psilva's prophecies: synthesis

Showing posts with label synthesis. Show all posts

Monday, July 13, 2015

F5 Animated Whiteboards

F5 Animated Whiteboards offer a quick, visual story to some of today's technology challenges and how we can help solve those headaches. Our latest covers Next Generation IPS and how SSL encryption of applications is becoming the norm. SSL ensures the integrity and privacy of transactions, but poses a visibility problem for IPS systems. This lack of visibility means attackers can evade IPS by encrypting their transmissions within SSL. Learn how F5's intelligent ADC combined with next-generation IPS provides a solution that eliminates dangerous blind spots.

Other F5 Animated Whiteboards

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Tuesday, June 3, 2014

A Living Architecture

You often hear people say, 'oh, this is a living document,' to indicate that the information is continually updated or edited to reflect changes that may occur during the life of the document. Your infrastructure is also living and dynamic. You make changes, updates or upgrades to address the ever changing requirements of your employees, web visitors, customers, partners, networks, applications and anything else tied to your systems.

This is also true for F5's Reference Architectures. They too are living architectures.

F5's Reference Architectures are the proof-points or customer scenarios that drive Synthesis to your data center and beyond.

When we initially built out these RA's, we knew that they'd be continuously updated to not only reflect new BIG-IP functionality but also show new solutions to the changing challenges IT faces daily. We've recently updated the Intelligent DNS Scale Reference Architecture to include more security (DNSSEC) and to address the highly hybrid nature of enterprise infrastructures with Distributed DNS.

F5’s end-to-end Intelligent DNS Scale reference architecture enables organizations to build a strong DNS foundation that maximizes the use of resources and increases service management, while remaining agile enough to support both existing and future network architectures, devices, and applications. It also provides a more intelligent way to respond and scale to DNS queries and takes into account a variety of network conditions and situations to distribute user application requests and application services based on business policies, data center conditions, network conditions, and application performance. It ensures that your customers—and your employees—can access your critical web, application, and database services whenever they need them.

In this latest DNS RA rev, DNSSEC can protect your DNS infrastructure, including cloud deployments, from cache poisoning attacks and domain hijacks. With DNSSEC support, you can digitally sign and encrypt your DNS query responses. This enables the resolver to determine the authenticity of the response, preventing DNS hijacking and cache poisoning.

Also included is Distributed DNS. Meaning, all the DNS solution goodness also applies to cloud deployments or infrastructures where DNS is distributed. Organizations can replicate their high performance DNS infrastructure in almost any environment. Organizations may have Cloud DNS for disaster recovery/business continuity or even a Cloud DNS service with signed DNSSEC zones. F5 DNS Services enhanced AXFR support offers zone transfers from BIG-IP to any DNS service allowing organizations to replicate DNS in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. The DNS replication service can be sent to other BIG-IPs or other general DNS servers in Data Centers/Clouds that are closest to the users.

In addition, Organizations can send users to a site that will give them the best experience. F5 DNS Services uses a range of load balancing methods and intelligent monitoring for each specific app and user. Traffic is routed according to your business policies and current network and user conditions. F5 DNS Services includes an accurate, granular geolocation database, giving you control of traffic distribution based on user location.

DNS helps make the internet work and we often do not think of it until we cannot connect to some resource. With the Internet of Nouns (or Things if you like) hot on our heels, I think Port 53 will continue to be a critically important piece of the internet puzzle.

Technorati Tags: f5,big-ip,dns,reference architecture,dnssec,iot,things,name_resolution,silva,security,cloud,synthesis

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Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Interop 2014: F5 Synthesis Whiteboard (feat Wagner)

Synthesis in the Wild! Tim Wagner, Manager, Field Systems Engineering, shows how he whiteboards the F5 Synthesis story to help organizations understand the value of SDAS – Software Defined Application Services. He discusses SDN and how that works within a Layer 2/3 environment and the power of SDAS for Layers 4-7 with its ability to apply important services to the applications that need it…all on a single platform. Interesting discussion on how marketing visions translate into real customer solutions available today.

Technorati Tags: f5,Interop,vegas,synthesis,security,silva,video,sdas,sdn,consolidation,whiteboard

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Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Interop 2014: Find F5 Pop Up Edition

In a little twist for April 1, I welcome you to Interop 2014 with a fun Pop Up version of how to find F5 Booth 2227. Reporting from Mandalay Bay in Vegas!

Technorati Tags: f5,Interop,vegas,synthesis,security,silva,video,findf5,pop-up

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Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Infrastructure as a Journey

I see and read a lot of IT articles almost demanding that organizations must do certain things to ensure that some piece of their infrastructure is secure, highly available, fault tolerant, agile, flexible, scalable, recoverable, cloud'able, whatever the silo needs or face the dire circumstances. I'm guilty of it too over the years. Organizations must have a WAF for PCI compliance or Remote employees need to have an encrypted tunnels to the corporate network or any other command pertaining to the health of your infrastructure.

Life is a Journey, Faith is a Journey and by golly, Business is a Journey. IT is tasked with supporting the business objectives, so why not Infrastructure as a Journey? We've seen part of this journey play out over the last 5 years as organizations first tried to understand the cloud, it's various definitions/deployment models and the true business benefits. The cloud journey continues as more organizations test the waters, so to speak, and distribute their content over a hybrid infrastructure.

Workplace mobility is and continues to be a journey for many organizations. This started over 10 years ago with the first bricks, Palms and Blackberry's making their way into employees hands. iPhones and Androids later, VDI, MDM, MAM and a host of other infrastructure solutions have come along to help with the mobile BYOx journey.

Security has always been a journey. Assessing, managing and mitigating the risk to the business. Security is probably an area that gets the most insistence to do something. For years the ever popular Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt has been used to urge companies to protect something in a certain way. With all the media coverage of data breaches and the reported mistakes (intentional or not) made along the way, it is easy to jump on the 'you must do' bandwagon. But all companies are different.

Also, organizations might not be able to obey all the mandates and accomplish everything they must. They might have tight budgets, limited staff, different priorities, varying risk or other variables that could prevent complete infrastructure bliss. And over the next 5 years, there will probably be even more change that adds even greater hills and valleys to navigate. Just like life. I can also guarantee that your infrastructure will probably look nothing like it does today.

Your body's infrastructure is what keeps us humans going day to day and your IT infrastructure is what keeps the business going. The infrastructure journey to a high performance, flexible, agile, application focused fabric with the ability to apply services across that fabric and the tools to manage it, is just beginning.

I realize there is incredible pressure to do more with less and have it done yesterday on top of dealing with the daily fires. Much easier said than done, but if you can think of your infrastructure as a journey, it might help prioritize the needs of your business and see what forks in the road are approaching rather than scrambling when the big one hits.

Journeys can take you to some interesting places as you progress from one stage to another. You try stuff, make mistakes, learn and make adjustments to address those and hopefully come out better on the other side. Just always remember to exhale and smile when you get there.

Technorati Tags: infrastructure,cloud,security,mobile,journey,it,synthesis,challenges,change,f5,silva,fud

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Monday, February 10, 2014

VMware PEX 2014: Find F5

Sporting a cool DevCentral t-shirt, I show you how to find F5 booth 208 at VMware Partner Exchange 2014. The theme for PEX is Master the New Reality and F5’s Synthesis is a perfect way to master infrastructure’s new reality…the Cloud.

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Wednesday, December 11, 2013

GartnerDC 2013: That’s a Wrap

I wrap it up from the Gartner Data Center Conference 2013 from Las Vegas. Special thanks to you for watching along with guests Robert Haynes, David Holmes and Nathan Pearce for the on camera help and Courtney and Nigel for their camera work.

ps
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Technorati Tags: f5,gartner,gartnerdc,synthesis,find f5,silva,trade show,video,conference,reference architecture,ddos,dns,security

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psilva's prophecies