At Cisco Live 2014, Embrane,®
the leader in delivering application-centric
network services today announced that it will be offering lifecycle
management for virtual network service delivered within Cisco ACI™.
The company also announced plans for integrating the Embrane Elastic
Services Manager (ESM) with the Cisco® Application Policy Infrastructure
Controller (APIC).
In addition to offering its own firewall and load balancer services on
the platform, Embrane will now automate the lifecycle management for its
growing ecosystem of partners, including Cisco
Adaptive Security Virtual Appliance ASAv and SourceFire virtual
appliances, as well as the newest ACI ecosystem partners, A10
Networks (NYSE: ATEN) and its vThunder virtual appliance and Citrix
(Nasdaq: CTXS) and its Netscaler VPX and
Netscaler 1000v.
“The demand for increased agility and automation are two of the biggest
drivers for building a cloud experience in the data center,” said Soni
Jiandani, senior vice president of marketing, Cisco. “The integration of
Embrane, ACI and our ecosystem of third-party Layer 4-7 network services
partners is integral to delivering full automation of IT services across
physical and virtual environments, with secure multi-tenancy at scale.
Together, we are uniquely positioned to offer lifecycle and policy
management in one holistic architecture and with investment protection.”
Virtual appliance lifecycle management is a critical requirement when
creating a virtual network infrastructure as it automates dozens of
otherwise manual steps required to license, create, deploy and maintain
virtual appliances. By leveraging the Embrane
heleos platform and the Embrane heleos
Elastic Services Manager (ESM), customers can dedicate A10 vThunder,
Cisco ASAv, Citrix Netscaler VPX and Citrix Netscaler 1000v and
Sourcefire virtual appliances as needed for any application or tenant.
As the premier lifecycle management solution for virtual appliances,
Embrane heleos provisions virtual network services instances in minutes,
automatically inserts them in the network, enables self-healing high
availability (HA), and automates the licensing and usage monitoring for
each virtual appliance.
“Increasing levels of agility should not add complexity and operational
costs,” added Bill Burns, Embrane president and chief executive officer.
“Together with Cisco and partners such as Citrix and A10, we give the
network team the tools they need to lower their operational expenses
through zero-touch automation of key steps necessary to deliver and
manage virtual Layer 4-7 network services.”
For enterprises and services providers, the most notable use cases for
ACI with virtual network services are where automation and multi-tenancy
is key. These include private/public/hybrid cloud,
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), self-service dev/test labs, and
disaster recovery. When deploying virtual network services in ACI,
customers not only get on-demand delivery of dedicated network services
to applications or tenants, they get the ultimate visibility for quick
troubleshooting and problem resolution. The end result is the ability to
non-disruptively adapt to business changes, simplified operations and
significant cost savings.
“Citrix NetScaler with TriScale technology provides multi-tenant ADC
services within the largest public and private clouds in the world,”
stated Morgan Gerhart, Senior Director of Products of Citrix. “NetScaler
integration with Cisco ACI and the Embrane virtual lifecycle management
solution gives enterprises and service providers the ultimate solution
for highly automated, application-centric infrastructures.”
“A10 Networks vThunder virtual appliances operate on our core ACOS
platform, providing high-performance and API-driven programmability to
integrate within cloud orchestrated vendor ecosystems,” said Jason
Matlof, A10 Networks vice president of marketing. “Participating as an
ecosystem partner with Cisco ACI and the Embrane Lifecycle Management
Platform gives our customers a services platform to achieve flexibility
and business agility, while lowering operating and capital expenses.”
About Embrane Lifecycle Management
In addition to managing the lifecycle of potentially hundreds of Embrane
or third-party dedicated virtual appliances from a single point, the
Embrane heleos ESM adds even greater functionality and automation to
virtual network services including:
-
Automated Licensing– The ESM manages all of the licensing for
each instance of a network service, regardless of the service or the
vendor. Using the ESM, customers select the size of a service to
deploy and the ESM automatically pulls the appropriate license from a
pre-purchased pool of licenses and assigns it to the service. For
Embrane services it’s even easier as the ESM only cares about the
aggregate throughput of all of the services associated with load
balancing or firewalls.
-
Centralized Billing – The ESM tracks the usage data of each
instance and reports it. Enterprises can then institute a chargeback
program internally, while service providers can begin to monetize
network services by charging their customers as appropriate.
-
Park/Unpark – when a network service is no longer needed for a
particular application, the ESM will power down the virtual appliance,
release its resources from the virtual appliance, park it and save the
layout, configuration, logs, etc. When/if the virtual appliance is
needed, the ESM will non-disruptively add compute power back to the
appliance and reinstate it.
-
Cloning – if a network service needs to be replicated, the ESM
creates duplicate network services with the exact image, layout and
start-up configuration as the original.
-
Self-Healing HA – When HA is requested, a single click tells
the ESM to create active/standby HA pairs. In the event the active
appliance goes offline, the standby appliance becomes the active
device and the ESM automatically creates a new standby appliance to
ensure continued redundancy.
-
Programmability – The ESM leverages RESTful APIs that enable
integration with new or existing tools, while enabling high levels of
automation.
To see live demos of Embrane virtual appliance lifecycle management in
action with the Cisco APIC, Citrix Netscaler VPX and Citrix Netscaler
1000v, A10 vThunder, Cisco ASAv and Sourcefire virtual appliances please
visit any of the following locations at Cisco Live:
-
Embrane Booth #2423
-
The Data Center technology zone on the Cisco Campus
-
The Cisco Investment Pavilion Booth #929
Related Blogs and Video:
Read Embrane blog: When
Vision Becomes Reality
Read Jason Blank’s blog: ACI
Ecosystem: Introduction to an Open Ecosystem, L4-L7 device packages, and
Embrane integration!
Watch video: Lifecycle
management for Cisco Virtual Adaptive Security Appliance
Watch video: Lifecycle
management for Sourcefire Virtual Appliances
Watch video: Embrane
and Cisco Executive Discuss the Partnership with Application Centric
Infrastructure
About Citrix
Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) is a leader in virtualization, networking and cloud
services to enable new ways for people to work better. Citrix solutions
help IT and service providers to build, manage and secure virtual and
mobile workspaces that seamlessly deliver apps, desktops, data and
services to anyone, on any device, over any network or cloud. This year
Citrix is celebrating 25 years of innovation, making IT simpler and
people more productive with mobile workstyles. With annual revenue in
2013 of $2.9 billion, Citrix solutions are in use at more than 330,000
organizations and by over 100 million people globally. Learn more at www.citrix.com.
About Embrane
Embrane is the leading enabler of application-centric network services,
including firewalls, VPNs, load balancers and SSL offload engines. The
company’s solutions enable customers to create network services on per
application basis in seconds, all managed from a single orchestration
engine. The result is greater security, and faster time to deployment
for applications. Additionally, customers achieve over 50 percent
savings in CAPEX and OPEX compared to integrated hardware-based systems
and traditional virtual appliance offerings. These solutions are
purpose-built for enterprises and service providers looking to design
data centers where agility and automation are priorities, including
private/hybrid/public cloud environments.
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* Availability disclaimer: Many of the products and features described
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