Tech Bytes

The following is a transcript of the audio you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 29, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Illumio earlier this month.

Who Is Illumio?

Illumio is a security company focused on preventing breaches from spreading through an organization using microsegmentation. The system works with a combination of agents and a central controller they call the Policy Compute Engine. The PCE determines, based on policy, what each endpoint in the network should be allowed to communicate with and tells the installed agents. Each agent programs the local operating system firewall service such as iptables or Windows Firewall.

And in that way, you’ve got a centrally managed security policy with granular controls you can keep up with. The Policy Compute Engine is doing the heavy lifting of figuring out exactly what rules are needed in each endpoint’s firewall. There’s more to the Illumio story, but that sets the background for the announcement I’m bringing to your attention today.

Illumio’s PCE Supercluster & Use Cases

In this briefing, Illumio discussed their Policy Compute Engine Supercluster. The PCE Supercluster is, as the name implies, a cluster of Policy Compute Engines that spans regions or even the globe. Illumio cited several scenarios driving this available architecture of their central controller.

Massive scale was one of those, and Illumio didn’t just throw a number up on the wall and expect people to believe it. In a live demo with a total of around 225K actual workloads spun up in three AWS regions around the world, they showed the Supercluster in action.

The point? Supercluster distributed controller architecture works when a single, centralized controller is likely to hit scaling limits. You can grow your microsegmentation domain as big as it needs to with this product.

A second scenario Illumio matched up with the PCE Supercluster architecture was that of large, globally distributed organizations. Why does this scenario matter to Illumio? Global companies like this often have complex applications that are communicating across the globe. For instance, a workload in one region might need to hit an authentication server in another, or perform a replication task. You get the idea.

To manage these communications well, you need a way to coordinate policy for flow between regions, and the Supercluster offers this. The alternative is manual firewall coordination at region edges, and that’s not terribly practical in an automated world. Controller federation really matters in some organizations.

Federation has a parallel benefit of offering consistent policy everywhere that an app is deployed, for example in multiple regions. Why reinvent the policy for each region? Create the policy once, then leverage that same policy in any region the PCE Supercluster lives and the app has been deployed.

For More Information

Illumio went into a lot more detail with some of the best live demos I’ve ever seen covering how the Policy Compute Engine Supercluster functions, recovers from failure scenarios, and so on.

If you’re one of those companies with tens or even hundreds of thousands of workloads distributed globally either on-premises, in the public cloud, or both, Illumio is bringing you maximally scalable microsegmentation.

For more information, see the recordings of the live demos I mentioned earlier by searching YouTube for Tech Field Day and Supercluster, visit illumio.com, or stay tuned into the Packet Pushers, as we’re going to publish an episode with Illumio in the coming weeks.

The following text is a transcript of the audio you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 28, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with DriveScale last month.

DriveScale is a composable infrastructure company, with a primary use case of distributed storage. That is, DriveScale software de-couples servers and storage, making it possible to compose infrastructure flexibly from pools of available resources. If that sounds more or less like what you get with public cloud, DriveScale claims to provide “the agility of the public cloud at a fraction of the cost.” That’s a plausible claim, as we’ve all learned that a company doesn’t move to the public cloud to save money.

I’ve written and spoken about DriveScale before, so search a bit if you’d like more detailed background on the company or check out the links in the episode notes. Now let’s jump into the discussion.

* An Introduction To DriveScale

* DriveScale’s Software Composable Infrastructure For Flash

DriveScale–Not A Hardware Company

In this briefing, DriveScale explained the current state of their evolution. One emphasis was that DriveScale wants to be out of the hardware business entirely. They are a software company that will work with a variety of different hardware. DriveScale will still supply some hardware if really needed to fill in gaps their customers might have, but that’s not what they want to be doing long-term.

Demonstrating how keen they are to be out of the hardware game, DriveScale highlighted some of their new industry alliances. For example, DriveScale is now a Dell EMC Tier 1 Enterprise Infrastructure Global Partner. That means Dell sales reps can sell DriveScale directly and get comped for it. That also means that if Dell EMC is an approved vendor in your shop, purchasing DriveScale is relatively easy for you.

DriveScale also announced support for the Cisco UCS S3260 Disk System, a monstrous series of disk chassis you attach to the network at high speed via dual QSFPs.

You get the idea. The more mainstream hardware DriveScale works with, the less DriveScale needs to supply their own hardware to make their solution saddle up a unicorn and ride around.

DriveScale Composer Architecture

Very well. DriveScale is all about the software. And what is the software? Much of the magic happens in DriveScale Composer. The chief value of DriveScale Composer is to compose any compute to any disk or flash, in a scalable way. DriveScale has successfully tested 3,000 nodes and 100,000 disks. 10,000 nodes and 100,000 disks are expected over time.

The system architecture is, of course, secure multi-tenant across the shared infrastructure, as you’d expect for something that scales so large. If you have a vast pool of resources, it’s safe to assume that a variety of discrete user groups would be consuming them. So, multi-tenancy is a necessary box DriveScale is checking here.

If you put multi-tenancy, compute, storage, and composability together, you might be wondering if DriveScale is a full-blown orchestrator, like Kubernetes. They are not. DriveScale Composer is RESTful API driven, and can be integrated with orchestrators. But DriveScale made it clear that they are not trying to orchestrate anyone’s applications themselves. Compose the infrastructure an application will use? Yes. Integrate that composable infrastructure with an orchestrator? Yes. Take on full orchestration duties themselves? No.

In addition to APIs, the DriveScale system leverages agents. These are user level agents that manage the resource...

The following text is a transcript of the audio you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 28, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with DriveScale last month.

DriveScale is a composable infrastructure company, with a primary use case of distributed storage. That is, DriveScale software de-couples servers and storage, making it possible to compose infrastructure flexibly from pools of available resources. If that sounds more or less like what you get with public cloud, DriveScale claims to provide “the agility of the public cloud at a fraction of the cost.” That’s a plausible claim, as we’ve all learned that a company doesn’t move to the public cloud to save money.

I’ve written and spoken about DriveScale before, so search a bit if you’d like more detailed background on the company or check out the links in the episode notes. Now let’s jump into the discussion.

* An Introduction To DriveScale

* DriveScale’s Software Composable Infrastructure For Flash

DriveScale–Not A Hardware Company

In this briefing, DriveScale explained the current state of their evolution. One emphasis was that DriveScale wants to be out of the hardware business entirely. They are a software company that will work with a variety of different hardware. DriveScale will still supply some hardware if really needed to fill in gaps their customers might have, but that’s not what they want to be doing long-term.

Demonstrating how keen they are to be out of the hardware game, DriveScale highlighted some of their new industry alliances. For example, DriveScale is now a Dell EMC Tier 1 Enterprise Infrastructure Global Partner. That means Dell sales reps can sell DriveScale directly and get comped for it. That also means that if Dell EMC is an approved vendor in your shop, purchasing DriveScale is relatively easy for you.

DriveScale also announced support for the Cisco UCS S3260 Disk System, a monstrous series of disk chassis you attach to the network at high speed via dual QSFPs.

You get the idea. The more mainstream hardware DriveScale works with, the less DriveScale needs to supply their own hardware to make their solution saddle up a unicorn and ride around.

DriveScale Composer Architecture

Very well. DriveScale is all about the software. And what is the software? Much of the magic happens in DriveScale Composer. The chief value of DriveScale Composer is to compose any compute to any disk or flash, in a scalable way. DriveScale has successfully tested 3,000 nodes and 100,000 disks. 10,000 nodes and 100,000 disks are expected over time.

The system architecture is, of course, secure multi-tenant across the shared infrastructure, as you’d expect for something that scales so large. If you have a vast pool of resources, it’s safe to assume that a variety of discrete user groups would be consuming them. So, multi-tenancy is a necessary box DriveScale is checking here.

If you put multi-tenancy, compute, storage, and composability together, you might be wondering if DriveScale is a full-blown orchestrator, like Kubernetes. They are not. DriveScale Composer is RESTful API driven, and can be integrated with orchestrators. But DriveScale made it clear that they are not trying to orchestrate anyone’s applications themselves. Compose the infrastructure an application will use? Yes. Integrate that composable infrastructure with an orchestrator? Yes. Take on full orchestration duties themselves? No.

In addition to APIs, the DriveScale system leverages agents. These are user level agents that manage the resource...

The following text is a transcript of the audio you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 27, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with HammerSpace last month. HammerSpace is a newly launched company to help you manage your data in shops where you are functioning both in the public cloud and on-premises.

If you said, “Oh, so HammerSpace is a storage company,” you’d be wrong about that. HammerSpace is about managing your data, no matter where it’s stored. In fact, a big part of the HammerSpace value proposition is that you don’t have to care about where the data is stored anymore. You can just get on with using it.

In this briefing, HammerSpace introduced their company, discussed some use cases, and dove deeply into their technology.

Understanding HammerSpace

For storage admins, the simplest way to describe HammerSpace is that they are an abstraction layer between data and metadata. David Flynn, CEO described it like this. “We have introduced an abstraction which separates the data consumer side and the storage infrastructure side. And that’s really what’s necessary before we can manage data in the cloud.”

HammerSpace becomes your point of entry to the data in your organization. HammerSpace indexes all the metadata, and presents a file system view via NFS or SMB. HammerSpace also manages access to the data, based on the policy that’s been defined.

They described this approach as sort of like DNS. HammerSpace clients talk to the metadata service, obtaining routing information for the file needed. The client then accesses the file directly. This means that HammerSpace’s metadata control plane is not in the data path. Storage platforms and data consumers no longer have to be tightly coupled in this model, as HammerSpace is the abstraction layer in the middle.

The Parallel NFS Link

If you’re wondering how HammerSpace gets out of the data path, the answer is parallel NFS. Quoting from pnfs.com, “Parallel NFS removes the performance bottleneck in traditional NAS systems by allowing the compute clients to read and write data directly and in parallel, to and from the physical storage devices. The NFS server is used only to control metadata and coordinate access, allowing incredibly fast access to very large data sets from many clients.”

HammerSpace is using this technology, and even has Trond Myklebust, Chief Linux Kernel Maintainer for NFS on the HammerSpace team as CTO.

For clients without parallel NFS support, HammerSpace offers a Data Service Node to act as a proxy.

The Automated, Policy-Governed Data Mover

All of this technology is lovely, but you might be wondering how this helps with hybrid cloud operations. The other major piece of the HammerSpace puzzle is that HammerSpace can move data around for you, wherever you need it, without operator intervention beyond policy definition.

David Flynn explained it this way. “Once you’re able to present data through the lens of the metadata and manage it through the lens of the metadata, then you can think of it as truly, ‘Data like air. Simply everywhere.’ As a matter of fact, the metadata can be aggressively replicated across the globe at different data centers so that you can have the view of it and when you go to access it, it can get the data to where you need it in a on-demand basis.”

HammerSpace Use Cases

HammerSpace cited “Cloud Analytics With On-Premises Data” as their main use case currently. The idea is that you have data in-house, and you need to mine that data. However, you want to use a cutting-edge cloud-based tool to do the analysis. Uh-oh. Normally,

The following text is a transcript of the audio you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 27, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with HammerSpace last month. HammerSpace is a newly launched company to help you manage your data in shops where you are functioning both in the public cloud and on-premises.

If you said, “Oh, so HammerSpace is a storage company,” you’d be wrong about that. HammerSpace is about managing your data, no matter where it’s stored. In fact, a big part of the HammerSpace value proposition is that you don’t have to care about where the data is stored anymore. You can just get on with using it.

In this briefing, HammerSpace introduced their company, discussed some use cases, and dove deeply into their technology.

Understanding HammerSpace

For storage admins, the simplest way to describe HammerSpace is that they are an abstraction layer between data and metadata. David Flynn, CEO described it like this. “We have introduced an abstraction which separates the data consumer side and the storage infrastructure side. And that’s really what’s necessary before we can manage data in the cloud.”

HammerSpace becomes your point of entry to the data in your organization. HammerSpace indexes all the metadata, and presents a file system view via NFS or SMB. HammerSpace also manages access to the data, based on the policy that’s been defined.

They described this approach as sort of like DNS. HammerSpace clients talk to the metadata service, obtaining routing information for the file needed. The client then accesses the file directly. This means that HammerSpace’s metadata control plane is not in the data path. Storage platforms and data consumers no longer have to be tightly coupled in this model, as HammerSpace is the abstraction layer in the middle.

The Parallel NFS Link

If you’re wondering how HammerSpace gets out of the data path, the answer is parallel NFS. Quoting from pnfs.com, “Parallel NFS removes the performance bottleneck in traditional NAS systems by allowing the compute clients to read and write data directly and in parallel, to and from the physical storage devices. The NFS server is used only to control metadata and coordinate access, allowing incredibly fast access to very large data sets from many clients.”

HammerSpace is using this technology, and even has Trond Myklebust, Chief Linux Kernel Maintainer for NFS on the HammerSpace team as CTO.

For clients without parallel NFS support, HammerSpace offers a Data Service Node to act as a proxy.

The Automated, Policy-Governed Data Mover

All of this technology is lovely, but you might be wondering how this helps with hybrid cloud operations. The other major piece of the HammerSpace puzzle is that HammerSpace can move data around for you, wherever you need it, without operator intervention beyond policy definition.

David Flynn explained it this way. “Once you’re able to present data through the lens of the metadata and manage it through the lens of the metadata, then you can think of it as truly, ‘Data like air. Simply everywhere.’ As a matter of fact, the metadata can be aggressively replicated across the globe at different data centers so that you can have the view of it and when you go to access it, it can get the data to where you need it in a on-demand basis.”

HammerSpace Use Cases

HammerSpace cited “Cloud Analytics With On-Premises Data” as their main use case currently. The idea is that you have data in-house, and you need to mine that data. However, you want to use a cutting-edge cloud-based tool to do the analysis. Uh-oh. Normally,

The following is a transcript of the audio recording you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 26, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Dell EMC last month. Dell EMC is one of the largest storage companies in the world. In this briefing, they focused on their Cyber Recovery 18.1 product.

You might be thinking, “Oh, another backup product. I already have one of those.” Sort of. Cyber Recovery is more than simply backup, and it’s more than what a decent disaster recovery plan gets you. Dell EMC points out that backup recovery is good, but can be quite slow if you need to recover a huge dataset, especially when dealing with tape. In addition, having a DR plan doesn’t mean you have a plan for recovering from a cyber attack. Disaster recovery and cyber attack recovery are different animals.

What do we mean by “cyber attack”? Dell EMC cited the infamous Petya and related attacks like NotPetya. These nasty bits of work are known as ransomware. Ransomware comes in various flavors, but in the Petya world encrypts files until you pay up while also attempting to harvest credentials and move through the network exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities.

Why is Dell EMC’s Cyber Recovery suited to address these attacks? The Cyber Recover Vault is an orchestrated Data Domain storage platform that provides an isolated copy of known good data that can be used to recover from a security breach. Let’s look more closely at each of the keywords in that definition, as that will help us understand exactly what Cyber Recovery is.

* First, orchestrated. The Cyber Recovery system is, in part, a bunch of software that does the logistical heavy lifting of deciding what data is known to be good and making sure there’s a copy of it in the vault.

* Second, Data Domain. Data Domain is an existing Dell EMC data protection product that’s got a pretty large install base. You need to be a Data Domain customer to use Dell EMC Cyber Recovery. Cyber Recovery leverages the ecosystem of apps and security features around Data Domain to help it do what it does and is replicating data from the Data Domain storage you’ve already got.

* Third, isolated. A big part of the security value of the Cyber Recovery Vault is that it is air-gapped. That is, the vault is only online when a data replication is in progress. To perform a replication, a network interface must be brought up. Then, a trusted connection between the two environments is created. Replication runs. Then the link connecting the vault to the rest of the network is shut down, creating a virtual air-gap between the vault and the rest of the network. In that way, if your network comes under an attack, the vault should be impervious, leaving you with a known good copy of your data.

* Fourth, known good. The data backed up into the vault is scanned to be sure it is good data before it is sent to the vault. Dell EMC claims that this takes the guesswork out of the restore process. The contents of the Cyber Recovery Vault are supposed to be completely trustworthy. That bit of magic is done by CyberSense, supplied to Dell EMC by a company called Index Engines. CyberSense works by scanning unstructured data and databases (Oracle, DB2, and SQL specifically) and scoring them based on an entropy engine measuring 40 different statistics. Machine learning is run to generate the score; there are no signatures involved. In effect, CyberSense is making a highly educated guess that something bad happened to a file based on the entropy score, and then replacing it with a known good copy. And that’s how you know you’ve got good files…

The following is a transcript of the audio recording you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 26, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Dell EMC last month. Dell EMC is one of the largest storage companies in the world. In this briefing, they focused on their Cyber Recovery 18.1 product.

You might be thinking, “Oh, another backup product. I already have one of those.” Sort of. Cyber Recovery is more than simply backup, and it’s more than what a decent disaster recovery plan gets you. Dell EMC points out that backup recovery is good, but can be quite slow if you need to recover a huge dataset, especially when dealing with tape. In addition, having a DR plan doesn’t mean you have a plan for recovering from a cyber attack. Disaster recovery and cyber attack recovery are different animals.

What do we mean by “cyber attack”? Dell EMC cited the infamous Petya and related attacks like NotPetya. These nasty bits of work are known as ransomware. Ransomware comes in various flavors, but in the Petya world encrypts files until you pay up while also attempting to harvest credentials and move through the network exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities.

Why is Dell EMC’s Cyber Recovery suited to address these attacks? The Cyber Recover Vault is an orchestrated Data Domain storage platform that provides an isolated copy of known good data that can be used to recover from a security breach. Let’s look more closely at each of the keywords in that definition, as that will help us understand exactly what Cyber Recovery is.

* First, orchestrated. The Cyber Recovery system is, in part, a bunch of software that does the logistical heavy lifting of deciding what data is known to be good and making sure there’s a copy of it in the vault.

* Second, Data Domain. Data Domain is an existing Dell EMC data protection product that’s got a pretty large install base. You need to be a Data Domain customer to use Dell EMC Cyber Recovery. Cyber Recovery leverages the ecosystem of apps and security features around Data Domain to help it do what it does and is replicating data from the Data Domain storage you’ve already got.

* Third, isolated. A big part of the security value of the Cyber Recovery Vault is that it is air-gapped. That is, the vault is only online when a data replication is in progress. To perform a replication, a network interface must be brought up. Then, a trusted connection between the two environments is created. Replication runs. Then the link connecting the vault to the rest of the network is shut down, creating a virtual air-gap between the vault and the rest of the network. In that way, if your network comes under an attack, the vault should be impervious, leaving you with a known good copy of your data.

* Fourth, known good. The data backed up into the vault is scanned to be sure it is good data before it is sent to the vault. Dell EMC claims that this takes the guesswork out of the restore process. The contents of the Cyber Recovery Vault are supposed to be completely trustworthy. That bit of magic is done by CyberSense, supplied to Dell EMC by a company called Index Engines. CyberSense works by scanning unstructured data and databases (Oracle, DB2, and SQL specifically) and scoring them based on an entropy engine measuring 40 different statistics. Machine learning is run to generate the score; there are no signatures involved. In effect, CyberSense is making a highly educated guess that something bad happened to a file based on the entropy score, and then replacing it with a known good copy. And that’s how you know you’ve got good files…

The following is a transcript of the audio file you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s November 19th, 2018, and here’s what’s happening:

* I had a briefing with Igneous earlier this month. Who’s Igneous? Igneous is focused on providing “as-a-service” solutions for unstructured data, including storage, backup & archival, global metadata indexing, and data workflow management. In this briefing, Igneous discussed recent announcements around their DataProtect, DataDiscover, and DataFlow services.

* Before we get to that, what is unstructured data? Unstructured data is, more or less, data that’s not in a highly structured form such what you’d find in a relational database. That doesn’t mean unstructured data doesn’t have any structure at all, but rather that the structure is not in a row/column format that lends itself well to carefully constructed queries. You know, like what SQL (structured query language) is all about.

* It’s the lack of nicely “queryable” structure that makes the unstructured data problem an interesting one to solve, as most data found at organizations is, in fact, unstructured. This is true even for big data shops, where high performance computing clusters run Hadoop and similar tools against massive unstructured datasets. In this unstructured data context, you find Igneous solving problems for companies. Let’s walk through the products they discussed with me in this briefing.

* First, DataProtect. DataProtect isn’t completely new, as it is the culmination of Igneous’ archive and backup offerings. The tool does what you’d expect. It’s about protecting your data in the form of backups, archival, and tiering of data to any public cloud, all delivered “as-a-service” meaning that Igneous is taking care of the DataProtect platform itself for you remotely.

* Second, DataDiscover. DataDiscover is about figuring out what’s interesting about your vast swaths of unstructured data by indexing all of the metadata that describes it. This service, by itself, is not about data movement or storage of the data. As the name suggests, DataDiscover wants to help you know what data you’ve got. Perhaps some of your data is old. Maybe there’s a huge volume of datasets, in which case DataDiscover helps you operate at scale. DataDiscover helps data managers understand what’s going in their data repositories and answer questions. Such as…is there data that should be archived? Where are the biggest files? Which files are the oldest? Etc.

* Third, DataFlow. DataFlow is about enabling end user workflows–making the lives of data consumers easier. In other words, this is less about IT folks who are storage professionals, and more about those who use the massive piles of data filling up all the storage volumes. The workflows around datasets tend to follow a lifecycle of capturing, processing, and analyzing data. Let’s give a simple high performance computing example. Imagine that, first, data is created by software. Then, the data is moved into an HPC cluster. The cluster runs software to process the data, generating more data in the form of results. That “results” dataset is copied to a directory for final analysis. Igneous DataFlow helps workflows around processes such as our little HPC example to be accomplished via APIs. The Igneous customer success team will work with the end user to make sure that metadata tagging, Python code, API calls, and overall workflow are functioning as well as possible. Again, remember that the DataFlow product is about the end user perspective. Igneous offered Paige.AI, a cancer research company, as a customer example for DataFlow…

Tech Bytes are short, sponsored conversations on the latest technologies and products. Today’s episode is sponsored by Silver Peak, and we talk to their customer First Bank.

Our guest is Marc Ashworth, VP – Information Security. We discuss how the bank was able to replace MPLS with lower-cost broadband connections, simplify its WAN edge by removing routers at each branch, and meet security requirements by moving to SD-WAN.

Ashworth shares his deployment experiences with swapping out MPLS with either broadband or cable modems at every branch.

We also discuss key features for First Bank, including WAN acceleration capabilities in Silver Peak, and encryption between branch devices and the bank’s headquarters.

Tech Bytes are short, sponsored conversations on the latest technologies and products. Today’s episode is sponsored by Silver Peak, and we talk to their customer First Bank.

Our guest is Marc Ashworth, VP – Information Security. We discuss how the bank was able to replace MPLS with lower-cost broadband connections, simplify its WAN edge by removing routers at each branch, and meet security requirements by moving to SD-WAN.

Ashworth shares his deployment experiences with swapping out MPLS with either broadband or cable modems at every branch.

We also discuss key features for First Bank, including WAN acceleration capabilities in Silver Peak, and encryption between branch devices and the bank’s headquarters.