer experience, where consumer means the IT professionals tasked with building out a private cloud. With F5 SDAS in the mix, organizations can also be assured of the availability and scale of the application services they rely on to ensure the security, performance and availability of the applications growing business and improving productivity today.F5 Synthesis: How SDAS are Delivered - As a Service
Software Defined Application Services (SDAS) are going hybrid. . Organizations are turning to cloud not just as an option for applications but also for the network and application services that deliver applications to anyone, anywhere at any time. And not just "in" the cloud marketplace, available for immediate provisioning and deployment, but as part of the cloud itself; as a service. One of the questions we asked of respondents in our survey this summer focused on the preferred deployment model across the breadth of application services. Security, I'm sure unsurprisingly, wound up with a significant number of services which organizations prefer to consume "as a service". Of those security services, the top three were SPAM filtering, DDoS protection and anti-fraud services. The distinction between "cloud" as in marketplace and "cloud" as in a service is necessary for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that adoption of both can force organizations to deliver services across multiple architectures (with a variety of different management systems) if they want to preserve seamless application experiences for users. For example, you might be able to subscribe to a DNS as a service (and many small and even medium businesses do), but it's management interface - whether API or service portal - are disconnected from everything else. Organizations might also choose to deploy apps in AWS or VMware vCloud Air and then choose to deploy application services to enhance security and improve performance from their respective marketplaces. But those, too, are likely to end up operationally disjoint from other, similar, services that may be delivered as a service or on-premise. That disjointed operational state is double plus ungood. It inhibits visibility into the overall state of the business (applications) and the services upon which those applications rely. It can impede deployment, too, by introducing stops and starts in processes that might otherwise be orchestrated to improve time to market, because the tools and techniques used to provision and manage these other services are not well integrated with the rest of the IT toolbox. That's why we continue to expand the ability of F5 Synthesis to deliver SDAS and have introduced yet another option for organizations seeking to ensure the security, performance and availability of applications across a growing portfolio of environments, architectures and business models. F5 Synthesis: As a Service F5's vision for application delivery is to enable organizations to take advantage of cloud and support a hybrid data center model without sacrificing the services applications need to stay secure, fast and available. That means not only expanding customer choices with respect to cloud environments and marketplaces, but making those application services available as a service and manageable as part of comprehensive, hybrid application service model spanning cloud, as a service and on-premise environments. That's where F5 Silverline comes into play, extending F5 Synthesis ability to deliver SDAS on-premise and in the cloud with cloud-based services delivery platform. F5 Silverline will support enterprises by eliminating traditional constraints requiring an either on-premise or in-the-cloud deployment model for application services. With an as-a-Service option to deliver F5 SDAS, customers gain the ability to shift the deployment of applications and adjacent services closer to the users and apps that benefit from them. As a first step, building on our acquisition of Defense.Net, we've added a new security service option with F5 Silverline DDoS Protection. This new, hybrid offering combines on-premise DDoS protection capabilities with a high-capacity, cloud-based service that enables organizations to mitigate a complete spectrum of DDoS attacks. New data centers in Frankfurt and Singapore expand the global availability of this service. F5 Silverline DDoS Protection F5 Silverline DDoS Protection is a cloud-based traffic scrubbing service providing real-time, automated DDoS mitigation of volumetric attacks. Organizations benefit from cloud-based DDoS protection precisely because it's in the cloud, meaning attacks are scrubbed (stopped) before they ever get near the corporate network. That's important because the growing scale and volume of these attacks can overwhelm many organization's Internet links. While such attacks target services such as DNS and applications, simply oversubscribing the target's links has the same effect: the denial of service. Scrubbing traffic external to those links, "in the cloud", provides ample reduction in traffic and effectively prevents services from becoming overwhelmed in the first place. F5 Silverline DDoS protection offers three subscription models: Always On This offering is a first line of defense, continuously evaluating traffic to identify and eliminate bad traffic Always Available A first line of defense available on demand, this subscription enables organizations to turn on the service "on demand". This allows organizations to primarily rely on on-premise DDoS protection services but immediately react in the event of an attack.F5 Synthesis: To boldly go where no ADC has gone before
#SDAS #cloud #DDoS #infosec It's an application world. But it's also a hybrid cloud, very mobile world, too. Applications might be on-premise, in the cloud or delivered as a SaaS application. Users might be at home, on the road or in the office using a laptop, a tablet a phone or, increasingly, a wearable device. The complex combinations of device, network and application is growing and business, employees and consumers alike expect the same level of performance, security and reliability regardless of where they - and their applications - might be right now. That means application delivery has to change, too. The same services that ensure performance, enhance security and assure availability must be as mobile and location-agnostic as the apps and users they serve. It's no longer enough just to support service delivery from a cloud environment - though that's certainly a requirement - it's also imperative that application services be able to move along both axes - the cloud continuum and the app-user continuum. That's because some services naturally gravitate toward the application like the moon to the earth; services like SSL and SLB and web application firewalls. Others, like SSO, GSLB and secure web gateways, are naturally pulled toward the users because ultimately it is a user-oriented service they are performing. So it's not enough to say services must be deployable from one end of the cloud axis to the other, from private cloud and traditional on-premise to the ultimate abstraction, as a service. Services must also be flexible enough to move closer to the app or the user, depending on their designated purpose. In much the same way that certain types of ADC capabilities, such as caching, were placed around the Internet and called CDNs in an effort to move content closer to users, the services traditionally delivered by an on-premise ADC must do the same; a service delivery network, if you like. That is, they must be able to be placed "around the Internet". They must go, as Star Trek fans say, where no ADC has gone before... We can simply call it "hybrid" but really, the new model is a combination of not just traditional and cloud, or multiple cloud models, or some combination thereof - it's delivering services across both axes; north and south, east and west, cloud and user and app and device. What We (that's the corporate we today) have announced today is the delivery of Software Defined Application Services (SDAS) from traditional, cloud and as a service offerings. We're laying the foundation for organizations to move services like DDoS protection and web application firewalling closer to the users or apps that need them with F5 Silverline. F5 Synthesis is focused on delivering applications without constraints. Some of those constraints include the inability to deploy the services apps need to remain available, fast and secure and are purely based on the fact that apps and users are on the move, sometimes frequently. Applications shouldn't be constrained and neither should users. Productivity and competitive advantage depends today on applications and that means applications anywhere. Whether in the cloud or on premise, as a Service or as part of an integrated system, F5 Synthesis delivers the software-defined application services that applications need and businesses rely on to meet and exceed user expectations.
