Nutanix(NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced general availability of Nutanix Clusters on AWS, extending the flexibility and ease of use of the company’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software, along with all Nutanix products and services, to bare metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With this announcement, Nutanix delivers hybrid cloud infrastructure — one that allows businesses to accelerate their digital initiatives and optimize spending, priorities further amplified in the age of COVID. Nutanix offers a single stack that integrates compute and storage, provides unified operations across private and public clouds, integrated networking with AWS, and license portability from private to public clouds, thus addressing key technical and operational challenges of the hybrid cloud era.

 

According to Gartner, by 2021, 90% of organizations will have deployed a multicloud or hybrid cloud model for their IT needs[1]. Companies require the flexibility of multiple clouds while they continue to struggle with the complexity, operational silos, and costs of managing private and public clouds. A unified solution that provides a consistent experience, tooling, and operational practices across clouds will allow companies to break down silos and reduce inefficiencies while enabling the advantage of flexibility to choose the right cloud for each workload.

 

With this announcement, Nutanix extends the simplicity and ease of use of its software to public cloud. This eliminates the cost and management complexity of hybrid environments and enables seamless mobility across private and public clouds without any rearchitecting of the apps due to built-in networking integration with AWS. Customers now have the flexibility to choose the right cloud environment for each application with the added benefit of license portability across clouds, which has a direct impact on cost and resource optimization.

 

Additionally, customers will be able to take advantage of the company’s full software stack on private and public cloud. This includes unstructured storage solutions Files, application orchestration solution Calm, database administration and automation solution Era, and more.

 

“We are excited to support an extension of a customer’s private cloud environment into AWS with the launch of Clusters on AWS. This provides customers the flexibility to get the most out of both their AWS and Nutanix environments,” said Doug Yeum, Head of Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Customers now have an opportunity to take advantage of Nutanix Clusters on AWS to deploy adjacent to their cloud-native applications in AWS and fast track their digital transformation.”

 

Key features in Nutanix Clusters include:

• Apps and Data Mobility: Nutanix Clusters solves a significant pain point for enterprises on their cloud journey by providing a seamless way to move legacy apps and data to the cloud. It enables mobility without needing to re-architect apps, something that can be extremely costly and time consuming.
• Streamlined Operations with Unified Cloud Environment: Nutanix Clusters allows customers to create, manage, and orchestrate their infrastructure, as well as their applications, across private and public clouds, all through a single interface. Unlike competitive solutions that only offer siloed cloud management, Nutanix Clusters extends this to private and public cloud. This single stack removes the need for a separate team to manage each environment, or the re-skilling of teams, and also enables seamless app mobility across clouds.
• Built-In Networking Integration with AWS:Thanks to built-in integration with the AWS networking layer, Nutanix Clusters delivers benefits in terms of ease of deployment and performance. The networking integration also allows customers to use their existing AWS accounts, including unused credits, virtual private clouds, and subnets. This enables a truly unified management plane across private and public cloud, and hugely simplifies the customer experience of managing a hybrid cloud environment.
• Cloud Cost Optimization: In addition to addressing key technical and operational challenges with hybrid cloud environments, Clusters can provide significant cost savings to customers. This is achieved by removing the need for different teams to manage each cloud environment, eliminating the need for costly migrations for legacy applications, and providing a way to easily hibernate public cloud clusters with just one-click to help eliminate waste. Additionally, available portable licenses, flexible payment models, and increased visibility in cloud spend, throughXi Beam, allow businesses to optimize their cloud investments and truly choose the right cloud for each workload, without lock-in.
• Freedom of Choice: Nutanix Clusters on AWS gives customers the choice to either reuse existing on-premises hardware or AWS credits when building out a hybrid environment. In addition, customers can also choose to bring the on-premises licenses or select a pay-as-you-go or Cloud Commit models.

 

Based on extensive research with customers, key use cases for Nutanix Clusters include:

• Lift and Shift: Customers looking to move applications to the cloud, or consolidate their datacenters, can simply “lift and shift” them without any change. Clusters eliminates the need to re-architect applications, resulting in very significant cost and time savings to customers. Additionally, Nutanix Moveprovides application mobility between non-Nutanix solutions and Clusters to further simplify the process.
• On-Demand Elasticity: Now customers can quickly scale capacity or expand to different regions in minutes by bursting into public clouds to support seasonal demands, changing priorities, and more. This is especially beneficial when speed is of the essence and adding capacity is a lengthy process, like expanding VDI resources.
• Business Continuity: Customers can now leverage AWS for high availability and disaster recovery without adding complexity arising from managing cloud environments or a stand-alone disaster recovery solution.
• Cloud Native Services: Customers can use cloud-native services with existing on-premises applications without expensive re-architecting. This results in easily modernizing existing applications by taking advantage of cloud native services like artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, and more to advance customers’ digital initiatives.

 

“On behalf of our customers, we have always worked to make IT so simple that it’s invisible,” said Tarkan Maner, Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix. “As the industry evolved, our focus has expanded beyond the datacenter to help our customers manage the complexity ofmultipleclouds, whether private or public. Nutanix Clusters on AWS is the realization of this vision. This enables complete flexibility by allowing businesses to write code once and use it anywhere, taking advantage of scale, location, integration, and pricing of multiple options – this is the true vision of hybrid cloud.”

 

Nutanix customers shared:

“At Penn National Insurance, we were looking for a new solution to support our VDI workloads to ensure business continuity if our primary datacenter suffers from a disaster event. Nutanix Clusters allows us to easily create a hybrid and multicloud environment spanning our Nutanix datacenter and AWS, so that we can very rapidly burst capacity in AWS when we need to quickly restore our workloads from a backup,” said Craig Wiley, Senior Infrastructure Systems Architect at Penn National Insurance. “On top of the flexibility that this solution provides, the ability to use our existing AWS networking setup made the Nutanix Clusters deployment very easy while delivering the expected performance. Now, we know we can expand VDI capacity with one-click and hibernate our hybrid cloud workloads when not in use, so we only pay for the capacity we need.”

 

“The Australian Bureau of Statistics is Australia’s national statistical agency, responsible for, among other things, the Australian Census. The Census is Australia’s largest peacetime logistical operation, and the increased IT demand needed to support this Census project is one of the main reasons we looked at hybrid cloud platforms. They provide the flexibility and agility needed to adapt to significant spikes in demand,” said Julian Doak, CISO at the Australian Bureau of Statistics. “We were already Nutanix customers, running our VDI and analytical workloads in our datacenter, and also use AWS. A single cloud solution to manage multiple clouds will make it easier to scale our IT needs. Nutanix Clusters provides a seamless way to burst capacity into public clouds to increase our VDI workloads when needed to support Census activities, while knowing all our apps will just work – without needing to repackage or rearchitect them.”

 

Nutanix Clusters on AWS is currently available to customers in 20 AWS Regions. In addition to being able to easily use their existing portable Nutanix licenses, customers will be able to choose between Cloud Commit and pay-as-you-go models. To learn more about Nutanix Clusters on AWS, its use cases, or to Test Drive it, visit here.

 

[1]Source: Gartner, Inc, Market Insight: Cloud Imperative — Embrace Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud Architecture and Services, October 2019

John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO at Fortinet

“Fortinet continues to push the boundaries of hardware-accelerated performance to enable the convergence of security and networking – what we call Security-driven Networking. The FortiGate 4400F Network Firewall delivers unprecedented scale and performance that is up to 13 times better than comparable products. As the only network firewall capable of securing hyperscale data centers and 5G networks, FortiGate 4400F leads the industry in what is possible for data center security.”

 

Hyperscale Data Centers Require Hyperscale Security

Today’s most digitally innovative organizations face escalating and often unpredictable capacity needs that are quickly outpacing their security solution’s performance capabilities. As a result, security has become the choke point for traffic entering and exiting most hyperscale data centers, adversely affecting user experience, and bringing productivity to a crawl, causing many network admins to feel pressured by business demands to forego security safeguards. Allowing all traffic to flow freely into and out of an organization’s network without security opens organizations up to the risk of cyberattacks, which can severely damage their brand reputation and cause potential loss in revenue due to extended downtime. While many organizations have successfully deployed hyperscale network architectures, achieving hyperscale security has been a significant challenge. To-date,some vendors claim to implement hyperscale security through multiple firewalls orchestrated together to achieve a hyperscale architecture, which has proven to be cumbersome and expensive. The hardware acceleration via purpose-built NP7 network processors of FortiGate 4400F uniquely delivers the first single compact appliance with security performance and scale that keeps up with the growth of today’s hyperscale data centers and enables the following use cases:

• High Velocity e-Retail:Allows high-velocity e-retail businesses to deliver the best possible user experience for their customers by supporting tens of millions of connections per second, enabling essential layer 4 security, and delivering hardware-accelerated prevention of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
• Cutting-edge research:Enhances productivity for cutting-edge research facilities and other verticals like oil and gas by supporting the secure transfer of extremely large datasets – also known as elephant flows – of up to 100Gbps. For situations that require encrypting at high speeds, IPsec can be turned on non-intrusively to support high-bandwidth IPsec tunnel flows.
• Financial institutions, cloud providers and other large enterprises: Allows businesses to launch services in the most agile and secure fashion possible to increase productivity and revenue. By accelerating VXLAN-based segmentation, FortiGate 4400F enables super-fast communication between massively scaled services (such as compute, storage, or apps) that are co-hosted on physical and virtualized domains. These large scale segments can be protected with essential Layer 4 or advanced Layer 7 security.

 

5G Speeds Need Security at Scale that Can Keep Up

Today’s hyperconnected world allows user-to-user, user-to-machine, and machine-to-machine communication, which in turn puts huge demands on security to be delivered at massive scale. As4G transitions to 5G, these demands will be pushed to their limits as network operation teams must ensure both security and business continuity. Most solutions lack the required scale to overcome IPv4 address scarcity, growing mobile bandwidth demands, and increasing numbers of encrypted tunnels connecting infrastructure, which in turn holds carriers back from being able to support a large set of  customers. FortiGate 4400F uniquely addresses these pain points, delivering:

• Carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) that enables hyperscale Packet Delivery Network (PDN) while preserving user experience with hardware-accelerated user session setup rates, low latency and hardware-assisted logging for audit and control.
• Critical scale for Security Gateway (SecGW) at 4G and 5G mobile for Radio Access Network (RAN) control to enable services providers to build high capacity networks that maximize return on investment.
• Allows service providers to differentiate their customer offerings by delivering additional value-added services such as parental control with technologies like URL filtering.

 

FortiGate 4400F vs. Competitors

Below is a comparison of the top firewalls on the market against the FortiGate 4400F series. Security Compute Ratingis a benchmark (performance multiplier) that compares FortiGate Network Firewall performance versus the industry average of competing products across various categories that fall within the same price band.

 

Specification	FortiGate 4401F	Industry Average	Security Compute Rating	Palo Alto PA-70502	Checkpoint CP28000	Cisco FPR-4145	Juniper SRX54003
Firewall	1.2Tbps	165Gbps	7x	N/A	145Gbps	80Gbps	270Gbps
Concurrent Sessions	600M1	46M	13x	32M	32M	30M	91M
Connections per Second	10M1	0.822M	12x	623K	615k	350k	1.7M
IPsec VPN	420Gbps	39Gbps	11x	28Gbps	49Gbps	18Gbps	60Gbps
Threat Protection	70Gbps	34Gbps	2x	37Gbps	30Gbps	N/A	N/A
SSL Inspection	65Gbps	10Gbps	6.5x	N/A	N/A	10Gbps	N/A

 

• Target values – Enabled by a Hyperscale License
• PAN: Calculated with 1-NPC (100G-NPC) cards, no services and support​
• ​Juniper: SRX5400E-B2-AC

 

FortiGate 4400F showcases the industry’s highest performance with Security Compute Ratings up to 13x better than the competition. As a result, organizations can enjoy far greater headroom for digital innovation with Fortinet TCO savings and have the resources to respond to unexpected events.

 

Powered by Security-driven Networking

FortiGate 4400F leverages security-driven networking principals to enable ultra-scalable, secure distributed networks and hyperscale data centers. Security-driven Networking solutions are not only faster and scale further than the competition, they are also much more cost-effective, delivering the industry’s best price/performance in a compact form factor for additional lower costs associated with lower rack space, power and cooling requirements. Fortinet also offers industry leading automation and orchestration capabilities as part of Fabric Management Centerand FortiOS. Additionally, Fortinet continues to be a proponent of Open APIs and is committed to support industry initiatives like OpenConfig with the goal of delivering automation to streamline operations.

 

The FortiGate 4400F, as a part of an integrated security platform via the Fortinet Security Fabric, also provides security for hybrid data centers as follows:

• Protection from known attacks with AI-poweredFortiGuard servicesincluding web filtering and intrusion prevention system services.
• Proactive threat detection for any segmentation that a customer plans to adopt with a Security Compute Rating of 2x.
• Full visibility into threats and removes blind spots with SSL inspection including TLS 1.3 that is 6.5x better than competing products.
• Protection of business critical applications and servers by offering virtual patching using high performance consolidated IPS.

 

By: Ashraf Sheet, Regional Director, Middle East & Africa at Infoblox

 

The future of the workplace is undoubtedly a remote workforce, accessing the corporate network via mobile devices and the cloud. This is likely to cause a few sleepless nights for the teams traditionally responsible for managing network security on-premise.

 

With remote working, data breaches will become commonplace. Networks will be infiltrated with malware due to an increase in roaming or off-network access.

 

Vulnerable and unsecure

At the root of many of these breaches, and the damage and stress that accompanies them, lies the DNS, or domain name system. Often referred to as the address book of the internet, DNS sits at the heart of every organisation’s IT network, translating domain names into machine-readable IP addresses. Despite most internet communications relying on DNS, however, it is inherently vulnerable and not sufficiently secured, resulting in weaknesses that can be exploited for criminal ends.

 

DNS is used by a high percentage of malware to carry out campaigns such as communicating with C&C servers, holding data to ransom or serving as a pathway for data exfiltration. Due to its position at the core of the network, however, DNS is often the first part of an organisation’s infrastructure to see the majority of malicious activity and should, therefore, be considered an organisation’s first line of defence.

 

By collecting and analysing data from DNS queries, an effective enterprise DNS security solution will provide essential context and visibility that will alert IT teams to any anomalies, enable them to report on which devices are joining and leaving the network, and ultimately allow them to resolve problems more quickly.

 

Many DNS security solutions are focused on on-premise networks, however, and aren’t sufficiently suitable for remote workers and offices, much of whose workloads are held in the cloud.

 

The mobile options

Meeting the demand for greater speed and mobility means that internet traffic from mobile workers tends not to be backhauled to an organisation’s network via corporate points of presence such as servers or routers. As a result, DNS traffic to and from an organisation’s mobile users will not generally be visible to corporate security monitoring.

 

The growing shift towards a more mobile workforce makes it important, therefore, for organisations to adopt a hybrid approach to DNS security that will protect both on-premise and mobile users; a combination of on-premise DNS security as mentioned above, and one of the following approaches to maintaining DNS security in a mobile environment.

 

Agent software, for example, can be installed on a mobile device and reroute DNS traffic to a cloud-based DNS security solution that can monitor client-side behaviour to detect malicious or suspicious DNS activity. And in cases where it isn’t possible to install an agent, configuration settings on a mobile device can be set to proxy mobile device traffic through services often referred to as cloud access security brokers, or CASB. However, while CASB services are able to monitor HTTP traffic from mobile devices, the implantation of an additional DNS proxy solution is required to reroute DNS queries to a cloud-based DNS security solution which can then monitor and block suspicious activity.

 

What’s more, a combination of both client agent and proxy approaches, integrated with threat intelligence to assure the detection of DNS tunnelling and other advanced targeted threats, can provide broad coverage across a variety of devices and external services.

 

DNS as an asset

If not given proper consideration within an organisation’s security plans, DNS can provide an easy point of entry for malicious actors intent on disrupting networks, and accessing and exfiltrating sensitive information.  And the problem is growing. As sophisticated cybercriminals continue to develop new techniques and tactics to exploit vulnerabilities in DNS services, the increasing demand to support a growing mobile workforce opens up additional attack vectors.

 

DNS services and data can be used as an asset in the security chain, however. By taking a hybrid approach of on-premise DNS security together with a cloud-delivered solution, organisations are able to protect not just the users within their corporate network, but also those based in branch offices, and those who increasingly opt to work remotely.

By: Jacob Chacko Regional Business Head – Middle East, Saudi & South Africa (MESA) at HPE Aruba

 

The current crisis has put a spotlight on a tried-and-true networking paradigm: Working from home. But despite the typical bandwagon claims, it turns out that effective remote or teleworker connectivity solutions have their own unique set of requirements that can only be satisfied with a broad range of products and services drawn from remote, branch and campus networking solutions delivering secure access to IT resources from the edge to the data centre to the cloud.

 

Based on Aruba’s extensive experience in enabling remote and home office networking, there are five key components of an effective and productive work-from-home solution that highlight the differences between consumer and enterprise-grade solutions.

1. Ease of Connectivity:As employees make the sudden shift to working from home, it’s not just about somehow connecting to corporate resources, but how easy it is to do that. Depending on circumstances, a secure software client may be best for a personal device, for others, new hardware. But, no one wants to “read the manual” to set up their access, so automated zero- touch installation is a must.
2. Performance:Once connected, employees will expect the same level of performance and responsiveness as they enjoy in the office. That typically means more than the consumer-grade connectivity solutions that workers deploy for their home use. Enterprise-grade hardware and software means that the in-home work experience will be the same as in the office.
3. Reliability:This is the companion point to performance. Enterprise-grade access solutions are built for long-life with enhanced components and extended testing and have anticipated challenges such as interference in their design. It all adds up to five 9’s of uptime that employees have come to expect.
4. Security:Security is more important than ever given the obvious lack of physical control in a home or remote environment. In-depth zero trust security includes multiple factor authentication, VPN encryption and traffic segmentation and consistent, role-based IT access policies that are applied consistently to a user or device no matter how and where they are connected.
5. Management:Work from home cannot mean “you’re on your own” when a problem shows up. IT needs the same visibility into the remote access network as they have on the corporate campus. It starts with a centralized cloud management solution that tracks, monitors and ultimately either self-heals or facilitates rapid problem resolution, and includes application testing and network health monitoring from a client perspective.

 

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, a leading provider of communications, networking and cloud solutions tailored to customers’ industries, today announced that Aster DM Healthcare has deployed a converged wired-wireless LAN and Unified Communications solution from Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise in its new Aster hospital in Sonapur, UAE. The implementation is in line with Aster DM Healthcare’s strategy to adopt a cloud-based approach and optimise IT spending across its multi-specialty hospitals.

Aster DM Healthcare is one of the largest private healthcare service providers operating across the Middle East. With a strong focus on clinical excellence, Aster is one of the few entities in the region with a strong presence across primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary healthcare through its 25 hospitals, 117 clinics and 238 pharmacies in the UAE.

With IT playing a critical role in empowering healthcare professionals with access to the information needed to make crucial decisions, Aster is focusing on strengthening its IT infrastructure, in part with the implementation of a converged network infrastructure in its new multi-specialty hospital that includes a special 55-bed COVID-19 treatment facility.

“It is important for us to have a solid network foundation to support 24/7 operations across our healthcare facilities. Providing our staff with fast access to patient records, critical healthcare applications and the means to communicate securely and efficiently is one of our primary priorities,” says Dr. Sherbaz Bichu, CEO, Aster Hospitals – UAE. “We are already familiar with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise solutions and services, since we use them in other facilities across the UAE, and we appreciate the level of engagement and exceptional post-deployment support we receive. Our new special 55-bed COVID-19 treatment facility was made operational in record time, which is impressive.”

At the heart of this converged network infrastructure is the Alcatel-Lucent OmniVista® 2500 Network Management System(NMS), which is tailored to provide Aster’s IT team with a single-pane-of-glass management platform. It also delivers the ability to monitor network traffic and critical functions and manage the end-to-end network from a web-based user interface.

“All IoT healthcare facility devices are connected centrally and data is seamlessly integrated with the hospital’s information system to form a central data repository for data processing and management. This makes the data access and retrieval efficient, which in turn results in our doctors being able to access patient records, conduct procedures and deliver holistic management and treatment in a timely manner, thereby improving the quality of patient care we provide at Aster,” adds Dr. Sherbaz.

With Wi-Fi as a key component of the deployment, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise provided a controller-less Wi-Fi architecture enabling better performance, high availability and scalability across the Aster hospital, while reducing complexity and lowering total cost of ownership (TCO). The high-speed Wi-Fi supports finely tuned quality of service (QoS) parameters to differentiate and provide appropriate QoS for each application, thus allowing Aster to prioritise bandwidth to critical areas of the hospital, such as operating rooms and ICUs. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise also provides 24/7 maintenance support and a lifetime hardware warranty, thus minimising the TCO.

“Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has proven its expertise in providing healthcare facilities with converged infrastructure solutions that help ensure high quality patient care. We aligned with Aster’s expectations and provided a simplified, efficient and secure communications and network infrastructure to allow healthcare professionals to better collaborate and spend more time with the people who matter most – their patients,” explains Rahul Sharma, Sales Director – UAE & Oman, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. “Along with our partners, the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise team led all five phases of the implementation and ensured no downtime, allowing business operations to operate continuously.”

In addition to this project, Aster and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise are collaborating on a pilot program testing Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Rainbow™, the company’s UCaaS platform, at Aster UAE facilities. The platform is already delivering impressive benefits by connecting Aster’s facilities with remotely-based doctors who consult on critical cases in the ICUs and operating rooms.  Rainbow connects various departments to provide a single platform for unified communications.