HyperIP by NetEx Blog

2016 NetExIP-HyperIP Security Enhancement Update

Posted by Marketing

NetEx/IP® and HyperIP® Today

Network Executive Software, Inc. (NESi) brings high performance file transfer technology to the industry-standard IP environment with its NetEx/IP and HyperIP software products.

NetEx/IP is many times faster than TCP over long distances, which makes it the ideal solution for moving massive amounts of mission- or time-critical data across the country or across the globe.  As proven by our long-term users, NetEx/IP has the highest throughput rates over long distances with no degradation of performance because of its efficient bandwidth utilization and mitigation of the effects of packet loss and latency. In fact, NetEx/IP and its predecessor product NetEx/HC (HyperChannel) have provided solutions for moving data for global corporations and US state and government agencies for more than 30 years.

For existing TCP applications, the premier solution is NESi’s low cost HyperIP.  HyperIP transparently implements NetEx/IP in the data path to provide all the NetEx/IP improvements, plus compression of data, on a virtual machine without having to modify existing applications or operating procedures.

The Challenge: Securing the Data

With an increase in hacking and breaches of sensitive databases in recent years, many corporations (especially those in the financial, government, or health sectors) and US government agencies are looking at ways to better protect data transiting between sites and the databases themselves.  Data security is also of utmost importance for those customers utilizing shared/public networks.

NetEx/IP Security Enhancements

NESi recognizes this concern for data protection and is therefore planning to enhance NetEx/IP and HyperIP over the next year with standards-based security technology like Transport Layer Security (TLS) to significantly increase the security of the data being moved across the computer room, the country, or globally.

TLS is a cryptographic protocol that secures data as it is transmitted, focusing on authentication, data integrity, and data confidentiality. With TLS, keys are generated uniquely for each connection and are based on a shared secret negotiated at the start of a session, providing security between two applications using NetEx/IP or HyperIP.  Adding TLS to our NetEx/IP products will also provide improved security for our BFX & PFX utilities, which interface upward to customer applications.

In addition to data security, adaptive block compression of data will also be added to NetEx/IP, thus decreasing WAN bandwidth usage and effectively increasing the application data throughput over the network.

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HyperIP Series – You Asked About WAN Acceleration of Encrypted Data…

Posted by Marketing

A customer recently asked a question during a webcast, “How does HyperIP accelerate encrypted data?” The answer is, it depends.

In the case where the data was encrypted when it was written to disk, as is required in most financial institutions, encryption poses problems for WAN optimization controllers who need to inspect the data to perform their optimization techniques:

1. Compression and deduplication on the network can no longer be applied to a secured/encrypted packet, so data reduction algorithms are a moot point.

2. Data security is paramount, so movement or transport of that data over the IP network requires the datagram to be intact, not un-encrypted, then re-encrypted putting data security at risk. That now means data pattern caching in disk or memory is no longer applicable.

3. Payloads in the encrypted data block can be quite large requiring a data streaming technology to meet window requirements and aggressive RTO’s to be adhered to.

So how can HyperIP WAN Optimization Virtual Appliance from NetEx accelerate encrypted data?

If the data is encrypted prior to HyperIP compression won’t be possible but HyperIP will still be able mitigate network issues that degrade WAN performance. SSL data payload, certificates, and keys will all passed through HyperIP’s accelerated transport at or near wire speed. No matter the distance or latency, no matter the packet loss on the WAN, no matter the amount of network congestion or out–of-order sequence issues, HyperIP will maximize the throughput of the application.  This allows for complete data security, no modification of the SSL-encrypted block of data jeopardizing the integrity of the payload, transparent to both the application and encryption.

If the traffic is encrypted with a Taclane KG encryptor, HyperIP takes the unencrypted data from the source, optimizes the transport of that data to near wire speed, then compresses the data blocks to reduce traffic on the WAN, then hands that data to an encryption appliance. This is the preferred solution in most Department of Defense implementations, where specific encryption gear is required. This solution allows for complete WAN Acceleration of the block of data before it is encrypted. Global replication and backup of data now leverage HyperIP’s value and complete data security with government approved encryption on the WAN links.

See a success story about HyperIP in a DoD implementation:
http://www.netex.com/index.php/download_file/view/73

Whether you are moving your secured data to a cloud storage provider, your own private cloud facility, a centralized data repository from remote offices, or an in-house DR facility, HyperIP can significantly improve the performance of your applications.

Resources:
Part 2 of The Ultimate Guide to Gaining Control of Your WAN
How to Leverage Cloud Backup Services

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HyperIP Series – You Asked About vMotions Over Global Networks….

Posted by Marketing

Storage vMotion is different from “vMotion” where your storage stays the same and you change hosts, or “live storage vMotion” where the host is the same and you change the datastore. The storage vMotion I’m talking about is changing both the host and datastore. Storage vMotion works great on a LAN, but performing it over a WAN is a whole different story.

If you have ever tried to Storage vMotion your virtual machines over a WAN, I’m guessing it didn’t work so well. Most who try to do this are not able to. Why, you ask? Because over a WAN the native TCP stack on your ESX(i) hosts will start to back down. You’ll be lucky to complete a small storage vMotion over moderate distance in several hours, if at all. We have several customers who have tried this natively and have run into problems.  Now they use HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance to mitigate performance issues making long distance vMotion a reality.

One of our customers, a large ‘financial’ enterprise level corporation, has been using HyperIP for their storage vMotions for well over a year now. When they first realized they had a need to migrate VM’s over their WAN, they would start a storage vMotion at the end of the day, expecting it to be completed when they came into the office the next day.  What they found is that in almost all attempts, the vMotion failed. They installed HyperIP and instantly they were vMotioning thousands of VM’s over their WAN between data centers. Last time we spoke to them, they had storage vMotioned over 1200 VM’s using HyperIP. They now do this on a regular basis. Before HyperIP they were lucky to get a single vMotion to finish.

Being able to move a VM at high speed anywhere in the world at anytime can have a profound impact on the way you do business and the way that your IT infrastructure is built and managed. You can build and configure VM’s locally at your corporate IT data center and HyperIP storage vMotion them out to where they need to go. If you are consolidating data centers or branch offices, you’ll need to move those VM’s over your WAN, or even a small internet link. If your organization is building dozens, hundreds, or thousands of VM’s, you’ll want to use HyperIP to move them.

In conclusion, HyperIP is downloadable, easy to implement, has a very small VM footprint, is inexpensive, and most important of all is absolutely necessary to storage vMotion your VM’s over a WAN. Download HyperIP now to start your free 30 day evaluation to take advantage your new ability to storage vMotion your VM’s anywhere in the world. Click the big orange box above to start the download process.

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HyperIP Series – You Asked About TSM Testing with HyperIP..

Posted by DaveHuhne

We recently had an opportunity to test IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Client to a TSM Server in our HyperIP lab. When doing any kind of application verification or performance testing it is important to first determine the overall limits of the native application with and without WAN acceleration.

Lab testing in an emulated environment is a good way to test applications because you can mimic certain network topologies and characteristics. In our case the HyperIP lab consists of two HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliances, two windows servers, and a distance simulator for the WAN. The simulator has the ability to inject packet loss, network latency and other network conditions over various bandwidths that can degrade application performance.

The main objective with any test is to try to validate whether the HyperIP can accelerate the application over various distances with varying latency and packet loss scenarios. Every application has its own performance characteristics and limitations. The same is true for WAN networks. They are about as unique as fingerprints.

Like many backup applications TSM was designed for the data center and performs very well when moving data short distances. Since we are truly becoming a global society is it important to be able to move data over longer distances which is clearly a requirement of cloud storage environments.

With the case of IBM TSM, we started off testing with a simple delay of 10 ms round trip time (RTT). At this relatively short distance TSM slowed by 80% compared to its native performance. This is typical application degradation due primarily to the inefficiencies of the TCP transport and not necessarily the fault of the TSM application. When HyperIP was added to the configuration, the TSM application was able to achieve throughput equivalent to native performance and no delay. In fact HyperIP was able to help TSM achieve near native performance rates at distances represented by 40 ms RTT, 80 ms RTT, 320 ms RTT all the way up to a 1 second RTT. This is a testament to how well TSM and HyperIP interoperate together.

Many applications have internal limitations such as outstanding operations, queue size, or queue depth that artificially restrict the application’s ability to maximize throughput. That was certainly not the case with TSM. TSM can certainly pump data over the network when it is not encumbered with TCP performance issues. When operating TSM with HyperIP, the two combined can sustain the same throughput rates whether running across town, across the ocean, or around the world. That was very impressive. TSM over HyperIP brings LAN-like performance to WAN-based remote backups.

 

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A Blog about a Blog, Is that Allowed?

Posted by Marketing

This weeks blog is about a blog post by Justin Paul, a systems engineer from SMS proTech who focuses on virtualization, storage, and backup applications.

Justin was recently working with a customer who was trying to replicate large amounts of data with limited replication windows and a limited amount of bandwidth.  The customer was using Veeam’s Backup & Replication software.

The big question they were confronted with was whether to add more bandwidth to meet the increasing data demands of replication or as an alternative leverage a WAN Optimization solution with the Veeam application in order to better utilize the existing WAN infrastructure.

Fortunately for the customer, they decided to try HyperIP WAN Optimization Virtual Appliance software with Veeam’s Backup & Replication software. The results speak for themselves.

Here’s a link to Justin’s IT Blog post, we thought it was well written and very informative.

Justin blogs are personal in nature and do not reflect the views of SMS proTech.   Can’t be all that bad for a guy who collects vintage Mustang cars, makes his own beer and is not a stranger to putting in long hours and hard work. Here’s more about Justin’s Bio.

We appreciate the blog….

 

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When gambling many times the River Card does not help ….

Posted by Marketing

An enterprise online gaming company uses HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance for global replication acceleration. The company started off using the HyperIP appliance, liked it so much that they migrated to the virtual version of HyperIP which in their environment runs on VMware ESXi. For them, the HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance solution is very cost effective, very easy to implement and provides the ability to scale with software as transfer requirements increase. Everybody likes a little investment protection, right?

So what problem was this company trying to solve? Like many other global enterprises they were challenged with their disaster recovery processes. They used the public internet to move terabytes of data during replication but found it increasingly difficult to meet recovery time objectives as mandated by their disaster recovery plans. The public internet was much less expensive than dedicated circuits but was hampered by latency, packet loss and out of order issues. The company also wanted to reduce their transfer windows, and at the same time deliver more efficient use of current WAN resources, and control bandwidth costs.

The customer uses EMC SRDF/A between sites and added Oracle DataGuard as a second replication application between sites. They tested Oracle DataGuard without informing anyone from NetEx and as expected, HyperIP worked like a charm. The point is, it is pretty easy to add additional applications to operate with HyperIP.

Did the customer try any other WAN Optimization solutions? Yes they tried Riverbed Steelhead appliances but decided to keep using HyperIP because of the significant performance advantage and the cost effectiveness of the software solution.

At the end of the day HyperIP helped this online gaming customer reduce replication, backups and migrations time frames by as much as 60%. The fact that HyperIP was a VMware Ready solution is extremely important to this customer. With a HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance solution the customer is happy with the ease of deployment, lost cost, ease of support and maintenance, ease of integration into their existing virtual environment, including the speed of deployment of newly created virtual machines.

This customer is very satisfied with their HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance solution.

Portions of this case study are sourced from:
TechValidate Survey of a Large Enterprise Hospitality Company
http://www.techvalidate.com/product-research/netex-hyperip/case-studies/AD1-EFB-F91

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HyperIP Series – You Asked About Enabling Centralized Remote Backup

Posted by Marketing

A successful remote backup and recovery process depends on the right backup applications, the right management of those apps, and the network to support it. How can HyperIP WAN optimization virtual appliance enable this? Let’s look at a typical remote backup solution consisting of remote servers, residing in a branch, and a central repository of data for the backups, residing in a data center. These servers, virtualized in most cases, require remote backups to occur in a given backup window for each server. These backups are slave to the size of the WAN bandwidth to/from the branch. To reduce the backup windows or at worst, meet them, the WAN overhead has to be eliminated.

Typically, TCP overhead limits actual application throughput over these WAN links. The table below shows anticipated application throughput with HyperIP. Compare this to what you get now and the value proposition of HyperIP becomes evident.

HyperIP mitigates the effects of packet loss, latency, and out of order packets to more effectively drive near wire speed of the WAN link (~95%). Then, if needed, block-level compression, a feature of HyperIP, is applied to further reduce the amount of data traveling over the WAN link, dramatically increasing application throughput. This effectively turns the WAN into LAN-like performance from the backup client to the backup server destination.

Sounds interesting? Want to try HyperIP with your backup application? Go to our website at www.netex.com and click on the big orange download box. This will get you started on the right track. Our SE Team at NetEx will be glad to help size your bandwidth requirements for remote backup.Feel free to CONTACT US.

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Goes together like PB & J

Posted by Marketing

Here is a brief success story about a Financial Services Company that uses HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance to optimize their Veeam Backup & Replication.

The company uses a DS3 circuit between data centers and carves out an 8 Mb MPLS circuit for replication and SQL log file transfers. Packet loss and excessive latency was causing poor application performance.

From a high level standpoint, they wanted to improve Veeam Backup & Replication performance, reduce bandwidth costs by using their existing WAN more efficiently, and provide a disaster recovery program that they could rely upon.

HyperIP was downloaded from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM) and installed on two existing VMware servers. In a very short period of time the customer’s IT architect installed HyperIP  and shortly thereafter was optimizing the Veeam Backup & Replication. Citrix WANscaler was also tested but the customer selected HyperIP for a variety of reasons:

Using a virtual infrastructure and virtual appliance provided ease of deployment, low cost of deployment, ease of integration into the existing infrastructure and the speed of deployment for newly created virtual machines.

For this customer it was extremely important that HyperIP was certified as VMware Ready versus other products. Customer Quotation – IT Infrastructure engineer:

“HyperIP did what I needed it to do at a fraction of the cost of the competition. Ease of implementation, good documentation, and pleasant experiences with support. HyperIP reduced the time to replicate VMware VMs by more than 80% while using less bandwidth. It was easy to implement due to good documentation and responsive tech support. The cost of increasing bandwidth was significantly higher than the cost of HyperIP.”

So with HyperIP and Veeam Backup & Replication this company has a replication (disaster recovery) solution they are happy with, are getting better WAN throughput and performance and are reducing costs by leveraging their existing infrastructure.

Download and test HyperIP for yourself at – http://www.netex.com/hyperip/evaluation-request

Portions of this case study are sourced from:
TechValidate Survey of a Medium Enterprise Financial Services Company
http://www.techvalidate.com/product-research/netex-hyperip/case-studies/FDC-B76-71E

 

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HyperIP Series – You asked about Backup…

Posted by DaveHuhne

Backing up your data to a remote site is a business necessity. The method or design of your backup solution will be dependent on your requirements and whose system you own. Things like backup window, WAN, de-dupe, distance and incrementals all come into play when making purchase decisions for a backup solution. So why do I need a WAN Accelerator? My storage backup system de-dupes and compresses the data before sending it to its remote DR site. If I install a WAN Accelerator will it provide any additional value? Will data be further reduced after dedup and how much will my application throughput increase?

These are great questions but first you will have to determine if there is a bottleneck in your network. My backups don’t complete on time, why? My backup application throughput is low, why? I can only backup certain servers per night or my backup fills the window and I have new servers arriving as we speak. I can’t keep up so what should I do to solve the issue?

I can buy more bandwidth, increase the buffers in my switches, make the TCP windows bigger. Some of these remedies are expensive, take time or maybe I can’t make changes to the network? A plausible alternative is to test a WAN Accelerator.

HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance helps alleviate many network issues that cause poor application performance and throughput over WANs. The software doesn’t care that your backup system data has been prior de-duped and/or compressed. The software uses an adaptive compression algorithm and will attempt to further reduce deduped data if at all possible. Compression is only one feature of the software that improves application performance. TCP transfers will also be affected by any number of network issues including congestion, jitter, latency, and packet loss. A minimal amount of packet loss can reduce effective throughput by half. Any resulting retransmits will further consume your bandwidth into making you believe your WAN utilization is high when in fact you are really only moving a fraction of the real data. HyperIP shields TCP applications from network issues allowing the maximize throughput.

So back to the question “What data reduction will I get with HyperIP”? The answer is HyperIP will manage the network so that the maximum throughput will be achieved as long as the application can deliver the required data to fill the pipe. As an example we have customers whose backup windows have gone from 24+ hours down to single digits. A recent Veeam customer reduced their backup window from 15 hours to 3 hours with HyperIP. CLICK HERE to see the Veeam / HyperIP success story.

Obviously every backup environment is different but downloading and testing HyperIP for yourself is quick and easy and could save you a lot of time.

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HyperIP’s ‘Thin’ Virtual Appliance Footprint Comparison

Posted by Marketing

Building a virtual appliance to leverage the advantages of consolidation of server resources has obviously exploded. The idea of implementing WAN optimization in a virtual appliance has become more of a necessity than a luxury. VMware has created Best Practices for virtual appliance deployment including information for required processors, memory, disk space for the expanded image, NIC’s, etc. Is it cost effective to implement a virtual appliance versus a standalone WAN Optimization controller? Not always, so it pays to do some homework. HyperIP’s virtual footprint looks like this versus others.

The WAN Optimization footprints for Riverbed, Silver Peak and Blue Coat are so large they  almost negate the ability for the customer to deploy them in a remote or branch office just because of the sheer size. HyperIP has the smallest virtual machine footprint of any WAN Optimization virtual appliance which equates to a cost effective solution. The same ‘thin’ foot print scales from 1.5 Mb/s to 800 Mb/s which provides scalability and investment protection. Check it out for yourself. Download the OVF through VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace or at www.netex.com.

Specifications for Virtualized WAN Optimizers:

Virtual Steelhead: http://www.riverbed.com/us/assets/media/documents/data_sheets/SpecSheet-Riverbed_VirtualSteelhead.pdf

Silver-Peak VX: http://www.silver-peak.com/assets/download/pdfpub/ds_SilverPeak_VX.pdf

Blue Coat Proxy-SG VA: http://bluecoat.com/products/sg/virtualappliance look under specifications.

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