Pulse vADC Updates

Pulse Virtual Traffic Manager 18.1 offers enhanced support for DevOps application teams looking for closer integration and automation in customized cloud deployments.

This new release of Pulse Services Director introduces significant enhancements for managing large numbers of Traffic Managers in an Enterprise deployment. Services Director 18.1 extends our vision for powerful enterprise capabilities, and includes options for intuitive graphical analysis and centralized logging, so you can gain a deeper understanding of how your all your applications are performing.

Pulse Secure has completed the acquisition of Brocade’s Virtual Application Delivery Controller (vADC) business, and we are delighted to welcome Brocade community members to the Pulse family! 

In this new release, Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager includes an upgraded Virtual Appliance platform, and has been designated as an LTS (Long Term Support) release.

In this new release, Brocade Services Director supports configurations where Services Director is running behind NAT. In addition, this release has been designated as an LTS (Long Term Support) release.

Organizations looking to get on top of the volume of unstructured data flooding their data centers need look no further than the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) with Brocade Virtual Application Delivery Controllers (vADC).

In this new release, Brocade Services Director supports centralized authentication for additional security and user management, including authentication of users against an LDAP, RADIUS or TACACS+ server - for all users accessing services director via REST API, CLI and GUI.

This latest version of Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager includes enhanced flexibility for management, control and more deployment options, including DHCP enabled on admin interfaces, delayed fail-back and PROXY protocol support.

Letsencrypt.org is a free and automated Certificate Authority that makes it easy for organizations to secure websites. It can set up TLS certificates very easily, limited to one domain name (i.e., www.domain.com) and has the advantage that it supports both RSA and ECC certificates.

In this article, we show an example of how to configure Let’s Encrypt to work with Brocade vADC, including:

• Issue new certificates
• Automated renewal of certificates
• Install certificates and tools
• Use both RSA and ECC for performance and maximum compatibility
• Enable automatic OCSP stapling

Starting in November 2016, the vADC feature tiers and bandwidth options will be updated to make it easier for customers to select the platform that suits their business needs.

Performance matters because agility is the key to maintaining a competitive edge.

Here we go again. It's all aboard the roller coaster into the seasonal shopping peaks and troughs.

This new release of Brocade vTM extends the performance and capability of the new Data Plane Acceleration (DPA) mode, first introduced in Brocade vTM 11.0. This new architecture allows lower-latency and higher-throughput traffic management, and can drive up to 120 Gbps L4 throughput and 1 million L4 connections per second on commodity x86 hardware. This means Brocade vTM can now deliver a combination of high L4 throughput and rich L7 services.

This version of the Brocade Services Director makes it easier to automate the creation of new services, with the ability for auto-registration of externally deployed instances of Brocade vTM, whether in private cloud or AWS deployments.

Never before has the choice of business application impacted an organization’s competitive edge as much as it does today. In fact, enterprises are spending up to a third of their IT budgets on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications alone—along with more spending for other business applications to streamline processes

Instead of this dystopian sprawl, what if we could use a single license that is based on traffic throughput and allows us to allocate as many ADC functions as we like tied back to that throughput allocation, managed by that single license?

This version of the Brocade Services Director makes it easier to manage large numbers of externally deployed instances of Brocade vTM, by providing an instance-level backup and restore feature.

Businesses are increasingly running the applications they use to automate and manage their operations, both internally and to connect with customers in the cloud. Read more...

If every second counts, why is there still so much room for improvement for application performance?

The Brocade Services Director makes it easier to manage large numbers of externally deployed instances of Brocade vTM, allowing self-registration of instances, which simplifies the creation and upgrade of large-scale ADC deployments. In addition, this version provides support to define authentication profiles using external sources such as LDAP, Active Directory, RADIUS and TACACS+.

The Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager 10.4 (Brocade vTM) offers support for ECDSA ciphers, providing significant performance and throughput advantages over earlier versions. In addition, this version also includes support for self-registration when used with Brocade Services Director, which simplifies the creation and upgrade of large-scale ADC deployments.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and the more recent Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols are the cornerstones of Internet security, providing a standard for authenticated transactions using secure key exchange and encryption. With support for TLS 1.2, Traffic Manager provides a wider range of protocol support, including the use of stronger ciphers for authentication, allowing clients to specify which hash and signature algorithms they will accept. vTM also permits full control over the selection of security settings per virtual server, per pool, or as a global setting, to suit a range of enterprise deployment options.

At peak demand, ADCs assign more bandwidth to the apps and Web pages that need it.

But higher traffic volumes and changing traffic patterns make it difficult to predict peak times or manage the workload. Load balancing appliances meet workload requirements less than half the time, and often add to your performance headaches...

At times of peak demand, ADCs assign more bandwidth to the right applications and Web pages. The trouble is, the business landscape is very different to how it was just a few years ago...

Brocade vTM, as a software ADC can be deployed on any x86 cloud platform. It's so simple to deploy on top of Linux or Solaris, that I'm sure people have been spinning up vTMs on Googles Compute Engine for a while now. But with the release of vTM 10.3 in December we now have an official Virtual Appliance available. It's probably about time some one published an Auto-Scaling driver too....

We have recently published a Technical Support Bulletin (TSB-2016-230-A) encouraging all customers to upgrade to version 2.1 or newer: you can find the details of this TSB on http://my.brocade.com.

Highlights in this new release of Brocade Services Director 2.3 include Cluster Traffic Light Status: the Services Director dashboard will display the status of clusters using a traffic light indicator (red/amber/green) as well as the detailed status of up to ten Virtual Servers managed within each cluster.