Cisco/EMC Solutions for Appl Acceleration and BO Infrastructure Consolidation [Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Software]

Solution Overview

IT organizations face challenges in consolidating costly and difficult-to-manage branch-office server and storage infrastructure-while preserving the service levels remote users realize with local infrastructure. Centralizing distributed file servers into the data center simplifies data management and protection, but the behavior of file access protocols in a WAN environment degrades performance for remote-office users. Cisco Systems® and EMC have partnered to provide end-to-end infrastructure consolidation solutions centered on Cisco® Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) technology and EMC's Celerra storage technology.

CHALLENGE

IT organizations deploy file servers, Web servers, e-mail servers, and other servers throughout the enterprise to help meet the service levels required for productivity with a distributed workforce (Figure 1). As storage requirements continue to rise and regulatory compliance is imposed, IT faces a decision: to centralize or maintain a distributed infrastructure.

Removing costly servers from remote offices may be attractive, but organizations must consider the challenges created by having remote users access all their critical information over the heavily used WAN. Furthermore, simply consolidating file servers into the data center does not eliminate the costs associated with managing many servers. Costs for hardware and maintenance, operating system maintenance and patching, antivirus, and data protection all will continue.

Figure 1. Typical Distributed IT Infrastructure

IT organizations need a solution to facilitate infrastructure consolidation while providing remote-office users with their accustomed accessibility of data and meeting the challenges created by the WAN that separates users from information. Cisco Systems and EMC have developed such a solution.

SOLUTION

Cisco WAAS provides powerful, transparent WAN optimization and application acceleration capabilities in an easy-to-use and easy-to-manage appliance or router-integrated network module. By thoroughly understanding how application protocols and transport protocols interact over the WAN, Cisco can optimize almost any application protocol that uses TCP as its transport.

The EMC Celerra family of network-attached-storage (NAS) devices is an extensible platform for data management that provides a foundation for server consolidation, cost mitigation, and information lifecycle management. With powerful data-protection features, such as snapshot copy and replication functions, EMC's Celerra products provide IT organizations with the storage capacity and tools they need to cost-effectively manage information.

When deployed together, Cisco WAAS and EMC Celerra can give IT organizations all the benefits associated with a centralized infrastructure without compromising remote-user performance. Such benefits include:

• Fewer silos of server and storage infrastructure to deploy, manage, and protect

• Significantly reduced spending on server licensing, backup software, and data-protection media

• Simplified business continuity and disaster recovery planning

• Ease of data classification to enable implementation of information lifecycle management (ILM)

By deploying Cisco WAAS with EMC Celerra, IT organizations can simplify the data management and application services infrastructure, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Simplified, Consolidated Infrastructure Using Cisco WAAS and EMC Celerra

CISCO WAAS: IMPROVED PERFORMANCE OF APPLICATION PROTOCOLS IN THE WAN

Cisco WAAS is a robust and powerful application acceleration and WAN optimization platform that helps improve the performance of application protocols in WAN environments. By deploying the Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) hardware platform, shown in Figure 3, with Cisco WAAS Software at each branch location throughout the enterprise, IT organizations can improve the performance of applications consuming WAN resources while reducing the amount of WAN resources consumed.

Figure 3. Cisco WAE Hardware

Cisco WAAS provides several optimization capabilities:

• Application-specific acceleration-Cisco WAAS provides optimizations such as latency reduction and object caching for the Microsoft Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol to safely handle protocol workload locally and serve validated, centrally locked objects.

• Advanced network compression-Cisco WAAS Data Redundancy Elimination (DRE) monitors incoming and outgoing TCP traffic to identify redundant patterns within data flows independent of application protocol to effectively remove redundancy from transmission, resulting in 5- to 500-fold compression (application and protocol dependent). Coupled with persistent, connection-oriented Lempel-Ziv (LZ) compression, Cisco WAAS can dramatically reduce bandwidth consumption and even reduce application latency.

• Transport optimizations-Cisco WAAS Transport Flow Optimization (TFO) improves the behavior of TCP in WAN environments to improve application throughput and efficiency, especially in environments with noticeable packet loss.

Cisco WAAS also provides the lowest operational cost of any application acceleration or WAN optimization solution in the market:

• Device autodiscovery-When network interception is configured, Cisco WAE devices running Cisco WAAS discover one another automatically. Administrators do not need to configure devices to specify which devices are able to communicate and optimize.

• Full transparency-Cisco WAAS is transparent to client workstations, servers, and the network. Cisco preserves the investment IT organizations have made in feature configuration in the network, including quality of service (QoS), NetFlow, access lists, firewall policies, and more.

• Scalable, highly secure central management-Cisco WAAS Central Manager communicates with all Cisco WAE appliances in the network through highly secure protocols, and can manage up to 3000 nodes. It can also be deployed in a high-availability fashion to support environments in which downtime is not an option.

EMC CELERRA DATA MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS

EMC Celerra provides a flexible, scalable, and extensible platform for IP storage and data management (Figure 4). Whether configured as an integrated system (based on CLARiiON CX disk storage) or as a gateway attached to an EMC storage area network (SAN), the EMC Celerra platform allows administrators to control costs through server consolidation and ILM.

Figure 4. EMC Celerra IP Storage Family

EMC Celerra provides the following data storage management capabilities:

• Proven architectural scalability-EMC Celerra relies on a CLARiiON CX hardware architecture, providing scalability and fault tolerance. Able to support up to 112 TB of storage capacity, the Celerra family supports the intermix of Fibre Channel drive bays and advanced-technology-attachment (ATA) drive bays, enabling hierarchical storage capacity in a single, easy-to-manage device.

• Server consolidation-EMC Celerra provides a suite of services to facilitate server consolidation. Celerra Virtual Data Movers allow a physical system to appear as many virtual servers for simplified consolidation.

• Unified data management suite-EMC SnapSure allows administrators to create storage-efficient, point-in-time copies of production file systems to facilitate online data protection and flexibility. Celerra Replicator asynchronously replicates file systems among geographically distant EMC Celerra devices to help enable disaster recovery.

EMC Celerra also saves operational costs:

• Simple Web-based management-EMC Celerra Manager is an easy-to-use Web-based interface that simplifies advanced functions. It can manage a single NAS device or an entire network of them from a single console. Wizards, intuitive GUIs, and other enhancements help in monitoring and managing the NAS environment.

• Virtual file system technology-EMC Celerra takes the complexity out of storage provisioning with innovative virtual file system technology, which simplifies management of multiple file systems. With the one-click volume and file system configuration of the EMC Celerra Automated Volume Management (AVM) software, environments can be easily optimized for specific workloads. Virtual provisioning facilitates allocation of exactly the storage capacity needed within a virtual file system or Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) logical unit number (LUN), with automatic expansion as capacity is needed.

PARTNERED FOR SUCCESS

Cisco Systems and EMC have performed extensive interoperability testing with the Cisco WAAS and EMC Celerra products. This suite of tests helps ensure that IT organizations can safely consolidate distributed servers into the data center while maintaining performance expectations without compromise to data integrity or security. Tests include all aspects of the relevant protocols, including the CIFS for Microsoft Windows for UNIX environments:

• Preservation of file server and domain security, user authentication, and user authorization

• Preservation of storage management features, including disk quotas

• Validation of data coherency and concurrency, helping ensure that stale data is never served

• Verification of support for protocol correctness under single-user and multiuser scenarios

• Scalability, redundancy, and failover testing

• Performance stress testing to help ensure correct system behavior under heavy loads

Cisco and EMC offer cooperative support for Cisco WAAS and EMC Celerra solutions. They also partner to provide remote-office assessment and migration (ROAM) services. ROAM services are used to analyze and assess data at remote offices to help classify and differentiate among data sets and migrate data to the data center Celerra NAS devices through the Cisco WAAS optimization framework.

SUMMARY

Cisco WAAS provides powerful, transparent WAN optimization and file service acceleration capabilities in an easy-to-use and easy-to-manage appliance or router-integrated network module. The EMC Celerra NAS platform provides scalability, resiliency, and streamlined storage management with simplified management. With the two together, IT organizations can consolidate remote-office infrastructure by removing expensive servers, captive storage, backup hardware and software, and costly software licenses. When on the consolidated network, IT organizations can benefit operationally from streamlined storage management. With fewer points of data to protect and a single protected copy at the data center, backup and restore policies are simplified. Disaster recovery, business continuity, and compliance with regulation can become a reality instead of a challenge.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For more information about Cisco WAAS, contact your Cisco representative or visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/waas

For more information about EMC Celerra NAS IP storage platforms, contact your EMC account representative or visit: http://www.emc.com/products/networked/ip/

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Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Software

Cisco/EMC Solutions for Appl Acceleration and BO Infrastructure Consolidation

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