May 23, 2019 at 13:07IoT, AI systems and network technologies on VMware EMPOWER 2019 - continue to broadcast from the scene
We are talking about the new products presented at the VMware EMPOWER 2019 conference in Lisbon (we are also broadcasting in our Telegram channel ).
Revolutionary network solutions
One of the main topics of the second day of the conference was intelligent traffic routing.
WANs are quite unstable. Users often connect to the corporate IT infrastructure from mobile devices through public hotspots, which entails certain security risks. Therefore, companies are forced to apply additional protective measures: redundancy, load balancing, encryption. Software-defined networks help solve these problems.
One of the most significant events of the day was a review of the VeloCloud SD-WAN network solution. VeloCloud is a cloud-based software-defined distributed network provider acquired by VMware last year. The organization offers a customizable solution that automatically routes, encapsulates, monitors and limits traffic.
The system includes a software platform and devices installed around the perimeter of the corporate network (in company branches, data centers, etc.). In the latter case, we are talking about the "hardware" VeloCloud Edge. They allow you to build tunnels of various types: Branch-to-Branch, Branch to SaaS, Branch to DC, there is also support for legacy-networks via IPsec.
The system analyzes the type of transmitted packets and the performance of network channels. Based on these data, the most suitable channel is dynamically selected or a decision is made to aggregate several of them. In VeloCloud SD-WAN, the control and transmission levels are separated, which are responsible for the logic of the operation of network devices and the translation of traffic. This approach makes the network more productive and flexible.
“Forget jitter - it will be gone,” - Guido Roberto Frabotti, Lead Engineer, SD-WAN at VMware
The capabilities of SD-WAN by VeloCloud are impressive - during the tests, the system reduced the average ping by three times and solved the problem of packet loss with UDP connection via LTE. Representatives of VMware claim that now you can forget about the defects of voice and video communications, if at least one channel (LTE or Fiber Channel) has sufficient bandwidth.
Large organizations have already appreciated the work of the solution in the production environment. For example, in February of this year, the SD-WAN by VeloCloud system was introduced in Singapore's telecommunications company SP Telecom. It successfully routes traffic to a network to which more than a hundred data centers and commercial buildings are connected, connected by a million kilometers of fiber. Among the users of SD-WAN are also Redmond , Deutsche Telekomand triton .
Hand on the pulse of IoT
The company is actively joining a growing segment of corporate IoT. VMware has the following goals in this area:
- Simplify the management of individual smart devices and their clusters through centralized administration, customizable templates, detailed and timely reporting of failures (and not only).
- Improve the security of IoT infrastructure, especially at mission-critical corporate sites. Speakers cited VMware's experience with railway companies and medical facilities as examples.
- To enable partner companies to implement a flexible and scalable infrastructure without the need for specialized administrators.
- Introduce native integration with various types of cloud environments.
The company will try to achieve all these goals using its IoT infrastructure management platform - Pulse 2.0. It is a solution for monitoring, administering, and protecting IoT devices. Pulse's goal is to simplify the management of large-scale IoT infrastructure with a RESTful API and more advanced over-the-air upgrade procedures.
“It is able to support work with 100 million smart devices”
The product demonstration impressed us. Representatives of the IT giant have clearly shown that now you can configure and mass update smart devices in a couple of clicks.
Machine Learning Again
As on the first day , machine learning was a hot topic. VMware said they annually double their investments in MO technology. Intelligent algorithms already perform a number of routine operations in products such as vSAN, NSX-T, vRealize Operations & Log Insight, Wavefront Analytics, Apteligent, Skyline.
“AI systems analyze logs and infrastructure performance, provide reports and recommendations to administrators, balance the load on servers and even partially automate technical support”
Automation of data centers is one of VMware's priorities. Representatives of the company are convinced that the “living” administrator should only be involved in determining the policies of the data center, and their implementation should lie entirely on the shoulders of the artificial intelligence system. In particular, VMware plans to implement a smart firewall that will take on many of the tasks of full-time network administrators.
The second day of the VMware EMPOWER 2019 conference was no less eventful than the first. We will continue to talk about the latest technological innovations of the IT giant in the blog on Habré and in the Telegram channel , where we broadcast from the place of events.
Posts from the Telegram channel with the VMware EMPOWER 2019 news: