Virtual Desktop Tools, Virtual Desktop Strategies, Server Virtualization
PR Newswire | September 01, 2023
Netskope, a leader in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), today announced the launch of Proactive Digital Experience Management (DEM) for SASE, elevating best practice from the current reactive monitoring tools to proactive user experience management. Proactive DEM provides experience management capabilities across the entire SASE architecture, including Netskope Intelligent SSE, Netskope Borderless SD-WAN and Netskope NewEdge global infrastructure.
Digital Experience Management technology has become increasingly crucial amid digital business transformation, with organizations seeking to enhance customer experiences and improve employee engagement. With hybrid work and cloud infrastructure now the norm globally, organizations have struggled to ensure consistent and optimized experiences alongside stringent security requirements.
Gartner predicts that "by 2026, at least 60% of I&O leaders will use DEM to measure application, services and endpoint performance from the user's viewpoint, up from less than 20% in 2021." However, monitoring applications, services, and networks is only part of a modern DEM experience, and so Netskope Proactive DEM goes beyond observation, providing Machine Learning (ML)-driven functionality to anticipate, and automatically remediate, problems.
Sanjay Beri, CEO and co-founder of Netskope commented, "Ensuring a constantly optimized experience is essential for organizations looking to support the best productivity returns for hybrid workers and modern cloud infrastructure, but monitoring alone is not enough. Customers have told us of the challenges they face managing a multi-vendor cloud ecosystem and so we have yet again innovated beyond industry standards, providing experience management that can both monitor and proactively remediate."
For issue identification, Netskope Proactive DEM uniquely combines Synthetic Monitoring with Real User monitoring, creating SMART monitoring (Synthetic Monitoring Augmentation for Real Traffic). This enables full end-to-end 'hop-by-hop' visibility of data, and the proactive identification of experience-impacting events. SMART monitoring enables organizations to anticipate potential events that might impact upon network and application experience.
While most SASE vendors rely on "gray cloud" infrastructure - built on public cloud - which limits their ability to granularly identify and control any issues, Proactive DEM leverages Netskope NewEdge - the industry's largest private cloud infrastructure - to deliver 360 visibility and control of end-to-end user experience while providing mitigation of issues, including using various self-healing mechanisms, before the user recognizes their experience has degraded.
About Netskope
Netskope, a global SASE leader, helps organizations apply zero trust principles and AI/ML innovations to protect data and defend against cyber threats. Fast and easy to use, the Netskope platform provides optimized access and real-time security for people, devices, and data anywhere they go. Netskope helps customers reduce risk, accelerate performance, and get unrivaled visibility into any cloud, web, and private application activity. Thousands of customers trust Netskope and its powerful NewEdge network to address evolving threats, new risks, technology shifts, organizational and network changes, and new regulatory requirements.
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Server Hypervisors, Vsphere
prnewswire | August 29, 2023
Napatech™ (OSLO: NAPA.OL), a leading provider of programmable Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) and Infrastructure Processing Units (IPU) used in cloud, enterprise and telecom datacenter networks, today announced the availability of the Napatech's first 400Gbps programmable SmartNIC solutions, leveraging the latest Intel Agilex® 7 FPGAs to deliver best-in-class performance for applications in security, cloud services, network monitoring and recording.
Enterprises and OEMs providing high-performance solutions for network monitoring and recording require NICs with a performance level that matches the high PCI Express (PCIe) bandwidth available in the latest servers such as those based on 4th Gen Intel Xeon® Scalable Processors. The new Napatech NT400 SmartNIC platform, based on the Intel® FPGA SmartNIC N6000-PL Platform, addresses this need through a PCIe Gen 4 16-lane host interface which enables full-duplex 2x100Gbps traffic between network ports and host applications. Similarly, for applications like the 5G packet core in telecom infrastructure that require high-bandwidth inline processing of network data, the NT400 platform sustains a total 400G of traffic over tens of millions of flows.
The NT400 programmable SmartNIC platform includes two QSFP56 network ports, supporting up to 2x200G traffic with the flexibility to configure 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G, 100G and 200G network links. The SmartNIC hardware is complemented by Napatech's portfolio of production-grade software packages, including Link-Capture™ for use cases such as network monitoring and recording, Link-Virtualization™ that provides a virtualized data plane for cloud services and Link-Inline™ for inline applications such as 5G User Plane Function (UPF). These integrated solutions deliver a true "IT experience" whereby the user just installs the card and the software, immediately achieving seamless acceleration of their application with no requirement to directly program the SmartNIC itself.
At the core of the NT400 platform is the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA F-Tile chiplet, which incorporates a configurable, hardened Ethernet protocol stack for supporting rates from 10G to 400G. Napatech chose the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA for a host of reasons, including scalability options that allow support for five different configurations that meet various price, performance, power and feature goals, tailored to specific customer applications and use cases. The F-Tile features are critical in enabling the NT400 to operate within the space and power limitations of standard servers deployed in network appliances, data centers and edge locations.
"As the networking landscape continues to evolve, SmartNICs emerge as the predominant growth catalyst in the expansive NIC market, poised to reach $3.3 billion annually by 2025" said Manoj Sukumaran, Principal Analyst for Datacenter Compute and Networking at Omdia. "High bandwidth programmable Ethernet adapters require very fine optimization in hardware and software to ensure deterministic and predictable processing time and making them suitable for real-time networking applications. Napatech is among the very few vendors who could provide highly optimized SmartNICs and software solutions leveraging FPGAs from vendors like Intel, and deliver highly efficient network offload capabilities" he added.
"The NT400 platform represents the latest generation within our portfolio of SmartNIC solutions," said Jarrod Siket, Chief Marketing Officer at Napatech. "We will deliver multiple SKUs based on this platform, providing products with memory configurations as well features like time synchronization and management ports that are precisely tuned to the requirements of our customers' applications, all packaged with the applicable production-grade software."
"We are delighted to see Napatech choose the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA for their leading-edge SmartNIC solutions," said Mike Fitton, Vice President Programmable Solutions Group and General Manager, Network Business Division at Intel. "The combination of our FPGAs, which deliver high performance, and power efficiency plus a rich feature set for the most demanding applications, together with Napatech's production-grade hardware and software, helps ensure that customers can deliver leading solutions for a wide range of enterprise and telecom applications."
About Napatech
Napatech is the leading supplier of SmartNIC solutions used in cloud, enterprise, and telecom datacenters. Through commercial-grade software suites integrated with high-performance hardware, Napatech accelerates network infrastructure and security workloads to deliver best-in-class system-level performance while maximizing the availability of server compute resources for applications and services.
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Virtual Desktop Strategies, Virtual Server Management
Business Wire | August 28, 2023
VMware Explore 2023 — Data and intelligence play a key role in enabling automation and implementing a successful hybrid work strategy, but a holistic approach is required to maximize its advantages. Today, VMware announces modern AI integrations to the Anywhere Workspace platform, part of the VMware Cross-Cloud services portfolio, that automatically optimize employee experience, drive new vulnerability management use cases, and simplify application lifecycle management. VMware Anywhere Workspace is the only hybrid work platform that integrates digital employee experience (DEX), virtual desktop infrastructure and apps (VDI and DaaS), unified endpoint management (UEM) and security to enable a seamless and secure workspace on any device or location.
“Last year, we announced our Autonomous Workspace vision as a path forward for organizations to navigate the challenges brought on by hybrid work,” said Shankar Iyer, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “We are thrilled to unveil new advancements for our customers that expand data sources and insights, integrate with technology partners for improved security, and unify app delivery strategy across all virtual desktops and apps. These innovations continue to progress our vision of providing the next evolution of digital workspaces.”
Integrated AI-Driven Platform Scales Experience Management
VMware continues to leverage data, intelligence, and automation to improve the employee and IT experience by introducing new Insights and Playbooks based on greatly expanded data and machine learning algorithms that enhance DEX remediation capabilities. These updates broaden access to data, help strengthen VMware Insights, and allow for remediation of more issues.
VMware will now enable delivery of new app performance scores, in addition to existing mobile device, desktop, and virtual environment experience scores. If a SaaS app service goes down, IT is proactively alerted and employees are automatically notified. This allows IT to quickly resolve the outage without dealing with inbound support tickets and employees don't waste time trying to access unavailable services.
But simply providing IT with more data is not enough to empower them to work smarter. VMware’s AI-driven Insights feature now provides anomaly detection that informs IT of potential experience issues for frontline devices and VDI environments, in addition to mobile and desktop environments. Today’s announcement of new Playbooks enables IT to create step-by-step remediation workflows to resolve incidents more efficiently and use success rate analytics to automate the resolution process and streamline execution over time.
“Workspace ONE Intelligence has been a game changer for us when it comes to automating life cycle management inside UEM. We have been utilizing it for automatically tagging devices and assigning them into smart groups. We have also used several dashboard templates for monitoring our security stance and helping remediate high-risk security threats,” said George March, manager of digital workspace and development, Information Technology, USA Health. “Next on our roadmap is implementing the ITSM connector, and with the addition of remediation playbooks, we are so excited about the way it will streamline our help desk support teams workflows.”
Unique Partner Integration Powers New Security and Manageability Use Cases
Ensuring end-to-end manageability and security for today’s distributed workforce is critical and requires a holistic approach to vulnerability assessment, prioritization, remediation, out-of-band support, and reporting. Collaboration with a best-of-breed partner ecosystem that offers speed, breadth, and depth in vulnerability management is necessary to protect against sophisticated attack vectors. VMware is committed to innovating together with our technology partners to provide customers with more secure and seamless hybrid experiences.
Today, VMware continues this mission by announcing an expanded partnership with Intel through a one-of-a-kind, cloud-native integration of Workspace ONE with Intel vPro®. This chip-to-cloud integration makes it easier to secure and remotely manage work devices entirely from the cloud, with no additional on-premises infrastructure and management software needed. Through line of sight and out-of-band management of vPro powered devices, IT teams can have below-the-OS vulnerability insights, and visibility to reduce the impact of potential exploits quickly and efficiently. Using Workspace ONE, customers can have centralized visibility into Intel vPro-powered PCs and accelerate patch remediation cycles for devices located outside of office perimeters, even if the devices are sleeping or powered off. This improves security and compliance by accomplishing higher patch saturation with fewer remediation steps and reduces potential disruption to employee productivity.
Modern App Management Simplifies Virtual Environments
Managing and delivering apps across VDI, DaaS, and published app environments has become increasingly complex and inefficient due to silos of legacy tools used. VMware recently introduced Apps on Demand, powered by VMware App Volumes, to unify app management and intelligently deploy apps to published app hosts or non-persistent desktop environments, all based on real-time app usage.
Today, VMware announces additional expansion of App Volumes support to deliver apps on demand to persistent virtual desktops. Now in beta availability, customers with persistent VMware Horizon environments will be able to use App Volumes to capture their apps once and deliver to many persistent virtual desktops. This automates the app delivery process with up to 99% compatibility and reduces management time and costs for any desktop or published app environment. VMware App Volumes is the only solution to help organizations deliver and manage apps across VMware Horizon, Citrix, Microsoft, and Amazon virtual desktop and app deployments as part of VMware’s Apps Everywhere vision.
Boeing: A ‘Hybrid Workforce Innovator’
The Boeing Company (Boeing) has used VMware Workspace ONE across the United States and in more than 65 countries to support its global workforce of 140,000 employees who develop, manufacture and service commercial airplanes, defense products and space systems for its customers. At VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, they were named ‘Hybrid Workforce Innovator’ as part of the 2023 VMware Customer Achievement Awards for the Americas for enabling its workforce to work from anywhere in the world, improving the user experience while reinforcing and advancing security for devices and applications.
“VMware Anywhere Workspace helps us manage and protect end points, provide a common platform to access apps and tools, as well as helping facilitate a digital experience for our employees,” said Kristina Ross, Boeing Workplace Solutions director for Research & Technology. “Workspace ONE helped streamline our transition from traditional PC lifecycle management to Windows 10 modern management which was enabled by our shift to a SaaS-based solution for the company. Today, we have a unified view to oversee all endpoint requirements, and the adoption of SaaS enhanced our scalability and ability to shift focus from infrastructure to business facing solutions.”
About VMware
VMware is a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. As a trusted foundation to accelerate innovation, VMware software gives businesses the flexibility and choice they need to build the future. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to building a better future through the company’s 2030 Agenda.
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