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Editor’s Letter

Best Converged Infrastructure Product

Best Hybrid Flash Storage Product

Best Cloud Management Software Product

Best Cloud Computing Service Provider

Best Enterprise Cloud App

Best Enterprise Mobility Manage-ment Product

Best Desktop and Application Delivery Product

Bright Idea Impact Award Winner

DECEMBER 2013, VOL. 2, NO. 11

Impact Awards

EDITOR’S LETTER

The Wisdom of Crowds

IMPACT AWARDS


IMPACT AWARDS


IMPACT AWARDS


IMPACT AWARDS


IMPACT AWARDS

Bright Idea Impact Award

IMPACT AWARDS

Best Enterprise Mobility Management Product

IMPACT AWARDS


IMPACT AWARDS


Introducing the winners, all of which promise to shake up data center operations and pave the way

toward IT’s future.

MIModern InfrastructureCreating tomorrow’s data centers

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • DECEMBER 2013 2

I RECENTLY LISTENED to a radio segment that discussed James Surowiecki’s 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, which argues that groups consistently make better deci-sions than any single member of the group.

Say, for example, that a crowd is asked to guess at the number of jelly beans in a jar. While it is highly unlikely that an individual will come up the correct answer on his own, the statistical mean of all the answers provided by the crowd is almost always uncannily correct. This phe-nomenon has been shown to work again and again across a variety of experiments.

This idea gave me comfort as I waited for Modern Infra-structure readers to deliver their verdict on the best, most “impactful” products to grace their data centers this year.

And deliver they did. In this, our first year holding these

awards, readers cast nearly 3,000 votes across eight cate-gories. In categories where they believed we had omitted a contender from the list of finalists, they didn’t hesitate to set the record straight, and wrote in their own nominees. Best of all, readers did more than simply check a box with their vote—they regaled editors and experts with colorful, detailed explanations about why they chose the way they did, making the task of selecting our winners that much easier.

To everyone who voted, my sincere thanks to you for sharing your wisdom and experience. Be assured that fel-low readers will make good use of it.

And now, without further ado, turn the page to see the winners of this year’s Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards. Congratulations to everyone who submitted a product and voted on a product, and of course, to the winners! n

Alex Barrett

Editor in Chief

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EDITOR’S LETTER

The Wisdom of Crowds


CONGRATULATIONS TO SimpliVity, whose OmniCube is the winner of the Modern Infrastructure Best Converged Infra-structure Award. SimpliVity users insist that OmniCube is the real deal.

“When I saw this on the show floor at VMworld, I was skeptical,” said one reader. “Then I saw it in action, and I was floored. This is the sort of direction IT needs to head, and it’s clear that [SimpliVity’s] vision is on that track.”

Compared with traditional converged infrastructure products, which some dismiss as mere packaging and inte-gration exercises, SimpliVity takes a true IT building-block approach, combining two or more 2U OmniCubes into an elastic pool of federated server and storage resources. As a testament to its scalability, SimpliVity claims OmniCubes can be found everywhere from small mom-and-pop shops all the way to multisite enterprises and service providers.

And when compared with other next-generation con-verged infrastructure offerings, judges commended Sim-pliVity for processing its storage functions with dedicated hardware. For example, some competing offerings present storage as a virtual appliance which can, in some in-stances, compete with other virtual workloads, explained one judge. “People put up with it because it solves a lot of other problems—namely political and financial—but

BEST CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE PRODUCT.

SimpliVity OmniCube

It’s more than just packaging, voters say, but a true IT building-block approach.

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doing things in hardware is a better way to do things.”OmniCube’s hardware acceleration comes courtesy

of the OmniCube Accelerator, a proprietary PCIe card that works with a Data Virtualization Engine to dedupli-cate, compress and optimize data inline, with no perfor-mance degradation, as well as to accelerate replication capabilities.

Modern Infrastructure readers also gave props to Sim-pliVity OmniCube for its deep integration with VMware virtualization. For instance, SimpliVity’s management console runs as a plug-in to VMware vCenter, the man-agement mainstay of any virtual environment. Through integration with VMware’s vStorage APIs for Array In-tegration, OmniCube provides hardware acceleration for VMware cloning workflows, and lets VMware clones take advantage of its deduplication and compression capabilities. Finally, OmniCube takes a virtual machine

(VM) centric approach to backup and replication. Readers mentioned that rather than relying on array-level snap-shots, OmniCube allows administrators to set backup and replication policies on a per-VM basis.

“SimpliVity reduced the complexity of our virtualized environment,” wrote a reader. “We were able to reduce our capital expense, operational expense and DC foot-print.” n

READERS ALSO GAVE PROPS TO SIM PLIVITY OMNICUBE FOR ITS DEEP INTEGRATION WITH VMWARE VIRTUALIZATION.


FINDING A SINGLE storage option that can provide good per-formance and capacity for a wide variety of workloads is easier said than done, but Modern Infrastructure readers report that iSCSI Nimble Storage CS-Series arrays have been a great addition to their data centers, providing the right levels of performance and capacity, along with exten-sive software features, all at a reasonable cost.

Like all hybrid storage systems, the CS-Series relies on a solid-state disk tier to provide ample performance for demanding, IOPS-intensive applications, coupled with lower-cost spinning disks for scale-out capacity. However, readers and experts said that Nimble’s proprietary CASL file system takes things one step further, especially with its Write-Optimized Data Layout feature.

“What’s really interesting about Nimble is that they’re mucking around with how writes happen,” explained one expert judge. Rather than commit writes directly to disk, Nimble “hangs on to them for a while,” and when those reach critical mass, “coalesces writes into one big serial write,” thus taking advantage of spinning disk’s natural propensity for streaming sequential data. Thanks to this, Nimble claims it can offer write operations that are as much as 100 times faster than traditional disk-based storage.

BEST HYBRID FLASH STORAGE PRODUCT.

Nimble Storage CS-Series Array

This hybrid storage system tackles read as well as write performance.

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Nimble also optimizes capacity with features such as always-on inline compression, thin provisioning, space- efficient snapshots and zero-copy clones, and promises non-disruptive capacity and performance upgrades. A fully loaded system can scale to 249 TB of effective capac-ity. However, the software feature that readers repeatedly called out was the InfoSight portal.

“[The] InfoSight portal is an extremely powerful tool,” wrote one reader. It presents a single window through which admins can view alerts and triggers, reports, ana-lyze performance and perform capacity planning.

Indeed, it’s the maturity of Nimble’s user interface and reporting tools that really set it apart from other hybrid flash players. “It’s a very mature product,” said another judge. While other vendors focus on tight platform in-tegration, or provide deeper performance metrics, it’s Nimble’s balanced approach to performance, capacity and manageability that make it such a strong choice for Modern Infrastructure readers. n

HONORABLE MENTION

Tegile ZebiIF YOU NEED a hybrid flash storage array that can

handle NAS or SAN, iSCSI or Fibre Channel, then look

no further than the Tegile Zebi array, whose multi-

protocol support sets it apart from the iSCSI-only

Nimble CS-Series.

“It supports more protocols at a much more af-

fordable price point,” one reader said.

Readers also commended the Zebi for its use of

enterprise-class components such as SAS rather

than the lower-cost SATA disk drives, plus enter-

prise vs. consumer-grade flash.

Not surprisingly, readers report that “the perfor-

mance rocks!” n

THE FEATURE THAT READERS CALLED OUT WAS THE INFOSIGHT PORTAL.


AS CLOUD SERVICES mature, improved performance, lower costs and fewer outages are enticing enterprises to the cloud. However, not all cloud providers offer exactly what your enterprise needs when it comes to building, monitor-ing and managing a private cloud infrastructure or hybrid cloud deployment. To fill that void, many IT pros turn to third-party cloud management software.

Modern Infrastructure readers chose Dell Multi-Cloud Manager as their choice for Best Cloud Management Soft-ware product, citing its flexibility, feature set and security management capabilities. Dell Multi-Cloud Manager, for-merly Enstratius, allows enterprises to deploy, automate and manage applications on a multitude of public, private and hybrid clouds.

“It’s the only product I found that works across multiple public clouds and supports multiple features of Amazon Web Services,” said one reader.

Another reader lauded the software for its flexibility and ease of use, while another noted that it works with open source environments such as OpenStack and Linux clouds.

In fact, Dell Multi-Cloud Manager supports a wide range of public and private cloud platforms, including AWS, Dell, Joyent Cloud, OpenStack, VMware and

BEST CLOUD MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE PRODUCT.

Dell Multi-Cloud Manager

Its robust features cover the gamut of public, private and even open source clouds.

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Windows Azure, among many others. In addition to interoperability with various cloud

service providers, enterprise IT is also concerned with data security in the cloud. Dell Multi-Cloud Manager helps overcome this obstacle by enabling enterprise-wide governance for cloud-based applications—giving IT pros the ability to control systems through encryption, user authentication and budget management. The tool also includes several automation features for provisioning, autoscaling, backup and recovery.

“It’s just the best tool out there for us,” said one reader. n

HONORABLE MENTION

Egenera Cloud SuiteEGENERA CLOUD SUITE was runner-up in the Best

Cloud Management Software category for its ease

of use and support for physical as well as virtual

environments.

“We like its ease of use and integration into

EC2 for hybrid cloud solutions,” noted one reader.

“It has the ability to offer physical and virtual re-

sources in the service catalog.”

Other readers said that Egenera

offers a drag-and-drop interface

as well as an “excellent source of

controls.”

Finally, one reader found its

chargeback capabilities most use-

ful, noting, “It includes an inte-

grated chargeback system that

allows me to know exactly what

my environment is going to cost.

And now it gives me the ability to

provision out to the public cloud.” n


JUST SAY THE words “public cloud” and those in IT likely think of Amazon Web Services. And that was certainly the case in the Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards, with Am-azon Web Services public cloud winning the Best Cloud Service Provider category.

Since AWS entered the public cloud arena, it has con-tinued to gain momentum—first with startups and one-off development projects, then gaining more widespread acceptance within the enterprise. “We’re currently using Amazon Web Services for a national website,” noted one reader.

As the cloud market continues to grow, enterprises are faced with several choices for cloud service provid-ers. How do those in IT decide which cloud platform to use? And how do cloud service providers differentiate themselves in a sea of options? Often, it comes down to cost.

Cost is one area where AWS has been leading the indus-try—with multiple price reductions throughout this year alone. And IT teams have taken notice. “We like AWS for its overall innovation and leadership, combined with fair pricing,” noted one reader.

Despite stiff pricing competition among cloud pro-viders, AWS stands out in other areas. The cloud giant

BEST CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICE PROVIDER PRODUCT.

Amazon Web Services

This heavyweight leads the public cloud pack. It’s nearly a one-stop shop

for enterprises.

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currently offers enterprises a wide array of cloud-based services. Service types include compute and networking; storage and content delivery; databases; deployment and management; and application services. And within each of these categories, AWS offers a range of services.

AWS also offers online documentation, training and a yearly conference to help customers navigate the ever- changing waters of public cloud computing. n

HONORABLE MENTION

Microsoft Windows AzureAS EVIDENCE OF the cutthroat nature of the cloud

service provider market, Microsoft Windows Azure

came in a very close second in the Best Cloud Ser-

vice Provider category of the

Modern Infrastructure Im-

pact Awards.

With Windows Azure, soft-

ware titan Microsoft has

managed to stay firmly on

the heels of Amazon Web Ser-

vices’ cloud moves, pushing

more frequent and granular

updates to Azure’s Platform

as a Service and Infrastruc-

ture as a Service offerings.

That’s resonating with cus-

tomers. “Windows Azure is

reliable and we like its pace

of innovation,” noted one

reader.

Another reader had a dif-

ferent take on why his company chose Azure: “It’s

cheap and meets our needs.” n


AS MORE AND more enterprises adopt cloud services for vital workloads and applications, the vendor community is coming to their aid with enterprise cloud apps to suit their evolving needs. Cloud users voiced their opinion on the enterprise cloud app that best supports their organi-zation’s day-to-day work and IT environment, and Crash-Plan PROe, an enterprise endpoint backup offering from Code42, proved to be readers’ enterprise app of choice.

“CrashPlan PROe solves a fundamental problem for IT,” said Dan Sullivan, senior systems architect at the Ro-anoke, Va.-based Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.

“Dead-simple end-user experience,” said one reader. CrashPlan PROe provides security to executive-level

and mission-critical data residing on endpoint devices—an important cog in the cloud security machine for en-terprises. Voters noted the app’s simplicity and flexibility as standout features among other enterprise cloud app choices.

“It’s simple—it just works without being overly com-plicated,” another reader said. “Yet if you want the added flexibility of configuring backup policies or even add things like LDAP/Active Directory integration—it’s there. Also, cross-platform support means we don’t have to stay locked into a single OS.”

BEST ENTERPRISE CLOUD APP.

CrashPlan PROeThis product stood out in a sea of apps

for its focus on endpoint security.

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Another enterprise user paid it forward when it came to casting a vote for CrashPlan PROe.

“CrashPlan saved my files when my computer crashed, so I am returning the favor whenever I can,” the reader said. n

HONORABLE MENTION

Axcient Cloud ContinuityTHE HONORABLE MENTION winner in the Enterprise Cloud App

category went to cloud backup provider Axcient Cloud Conti-

nuity. As the costs of downtime affect enterprise IT’s financial

bottom line and reputation, Axcient Cloud Continuity offers

the ability to access your cloud environment—and potentially

your mission-critical data—so you can continue working from

any cloud-connected device during an emergency.

Sullivan calls Axcient Cloud Continuity an “interesting service

that can streamline disaster recovery.” n


ENTERPRISE MOBILITY MANAGEMENT represents a new frontier for IT, with a lot of moving parts. A product’s ease of use and a vendor’s customer support can go a long way toward helping companies overcome these challenges—and that’s where AirWatch excels, according to our readers.

AirWatch’s suite provides device, application and con-tent management features that IT administrators can use to address the many facets of an enterprise mobility initiative.

“They successfully combine management of the device, applications and corporate content in a very user-friendly way,” one reader wrote.

AirWatch, a 10-year-old company based in Atlanta, also earned high marks for evolving beyond mobile de-vice management, an important, but limited, technology that has become somewhat of a commodity. AirWatch’s mobile application management offering lets companies purchase, deploy and even develop apps for end users.

“We really love the app wrapping component, since that allows us to add security to our app without having to shell out extra cash to contractors,” another reader wrote.

One of the biggest pain points in managing enterprise mobility, especially in bring your own device shops, is the variety of different devices and operating systems at

BEST ENTERPRISE MOBILITY MANAGEMENT PRODUCT.

AirWatchThis EMM vendor supports a huge range

of endpoints for a satisfying IT experience.

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play. Securing heterogeneous endpoints has never been IT’s strong suit, but broad platform support from an en-terprise mobility management vendor can help ease the pain. Several readers noted that AirWatch supports all the major mobile OSes—and even some not-so-major ones, like Nokia’s Symbian.

“Moving forward, they are now supporting Windows PC [and] Mac OS X management as well,” one reader wrote. “This shows their ambition in the market.” n

HONORABLE MENTION

MokaFive for iOSWHEN IT COMES to mobility, IT must walk the tight-

rope between protecting corporate data and

enabling user productivity. MokaFive’s unique

approach in this area sets it apart from the field,

according to our readers.

“MokaFive understands that information secu-

rity is about more than just protecting

[the] device,” a reader wrote.

MokaFive for iOS creates a secure

container where users can access and

edit corporate data, either through its

built-in file viewers or, if IT approves,

through integration with third-party

apps on the iPhone or iPad.

“Preserving the native app ex-

perience on iOS vs., say, a Windows VDI ap-

proach to getting at organizational data is a much

better way to go,” one expert judge said.

This data access can either occur over a VPN

connection or through the MokaFive app itself

thanks to its offline cache feature, which this judge

said is “a nice perk.” n


CITRIX HAS BEEN in the desktop and application delivery game since the company’s earliest days, so it’s no surprise that many organizations look to Citrix XenDesktop for desktop virtualization.

XenDesktop delivers desktops and applications to a variety of endpoints. To keep up with the increasingly mo-bile workforce, the latest version brought more features for desktop and app access on mobile devices, including protocol enhancements to improve WAN efficiency, scrolling and gesturing and support for native mobile functions.

Readers said XenDesktop’s maturity, flexibility and fea-ture strength are what make it stand out in this market. Plus, it can be applied in many different use cases because the software supports numerous clients. The FlexCast de-livery model allows IT to choose from hosted shared desk-top delivery, on-demand apps and three other methods.

“Its FlexCast model supports a wider range of work-loads and delivers desktop and app virtualization more efficiently than the others,” one reader said.

Although desktop virtualization products from the larger vendors can be complex, users say XenDesktop is simple to manage. In XenDesktop 7, the company combined the XenDesktop and XenApp management

BEST DESKTOP AND APPLICATION DELIVERY PRODUCT.

Citrix XenDesktopThe desktop old-timer continues to push innovation with flexible delivery options.

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architectures, bringing the number of management con-soles down to only two.

Readers also lauded XenDesktop for its HDX dis-play protocol technology. The technology helps deliver high-performance graphics, video and other multimedia over the network. HDX works well over WAN connec-tions, which is especially important for organizations that need to deliver desktops and applications to disparate locations.

“Since we have a number of peripherals to support and our clients all deploy to branches, I would have to choose XenDesktop for their support of the peripherals and for a better communication protocol,” one reader commented.

In the end, Citrix XenDesktop helps users work more efficiently at home and in the office—whether it’s from a laptop, desktop PC or mobile device.

As one reader put it: “I could never work for a company now that does not offer a desktop/application virtual way of working. It has changed my life.” n

HONORABLE MENTION

VMware Horizon ViewTHE CLOSE RUNNER-UP to XenDesktop is VMware’s

View, now bundled into the company’s Horizon

Suite for complete work-

s pa c e m a n a g e m e n t

and delivery. View is a

well-established prod-

uct that integrates with

the company’s vSphere

platform.

Readers said VMware

View is easy to set up,

and they like the new

features in the latest

version. Horizon View 5.2 added support for hard-

ware-accelerated 3D graphics and SE Sparse disks

to optimize disk space, while View 5.3 took graphics

to the next level with the virtual dedicated graphics

acceleration feature.

“We have been deploying over 500 desktops in

our educational space for the past four years and

are extremely happy with View 5.2,” one reader

commented. n

THE HDX DISPLAY PROTOCOL TECHNOLOGY HELPS DELIVER HIGH- PERFORMANCE GRAPHICS, VIDEO AND OTHER MULTI- MEDIA OVER THE NETWORK.

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FOR ALL THE TIME, effort and money that go into optimizing storage performance, you’d think the industry would have thought of this by now. But readers told us that PernixData FVP is an original and “slick” solution to the age-old prob-lem of I/O bottlenecks, and thus is the winner of the first annual Modern Infrastructure Bright Idea Award.

PernixData FVP is a fit for any VMware virtual envi-ronment that struggles with storage I/O bottlenecks that threaten application performance. Running directly in-side a server hypervisor, FVP aggregates each virtual host’s server cache into a clustered storage tier that can be used to optimize host-level reads and writes, thus minimizing application latency.

The beauty of this idea is that virtualization admin-istrators can scale IOPS performance independently of storage capacity, using readily available server-side flash resources, readers said.

“Decoupling performance from capacity is a logical step to make and prepares us for creating a deterministic performance layer,” said one reader.

Readers and experts also commended PernixData for solving both the read as well as write caching problem.

While read caching is pretty uncontroversial, not so write caching, “especially in virtual environments where

BRIGHT IDEA IMPACT AWARD .

PernixData FVPThere’s a new solution to the old

problem of IO bottlenecks.

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you have a lot of eggs in one basket,” explained one expert. “If you’re caching writes and something happens to that host, some of the writes will not have made it back to storage,” a big no-no. PernixData FVP mitigates that risk by copying writes to other hosts, providing a measure of fault-tolerance.

Another feather in PernixData’s cap is its non-disrup-tive approach. Because it runs directly as a hypervisor-only module, rather than as an agent or separate virtual ma-chine, readers said it was easy to deploy. It also allows administrators to set policies on a per virtual-machine basis, and integrates with the complement of VMware clustering tools.

“It provides an immediate boost to performance with very little change to the environment,” said one reader. “No [vSphere Storage Appliance], no middleware, no I/O tuning, huge [hardware compatibility list],” gushed another.

Finally, readers also noted that PernixData is remark-ably mature and stable for a product that only recently became generally available.

“[I] haven’t seen a more complete execution of the prod-uct vision in many years,” said one reader. “They solved some of the hardest problems known in the virtualization space—hypervisor-based, clustering, non-disruptive ac-celeration, write acceleration with fault tolerance—and did it in their 1.0 product.” n

The MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE IMPACT AWARDS used a combination of reader votes, expert judging and editorial guidance to compile the list of winners and honorable mention finalists.

Modern Infrastructure is a SearchDataCenter.com publication.

Margie Semilof, Editorial Director

Alex Barrett, Editor in Chief

Christine Cignoli, Senior Site Editor

Phil Sweeney, Managing Editor

Eugene Demaitre, Associate Managing Editor

Laura Aberle, Associate Features Editor

Linda Koury, Director of Online Design

Rebecca Kitchens, Publisher, [email protected]

TechTarget, 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466 www.techtarget.com

© 2013 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or re-produced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group.

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