Borderless Applications: The Disruption Stops HERE! : Performance Matters

Application outages and performance glitches plague our daily lives. As applications become more collaborative and are accessed globally, businesses will need to ensure they are well-equipped to manage user performance and eliminate outages in order to compete. Understanding application performance and user experience for these types of transactions is critical. Today, applications have a direct impact on company revenues, customer satisfaction and brand perception. However, being able to manage the business application’s performance has become a difficult task for IT operations, due to:

• increasingly complex and distributed application architectures
• application usage that spans globally
• an explosion in the types of devices and browsers.

In order for businesses to thrive and increase market share, they need to be innovative, use cutting-edge technology and market themselves in sophisticated ways. How can critical business applications be managed without increasing budgets and hiring more people? IT operations play an enormous role in ensuring business success. IT is the “mother ship” for managing the day-to-day business operations. It plays a pivotal role in helping the business change to meet the demands of today’s users.

IT managers and their business counterparts need to differentiate themselves from the competition without adding resources, and even producing more with less. Three questions come to mind when seeking solutions to achieve business transformation, competitive differentiation and growth in revenue:

• How does IT align itself to meet business needs?
• How can IT capitalize on what’s already in place and innovate without adding cost or overhead?
• How will IT meet customer application performance expectations, maximizing revenue opportunities while safeguarding the corporate brand?

The impact on the business can be great if IT is ill-equipped to ensure performance meets user demands. If we look back in time to see how IT and business owners have operated, we can see how drastically people, process and technology have changed and where they are headed in the future.

As the business delivers new revenue-generating applications to its customers, IT is looking to optimize cost and increase efficiencies through the adoption of new process, new technologies and new tools. Furthermore, ensuring high performance for newly adopted technologies becomes a “must,” due to the threat of competition and loss of revenue. End-to-end application performance management becomes critical to both IT and business counterparts, with the need to track, measure, identify and fix issues prior to users feeling the effects of poor performance. End-to-end visibility must be achieved no matter where the application resides: external, internal or cloud-based.

Therefore, the critical driver for ensuring that performance meets user demands is the ability to manage the application across the entire application delivery chain anywhere around the globe. An end-to-end application performance management solution that can easily extend to managing new technologies provides a foundation for IT and business counterparts to collaborate and address performance issues quickly and meet business demands. This blog posting is the first of 3 blogs to follow that provides insight into the shift in application performance management by IT operations in three key areas:

1. Application architectures

2. Zone of responsibility

3. Customer expectations

In addition, the series of blogs will provide insight into how best to ensure applications spanning across all boundaries of enterprise and the Internet can successfully be monitored and managed to meet the needs of the business.

(Source:Borderless Applications: The Disruption Stops HERE! : Performance Matters)

The unique advantage of Force10 Command Line Interface (CLI) that is nearly identical to Cisco’s

SAN JOSE, Calif., February 24, 2010 – Force10 Networks, Inc., the global technology leader that data centers, service providers and enterprises rely on when the network is their business, today announced an aggressive new promotion that incents HP resellers to continue to offer a standards-based alternative to Cisco. Resellers that want to offer best-of-breed Ethernet networking solutions from Force10 will receive an improved margin and a lower-priced competitive solution than a comparable Cisco 6500 configuration.

“We’ve seen ongoing channel disruption since Cisco introduced its Unified Computing System / blade server technology in 2009. It intensified this week with the announcement that Cisco will terminate its channel alliance with HP. We see a fast-emerging opportunity to build relationships with partners that now need an alternative to Cisco,” said Andrew Stewart, vice president, worldwide channels and sales operations at Force10 Networks.

Under the new program, Force10 will help resellers and distribution partners like Bell Micro, Tech Data and NHR to define attractive best-of-breed solutions geared for the data center, 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and video applications.

Force10’s high density and resilient Ethernet switching and routing solutions are standards-based and offer the unique advantage of Command Line Interface (CLI) that is nearly identical to Cisco’s, thereby enabling seamless insertion. Moreover, Force10’s power and cooling metrics are up to 80% lower than Cisco’s comparable products. Also, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Force10’s non-blocking line-rate solutions offer significant savings, ranging from thousands to millions of dollars over typical depreciation schedules used by enterprises today.

Industry Transition Opportunity

Called the “C300 Play-to-Win,” the promotion is designed to exploit the large installed base of Cisco’s Catalyst 6509 chassis, which has now reached end of life. Under terms of the promotion that runs through the end of September 2010, Force10 will sell at a lower price its chassis-based C-Series C300 switch against any new Cisco 6500 Series chassis. Moreover, authorized reseller partners who generate more than $1 million in qualified C300 switch net sales to Force10 will receive an additional 10 percent cash rebate.

According to Force10, its C300 chassis solution surpasses the density and switching performance of the Catalyst 6509, supporting 384 line rate GbE ports and 64 line rate 10 GbE ports, in the same footprint as the Catalyst 4510R. The C300’s compact design allows customers to support more network capacity with less space while reducing cooling and power costs.

For Force10 authorized resellers who would like more information, please log in to our Partner Portal. If you are not a Force10 authorized reseller but would like to join, please register here.

About Force10 Networks

Force10 Networks is the global technology leader that data center, service provider and enterprise customers rely on when the network is their business. The company’s high performance solutions are designed to deliver new economics by virtualizing and automating Ethernet networks. Force10’s high density and resilient Ethernet switching and routing products increase network availability, agility and efficiency while reducing power and cooling costs. Force10 provides 24x7 service and support capabilities to its global customer base in more than 60 countries worldwide. For more information on Force10 Networks, please visit www.force10networks.com.

(Source : Force10 Networks: News: Press Releases)