Traffic Visibility Fabric for Revenue and Differentiation in the Cloud Provider Market // White Paper

Transcription

1 Traffic Visibility Fabric for Revenue and Differentiation in the Cloud Market Cloud provider landscape and challenge As a Cloud Service (CSP) there are many services that you can offer. Based on your core competencies and business strategy you may choose to provide Infrastructure as a Service (), Platform as a Service () or Software as a Service (). In this paper, we will explore some ideas on how you can differentiate your offerings while creating a platform for fast, flexible and scalable creation of additional service offerings. Let s first take a look at the customers, as well as the complexity and economics of, and in order to determine where you can differentiate. Figure shows the relative pricing and customers for each of these services. If a or High Service Pricing s Infrastructure Renters s s Low Low Integrated s Application Users s Service Complexity Integrated s Application Users High provider decides to be vertically integrated, they will need to build their own data center and take on that added complexity. Many and vendors choose to not build their own data center in order to avoid a high level of complexity in their business and take advantage of a fast time to market. This decision also lets them focus on their core competency which is software development, and outsource the complex activity of building and maintaining their own data centers. Figure shows common cloud services configurations found in the market and how complexity and profitability are shared between the providers. and providers typically have unique differentiators in their offerings and therefore are less likely to be commoditized; that is, looking more and more like every other provider. Complexity & Profits Shared By Integrated Using an Integrated Using an Common Service Delivery Models FIGURE : Cloud service complexity vs. pricing FIGURE : Complexity/profitability sharing models

2 Traffic Visibility Fabric for Revenue and Differentiation in the Cloud Market Once the basic value propositions of pay-as-you-go and a highly available infrastructure are met at a satisfactory level by vendors, it becomes difficult to stand out among the competition. At the same time the provider faces a great amount of complexity due to multi-tenancy by customers, each with its multiple requirements. This paper will focus on how an provider can differentiate and improve profitability. The ideas that we discuss in this paper can also be used by vertically integrated and providers as well. Towards the end of the paper we will address how they can leverage these ideas. Service s Network s s s n 5 6 n 5 6 FIGURE : Logical view of an infrastructure Key insights to differentiating your offering Figure provides a logical view of an provider s service delivery network. The network consists of secure containers for customers who just rent the infrastructure for enterprise applications, and / providers who rent the infrastructure to offer services. providers start off with the basic value propositions of pay-as-you-go, high availability and broad network access. However, in order to keep revenue and profit growing up and to the right year over year, and to differentiate your company in the market, you will need to expand the menu of services that you offer to your customers, but without the cost associated with a major expansion into a vertically integrated CSP offering,, and.... n This is where you can address the needs of your customers in order to differentiate your offerings. The ideas that are introduced in this paper can also help you to execute on your basic value proposition of the highly available infrastructure. The key insights from cloud and customers are that they want to use providers who offer infrastructure that enables them to:. Deliver services to market as fast as possible. Resolve service performance issues quickly. Gain as-deep-as-possible customer experience analytics, security monitoring/incident prevention, and other performance analysis capabilities These requirements are fairly easy to understand. If you can deliver a service to market early, then the / customer can achieve revenue early. And by signing up customers early, they can start gaining market share. At the same time your / customer is responsible for the performance of the service that they offer. It is quite common for them to face customers who complain about service performance. The service will cross the infrastructures owned by many providers and even the end user. Therefore, it is very important for the / provider to quickly identify where the service performance issue is located. If they can prove that the performance degradation is not due to the infrastructure that they are using then they can stop the blaming and move on to helping the end customer debug the problem. However, for the provider this is typically difficult to accomplish in a costeffective manner, since management, analysis and security tools have to be dedicated to each customer. These tools are fairly common in cloud infrastructure, but they are looking at the overall infrastructure and providing information and reporting for the CSP to secure and maintain availability in general, and not focused on unique customer applications and performance analytics.

3 Traffic Visibility Fabric for Revenue and Differentiation in the Cloud Market Before we jump into the details of how to differentiate your offering, let s start with a quick review of the challenges in achieving the basic value proposition of your offering a robust, high-availability infrastructure. The challenge of achieving high availability If your infrastructure is anything like those of our demanding cloud service provider customers, then you have a very complex network. A network made complex by a large number of servers, storage, dynamic virtualization, load balancing equipment, highavailability with redundant paths, security devices and disaster recovery procedures. This complexity impacts your network uptime and makes it very difficult to troubleshoot performance issues or security breaches. In spite of this complexity you need your network to offer the best infrastructure availability and performance, but maintain and improve profitability goals. With all the money being spent on servers, virtualization, storage, security and high-speed links, it is difficult to justify the expense of monitoring, time stamping and performance tuning tools that you need to monitor and optimize your network for performance. Yet if you do not have this visibility into your network, you know that you are operating blind blind to bandwidth choke points, blind to network performance problems and blind to security breaches. visibility essential for securing, operating and optimizing your environment. Figure shows the basic concept of a Traffic Visibility Fabric. From the millions of flows, thousands of events and hundreds of changes that occur within the increasingly complex cloud infrastructure, the Traffic Visibility Fabric can provide data in real time. By prioritizing critical traffic flows over nonessential ones, one application over another, as well as optimizing packet information, the fabric is able to address issues of oversubscription and deliver the appropriate, relevant and critical information to your centralized security, monitoring and management systems. The fabric is able to extend visibility from the physical world of the network, monitoring systems and servers, to the virtual world where multiple virtual servers and networks can exist on a single physical infrastructure. From the mobile edge through to cloud environments, the Gigamon Traffic Visibility Fabric can see into your cloud infrastructure and change the dynamics of how you choose to secure, monitor and manage your network. With the Visibility Fabric in place, the systems and tools that were limited by the number of connection points, volume of traffic or by the network link speeds can achieve their full potential, thereby increasing ROI. With so much of your security, revenue and margin tied to the network, being blind to what is going on in the network, is not a place you want to be. To this end Gigamon has introduced the Traffic Visibility Fabric that gives you a proactive approach to network visibility that will not strain your budget. The Gigamon Traffic Visibility Fabric The Traffic Visibility Fabric can be thought of as non-intrusive technology that allows visibility of traffic flows almost anywhere within the cloud infrastructure network access, distribution and core, and within the virtual switched network as well. The Visibility Fabric will direct appropriate traffic to management, analysis and security tools, providing the necessary level of FIGURE : Traffic Visibility Fabric

4 Traffic Visibility Fabric for Revenue and Differentiation in the Cloud Market Achieving the basic value proposition using the Visibility Fabric Nobody needs to convince you to monitor your service delivery network. However, in the face of a complex service delivery network and the fact that you must justify every investment, your approach to monitoring and securing your network becomes very important. The typical approach of letting your team use a myriad of management, analysis and security tools connected to every critical data path is no longer going to be an acceptable approach. Monitoring and protecting the service delivery network using a distributed approach is neither efficient nor cost effective. The key to improved visibility and hence the ability to protect the service delivery network in an operationally efficient and cost-effective manner, is to use a Visibility Fabric with accurate time stamping capability. Figure 5 shows how a Visibility Fabric for a service delivery network can be implemented using Gigamon products. Differentiating your service Once you have achieved your basic value proposition of high availability, we can think of ways to differentiate your service using the insights that your customers want fast time to market and the ability to resolve performance problems quickly. Table shows the framework that you can use to differentiate your service. You can offer these value-added services without extra equipment cost since the Visibility Fabric does the time stamping and allows you to share latency analysis tools. Leveraging these ideas into a vertically integrated / environment A vertically integrated or provider can build a targeted data center that does not have to account for multi-tenancy. However, this data center is also going to be fairly complex due to the large number of servers, storage, dynamic virtualization, load balancing equipment, high-availability with redundant paths, security devices and disaster recovery procedures. So the same network visibility challenge exists for the vertically integrated cloud service provider as well. Since the vertically integrated provider has to build and operate their own data center, they will also face the same challenges in achieving high availability during initial build out and when they upgrade their data center periodically. They will also face the same financial challenges as the provider in spending money for network monitoring and service latency tuning tools. The Traffic Visibility Fabric can help meet these challenges. Quick response to service performance complaints by leveraging the Visibility Fabric becomes an internal timesaver and customer satisfaction tool in the case of a vertically integrated / provider. Similarly the idea of leveraging the Visibility Fabric for achieving fast time to market is equally applicable for the vertically integrated / provider as well. In this case the Visibility Fabric not only provides fast time to market, but also reduces the operational cost of bringing a new service to market. FIGURE 5: Visibility Fabric for service delivery network

5 Traffic Visibility Fabric for Revenue and Differentiation in the Cloud Market Table : Framework for differentiating your offering Value Proposition Offering Delivery Mechanism High availability Use your Visibility Fabric for cost-effective monitoring. Basic Quick Response Pain-free infrastructure upgrades Post deployment SLA monitoring End-to-end service delivery performance reports on demand s do not want to experience downtime or see service impacts when you upgrade your infrastructure (patches, new hardware, etc.). And you do not want to spend a lot of resources doing this. Regression test and tune your network latency quickly and cost effectively using your Visibility Fabric. Program your Visibility Fabric to periodically time stamp the service delivery network of an individual customer and then provide them with reports. Program your Visibility Fabric to time stamp the service delivery network of an individual customer and then provide them with reports on demand. Initial service tuning Program your Visibility Fabric to help a particular customer time stamp and tune the latency of their service delivery network. Time to Market Service testing to tune the end user experience Use Gigamon products to connect test tools to the service delivery path of your customers to emulate thousands of end users accessing their services. Time stamp the response of the service delivery path using your Visibility Fabric and then analyze the stability and latency of the path under stress. Gigamon products will help you share a pool of test equipment among your customers, thereby allowing you to differentiate cost effectively. Upgrade service tuning Check service delivery performance and tune service latency if needed quickly by programming your Visibility Fabric to assist a particular customer. Service testing to tune the end-user experience after an upgrade 5 End-to-end service delivery performance reports on demand Same as the initial testing and tuning service, but done on demand when the / customer execute their upgrade process. Program your Visibility Fabric to time stamp the service delivery network of an individual customer and then provide them with reports on demand. Revenue Generation Network performance analysis as a service experience monitoring as a service IDS/IPS as a service Granular tool enablement on a per-customer, pay-as-they-go billable revenue model. Network forensics as a service 5 Compliance analysis/reporting as a service Copyright 0 Gigamon, LLC. All rights reserved. Gigamon, GigaVUE, GigaSMART, G-TAP, Flow Mapping are registered trademarks of Gigamon, LLC and/or affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. Visibility Fabric, Traffic Visibility Fabric (TVF), Citrus, and The Smart Route To Visibility are trademarks of Gigamon. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Gigamon 598 Gibraltar Drive Milpitas, CA 9505 PH

6 Traffic Visibility Fabric for Revenue and Differentiation in the Cloud Market Conclusion Infrastructure as a Service offerings from Cloud Service s have become a standard go-to solution for solving many business challenges. Cloud solutions for Infrastructure, Software and Platform have moved way up the food chain when organizations make their lists of go-forward infrastructure action plans. Enterprise IT departments are meeting business challenges to scale and grow their IT services, and even get out of the business of managing data center infrastructure altogether in order to focus more effort on core business priorities. As more and more providers show up in the market, the service is beginning to become more commoditized, and differentiation is difficult for customers and the providers. CSPs currently pursue revenue growth and market share by building, expanding or acquiring more data center square footage. By enabling the Gigamon Traffic Visibility Fabric as a core infrastructure element, CSPs will have a quickto-market capability for delivering add-on services that can increase their per-tenant revenue, and differentiate themselves against their competitors. Enjoy the following benefits when you roll out your Visibility Fabric: Accurately time stamp packets allowing you to fine tune network latency and packet delivery and provide SLA audit trails. Prioritize traffic at the flow, packet or application level, so that the right information is sent to the right tool for optimum visibility and clarity. Deliver a single view across the physical and virtual worlds to correlate the two worlds without great effort. Direct the right information to management, analysis and security tools, allowing you to spend less and to increase the return on investment for these tools. Help predict service degradation, allowing your team to address the problem before customers discover it. Filter traffic to reduce the amount of data being sent to a tool, which allows you to reduce cost by using/re-using lower speed tools to monitor higher speed links. Eliminate SPAN/mirror port contention allowing you to easily replicate the appropriate data to multiple tools at the same time in order to eliminate data blind spots. Baseline normal behavior for capacity planning allowing you to plan for network capacity growth based on latency. About Gigamon Gigamon provides intelligent Traffic Visibility Networking solutions for enterprises, data centers and service providers around the globe. Our technology empowers infrastructure architects, managers and operators with visibility into the traffic traversing both physical and virtual networks without affecting the performance or stability of the production environment. Through patented technologies, the Gigamon GigaVUE portfolio of high availability and high density products intelligently delivers the appropriate network traffic to security, monitoring or management systems. With over seven years experience designing and building intelligent traffic visibility products in the US, Gigamon serves the vertical market leaders of the Fortune 000. For more information about Gigamon solutions visit: Copyright 0 Gigamon, LLC. All rights reserved. Gigamon, GigaVUE, GigaSMART, G-TAP, Flow Mapping are registered trademarks of Gigamon, LLC and/or affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. Visibility Fabric, Traffic Visibility Fabric (TVF), Citrus, and The Smart Route To Visibility are trademarks of Gigamon. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Gigamon 598 Gibraltar Drive Milpitas, CA 9505 PH