Riverbed at Akamai Government Forum; Steve Riley to Present on Hybrid Cloud

With initiatives, mandates and reforms in place aimed at bringing efficiencies to government IT, it should be no surprise that over the last few months you’ve seen a lot of Riverbed at government IT conferences and events. After all, our IT performance solutions help government agencies meet initiatives, mandates and reforms – from enabling data center consolidation, to helping reduce costs for IT, and executing on the cloud first policy.

On November 16, Riverbed will be at the Akamai Government Forum, taking place at the Grand Hyatt Washington in Washington, D.C. The second annual Akamai Government Forum will focus on the latest solutions for scaling the Internet infrastructure for local, state and federal government agencies. Visit the Riverbed station to see demos and learn about our cloud performance solutions, including Steelhead WAN optimization, Stingray application delivery and Web content optimization, Cascade application-aware network performance management for traffic visibility, and Whitewater cloud storage gateways for data protection.

And, because you can’t get enough of him, Riverbed technical leader, cloud expert and aficionado Steve Riley will deliver the cloud track discussion on hybrid cloud from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. ET.

In his presentation, Steve will highlight how the performance problems associated with distance computing can be mitigated with optimization techniques designed for multiple layers: application, transport, network and storage.

Here is the teaser:

No longer just the fluff of airplane magazine articles, cloud computing is here to stay. The architectures envisioned for large public cloud providers are revolutionizing on-premises data centers, too. Hybrid clouds – clouds that utilize both public and private resources – allow agencies to spread workloads across multiple locations to satisfy distinct policy, regulatory, security and financial requirements. Hybrid clouds, like their individual counterparts, involve adding distance between users and their data. In most cases, the particular distance at any point in time is unpredictable, which will lead to inconsistent user experiences. Applications deployed in hybrid clouds often move large amounts of data across multiple internal and external providers; long waits for data transfer will affect productivity and availability.

Stop by; learn everything you need to know about optimization, acceleration and performance to meet the government IT mandates; and tell us what you thought of the conference.

 

Optimizing Your Global Infrastructure for SharePoint – Part 1

SharePoint is an amazingly rich and robust solution that has taken off like a rocket.  However, SharePoint’s performance isn’t always perceived as rocket fast by remote users.  Many times organizations forget not everyone is at HQ sitting around the corner from the SharePoint servers…where they have virtually unlimited bandwidth and only 1 – 2 milliseconds of latency.  In most global organizations employees are at remote sites far away from the SharePoint servers…where they have limited bandwidth and much higher latency.  This limited bandwidth and higher latency correlates to a slower user experience and subsequently lower productivity.

In this multi-part blog post we will discuss how your organization can optimize your infrastructure to ensure your employees get a very fast SharePoint experience – no matter where they are.

One of the first tasks most large global organizations will want to undertake is understanding how their SharePoint environment overlays the infrastructure.  Cascade’s dependency mapping, performance monitoring, multi-tier service maps, transaction analysis and other capabilities empower organizations to better understand, consolidate, support and troubleshoot global SharePoint environments.  For example it can help answer questions such as:

• Where are my SharePoint Servers? > Are any of them unauthorized, or at remote sites and need to be consolidated?
• Which sites/users connect to which servers? > How fast is their experience? > Which users are the most disadvantaged?
• How many of my SharePoint users connect from the Internet/VPN versus internally?
• How many objects make up specific web pages? > Which objects are the largest/slowest? > How much delay is on the server versus the network?
• What backend servers do my SharePoint web servers connect to and depend upon?
• Are the SharePoint/IIS servers authenticating to a local Domain Controller for all users, or are they unexpectedly hitting a remote Domain Controller for some users?
• How much bandwidth does my crawling of regional SharePoint sites consume? > Is it impacting business applications?
• How much backup traffic does SharePoint generate?  Which path does it take to the DR/COOP Site?

Now that we understand SharePoint globally it is time to start strategizing how to improve performance.  There are several ways to approach this and priorities will depend on your organization’s goals.  In this series we’ll take the approach that user productivity and application availability take priority over infrastructure optimization. 

The fastest and easiest way to optimize general user experience and productivity within SharePoint is to optimize the content being served up.  To accomplish this Stingray Aptimizer, formerly Aptimize, has consistently been found by SharePoint administrators to be the solution of choice. It makes web pages pages 30 – 75% faster, increases server throughput, and takes only a few hours to fully configure and start improving performance.  Plus you can kick the tires for free prior to making a decision. 

Stingray Aptimizer is loaded on the SharePoint web server as a Runtime Page Optimizer (RPO). 
It improves performance by file merging, dynamic layout, compression, caching and more so that users see the page significantly faster. This results in fewer objects, fewer authentication turns, more use of the browser’s cache, lower network utilization and less load on the server infrastructure.  It has a huge impact on productivity and encourages users to engage SharePoint even more.  For third-party validation read about how Microsoft uses Stingray Aptimizer on their own SharePoint site.  

For the uber-geek here are live reports from http://www.webpagetest.org so you can compare optimized and non-optimized performance of Microsoft's SharePoint site.

Homepage 

    Aptimizer enabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_P8_20Q3G/

    Aptimizer disabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_16_20Q6X/

Customer page 

    Aptimizer enabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_KC_20QM5/

    Aptimizer disabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_ZR_20Q3E/

If you’re a visual person here are two great videos about Stingray Aptimizer:

1)    How It Works

2)    How to Install, Configure & Deploy

Wondering how much faster your SharePoint could be?  What are you waiting for? Give Stingray Aptimizer a try for free today.

In the next post of this series we’ll discuss how Stingray Traffic Manager and Application Firewall intelligently load balance, scale and protect global SharePoint environments.

 

Stingray Traffic Manager Overview Video

Owen Garrett, Director of Product Management for Riverbed's Stingray line of asymmetric optimization products, provides an overview of the Stingray Traffic Manager.

 

 

Introducing the Stingray Product Family

Apurva Dave, Riverbed VP of Marketing, provides an introduction to Stingray, which is Riverbed's new line of asymmetric optimization products.

 

You can also read the press release here

We love developers!

If you’re no stranger to the Riverbed blog, any of our other social media outlets, or even our web site, by now you’re aware of our new acceleration offerings. Keen observers (and we know you’re all keen!) will note these products depart from our traditional symmetric optimization history. We’ve already discussed why we believe this matters. I’d like to write a bit about to whom it does.

We realize that an IT organization comprises more than those who build the networks and shepherd equipment that routes datagrams. All of that infrastructure would be unnecessary if it weren’t for the applications they run and the data they move about. And while plenty of great technology choices can help the network guys discover and accelerate their prized datagrams, developers, too, can benefit from tools and techniques that improve the speed of their code and the availability of their data.

As a developer, you’re continually trying to balance conflicting demands. Your code must run fast, function correctly, contain no vulnerabilities, and reuse other elements where possible—all, of course, on schedule. At times, some of these demands give way to others—that’s just reality. Aligning resources to meet a release date with full functionality might require constraining resources available for optimizing your code’s performance. That’s where we can help.

Our Stingray line of products is designed specifically to ease the pressure to tightly optimize your code. It can also help you eliminate the worries of deploying code that you acquired elsewhere and are unable to modify it to streamline its performance. Whether you need to improve the response time of a single SharePoint server or rapidly distribute high-performing applications across multiple geographic locations, we at Riverbed realize that you, our new developer audience, deserve the same kind of high-quality attention to your needs as we’ve provided our networking friends for years.

We encourage you to explore our new application-oriented performance offerings. Then, take a walk downstairs (it’s almost always downstairs, isn’t it?) and chat with your buddies in the networking department. They might look kind of scary, but they’re cool people—I promise, I used to be one of them! Swap some stories about how eliminating performance bottlenecks has helped your organization rise above your competitors. And work together to ensure that your entire IT stack—from the datagrams to the data—perform at the speed of 21st century business.

Riverbed 101 – An introduction video to Riverbed’s products

Bob Gilbert gives a high level overview of Riverbed's products.

 

 

Enhancing your applications for mobile device access

I recently came across a fantastic infographic courtesy of Microsoft Tag that highlights some very interesting statistics on how people are using mobile devices in 2011 and the possible impacts on mobile marketing.

The element of the infographic that really grabbed my attention was ‘how fast is mobile internet growing?’ According to the graph mobile internet usage is projected to overtake desktop internet usage by 2015.

So, why should we care about this projected growth?

As an increasing number of organizations look to offer their services online the requirement to have an online presence that performs and meets the expectations of customers no matter what type of device (and not just the trusty old desktop) they are using, is now even more important than ever.

If more of us are going to use mobile devices in the future as the preferred way to access the applications that support these online services, this will have implications on the way those applications are developed and designed to provide the best possible level of performance. According to a recent article in ClickZ, research shows a simple 1 second delay could result in 7 percent fewer conversions, 11 percent fewer page views, and even a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction – not something your organization is going to want to experience.

So, wouldn’t it be helpful to understand which mobile devices visitors are using to access your applications and online services and in-turn help understand how to tailor applications for the best possible level of performance? However, as we all know, the number of devices with different capabilities and the frequency with which they come onto the market is quite amazing. For example, a recent article published on the Rimm-Kaufman Group blog shows that in its last quarter Apple sold 9.25 million ipads which is an increase year on year of 183%.

So, how can an organization keep pace with this change?

Well, thanks to Luca Passani at WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File) and his contributors, including individuals from a number of the carriers, there is a way! WURFL is a global database of all devices and their capabilities. This file can be accessed by developers so that they can build applications and services that perform better for their users when using certain mobile devices including those from Apple.

For those of you who are already using Zeus’ software-ADC solution for intelligently managing their web-based application traffic, Luca and his contributors offer a Java API. This means that those responsible for writing and developing applications can now build this type of mobile device application enhancement on their application delivery solution.

The data provided by WURFL and the use of a software-ADC like Zeus can help organizations overcome a number of issues. Let's finish with one issue in particular. How can an organization ensure that the performance experienced by those using mobile devices is not compromised due to the resolution of the content being delivered back to them? Well, by identifying which mobile devices visitors are using, the organization can then make an informed decision on the resolution of the content that is delivered back. This will help ensure that the content being requested is delivered back as quickly as possible, resulting in improved page load times.

If the projected increase in mobile internet usage becomes reality, how confident is your organization that the performance experienced by those using mobile devices to access your online services is not compromised?

Image source: Microsoft Tag

All Sharepoint. All the time.

Recently, a lot of my work has been focusing on Microsoft SharePoint 2010.  I wanted to take a moment to blog about two recent related efforts:

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 interoperability testing in Redmond

Riverbed Steelhead appliances have been optimizing Microsoft applications since the beginning, but we are getting a fresh look at improving our protocol optimization by working directly with the Microsoft Interoperability Team at the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center in Redmond, WA.  Riverbed has a lab there that we use to work with customers, but now it's great to work with Microsoft directly to get both technical teams working together.

A special thanks goes out to HP, who provided the servers and network hardware for our interoperability lab.

Riverbed booth at Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011

From the lab, I go on the road to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Aneheim, CA.  Our booth will be showcasing Riverbed Steelheads and the Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator.  In and out of the cloud, from document management to complete searchable websites, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 redefines the collaborative environment.  Riverbed Technology enables that capability on the WAN.

Look for the Riverbed Technology booth at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 from Oct 3-6.  Conference information can be found at http://www.mssharepointconference.com .

Aptimize: Supercharging Your SharePoint Performance!

Do you have issues with Microsoft SharePoint environment performance?  While SharePoint is an amazing collaboration tool with loads of rich features, oftentimes long distances and bandwidth limitations can get in the way of delivering the best possible SharePoint experience to remote workers. 

No one likes to wait, and delays will drive users’ behavior.  If SharePoint is too slow, dissatisfied employees won’t use it as much as they could, might open IT tickets in complaint, or may even abandon it entirely.  This can result in productivity losses and missed opportunities in SharePoint deployments.  What to do?
 
Enter Riverbed!
 
Steelhead WAN optimization has been able to improve SharePoint performance for branch office workers with data reduction, HTTP protocol features, and even application specific tuning to accelerate authentication for example.
 
Now complementing Steelhead is our new Aptimize web content optimization software, which can immediately deliver additional performanceimprovements when installed on the SharePoint server.  Aptimize also has the advantage of being able to optimize asymmetrically (nothing required on the client side!)

 
Aptimize will help SharePoint by:

• Merging web page files for fewer roundtrips
• Shrinking and compressing these files to reduce data quantity
• Increasing browser caching to reduce reload times
• Tuning the page layout to display first things first

 
The results speak for themselves:

• Up to 76% reduction in load times
• Up to 43% less traffic
• AND happier and more productive SharePoint users

 So whether you are a Steelhead customer today or new to Riverbed and looking for a fresh approach, here’s your chance to supercharge your SharePoint environment!
 
Reach out to your local Riverbed representative to learn more.

The Industrial Cloud Revolution

Does anyone else miss writing those high school history papers? You know, the ones that all start “With the Industrial Revolution came widespread change across the economic, political and social fabric of western civilization…” Blah, blah, blah. Anyone? Anyone?

Not so much, eh? Okay, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve flown solo in the history-nerd department.

But the reason the Industrial Revolution was such a great opener for many a high-school history paper was that it really did transform the economics of production, which had wide-reaching implications for modern civilization. Production went from small-scale, localized, cottage-industry to large-scale, concentrated production centers benefiting from economies of scale and scope. Various innovations, from the flying shuttle to the assembly line, were instrumental in creating the efficiencies of industrial revolution factories, but at the end of the day, creating more products, more quickly wasn’t worth much unless you had exposure to enough customers to buy them. In other words, you had to get all those products to market.

Enter the steam engine. With a steam-powered railway infrastructure, industrialized manufacturers could get their products to more markets, faster.  Which is a good thing when you just churned out more pairs of pants in a year than everyone in a hundred mile radius could wear in their combined lifetimes.

So, why am I going off about steam engines and the Industrial Revolution? Well, here in IT land, we’re having a bit of an Industrial Revolution redux. Virtualization has enabled IT administrators to consolidate servers and gain economies of scale, and companies like Amazon, Rackspace and AT&T are beginning to offer basic IT services on-demand, passing on even GREATER economies of scale. But all the cheaper, on-demand compute and storage in the world isn’t worth much if you can’t get the product (applications) to market (users).

We need a steam engine for the cloud revolution. Oh, wait! WAN optimization has proven to accelerate network-based applications by reducing bandwidth consumption and the impact of latency. Choo-choo!! Layer on network performance monitoring (who’s keeping track of all these trains?), web content optimization (how are we loading these products on the trains?), and application delivery controllers (what train is going where, when?) and you have yourself the speed and intelligence for a high-performance cloud delivery system.

 All aboard!

Extra credit: Join Amazon Web Services Senior Evangelist, Jeff Barr, and me on August 17 for a webinar on how to optimize your cloud server deployments. Register here!