Geekly Articles each Day
📜 ⬆️ ⬇️

What year 2015 brought us?



I would like to congratulate all the people of Habrovchan on the coming New Year and Merry Christmas! Outside the window of our Moscow office, winter is in full swing: there are many puddles and +8 on a thermometer. The year is coming to an end, and it's time to sum up. We decided to try to remember what appeared so interesting in 2015 in the IT world. And since the IT world is huge, and remembering everything is an extremely difficult task (except for Schwarzenegger), we narrowed our eyes and focused on the following companies: Cisco, HPE, Microsoft and VMware. As it turned out (who would actually doubt it), if you try to tell about all the new products of the above companies, you will need to try very hard. But soon the holidays, and you need to buy gifts, go cut the tree, start cooking Olivier. Therefore, we tried to choose only what, in our opinion, was most significant for us and our customers. In any case, we hope so.

So, enough of the lyrics, we start our TOP solutions / devices / and other trifles that we have selected, divided by manufacturers.

')
Wireless technology

This year, the main innovations of the company in the field of wireless technologies somehow revolve around the development of the 802.11ac standard. In particular, the market was presented with two new access points: 1850 and 1830.


These access points support the so-called second wave (wave 2) development of the standard 802.11ac. The main innovations that have emerged at these access points are Multi User MIMO support and support for the beamforming standard (802.11ac transmit beamforming). As we remember, before this access point, only one client (Single User MIMO) could be serviced at a time, and the proprietary technology ClientLink was responsible for beamforming (by the way, it does not exist in new access points). Another feature that deserves mention is the Mobility Express feature. This feature allows you to use an access point of 1830 or 1850 as a wireless network controller. Management of up to 25 access points is supported (moreover, the managed access points can be x600, x700 and, of course, x800 series). The main difference between new access points is the MIMO: 4x4: 3 (4) formula for 1850 and 3x3: 2 for 1830.

Another new feature was the 5520 Wireless Access Controller, which is also closely related to the 802.11ac wave 2. The main advantage of this controller is its performance (bandwidth up to 20 Gbit / s, a large number of controlled access points - 1500 and clients - 20 000).


The 8540 controller also appeared. It is even more productive and designed for very large networks.

The development of the 802.11ac standard is closely related to the increase in data transfer speeds. As we remember, wave 1 provides physical data transfer at speeds up to 1.3 Gbit / s, wave 2 - up to 1.7 Gbit / s. At the same time, the channel speed (that usable bandwidth, which is just interesting for us) is smaller and amounts to 845 Mbps for wave 1 and up to 1.1 Gbps for wave 1. Of course, these numbers are still difficult to achieve. For example, in order to “squeeze” a maximum of 1850, we will need a client who can accept 4 spatial streams. But it is already clear: connecting access points to a wired network at a speed of 1 Gbps in the future will become a bottleneck. Already, the 1850 access point has two built-in 1 Gb / s ports. Therefore, Cisco Catalyst Multigigabit technology (based on the NBASE-T standard) has been actively developed. It allows us to transmit data over a twisted pair category 5e / 6 (i.e. use the current cable network) at 1 Gb / s, 2.5 Gb / s, 5 Gb / s, and 10 Gb / s. Support for this technology has appeared on some models of Catalyst 4500E, 3850 and 3560-CX switches.

Unified Communications

This year almost all major versions of UC software products (UCM, UCCX, etc.) have been updated. Licensing schemes have also been updated for some of them, in particular, for Telepresence (Multiparty Licensing) solutions.

A new platform was introduced for the Business Edition 6000 solution. Now it is possible to implement the BE 6000 based on the Cisco 2921 router with the UCS E160D M2 blade server. BE6000S (this is how it became known as) supports up to 150 subscribers. You can simultaneously run five UC applications: Unified Communication Manager, Instant Messaging and the Presence with the Cisco Jabber, Unity Connection, Prime Collaboration Provisioning and Paging Server. The new BE6000S can be an alternative to the old Unified Communication Manager Express (UCMe) solution. As you know, the UCMe solution has not been developed for a long time, and the vendor is always recommended to build solutions based on the UCM product.

This year the line of phones has replenished. There was a fairly budget (if, of course, this word is applicable to Cisco products), the 7811 phone. It has a built-in two-port switch, a graphic display, a full-duplex speakerphone and a set of necessary dedicated keys. All this is enough to stick a label to it - a contender for a “typical phone for an ordinary employee.”

There are new phones with integrated camera 8845 and 8865 (HD 720p is supported).



Switches and routers

Some lines of Cisco switches have been updated this year. For example, a lineup of 3850 switches was significantly added. There were models with 24 and 48 ports of 10 Gbit / s and models with Multigigabit ports. It has become possible to install modules with 40 Gb / s ports on these switches. New 6840-X fixed configuration switches were also introduced. In terms of functionality, they are comparable to 6807/6880 switches.


Separately, we can mention the emergence of new switches for SMB with 10 Gbit / s ports (it sounds funny, of course: 10 Gbit / s for SMB). Speech about switches 350X and 550X.


If we talk about routers, then we have not noticed any significant changes. I can only note that the list of modules for installation in 4300/4400 routers has expanded.

Data centers

This year, the active development of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), an SDN solution for building data center networks, continued. It became available a lot of information materials on this technology.



New Nexus 3200 switches were also presented. One of the models supports connections at speeds up to 100 Gbps (ports can operate at speeds of 10G / 25G / 40G / 50G / 100G). In this case, the switch is supplied in a fixed configuration.



Security

For many companies, the theme of controlling user traffic has begun to play with new colors in the spring of the outgoing year: since April 14, 2015, Microsoft has officially discontinued the main support for the Forefront TMG proxy server. Someone had prepared for this in advance, and someone in a panic, systematically and without much fuss, began to look for a replacement for TMG in the vast expanses of open-source and commercial NGFW, UTM and Web-proxy solutions. One such solution is Cisco FirePOWER. In addition to the fact that there are new Cisco ASA models with FirePOWER services (5506X, 5508X, 5516X), this year some innovations were introduced:


All this and much more was added to version 6.0 of the Firepower services, which became available for download in November of this year.

As we have already noted, this year, new ITU ASA models were presented: 5506X, 5508X and 5516X. All these devices are more productive than their predecessors and are distinguished by the fact that they have an SSD drive preinstalled. So they are out of the box ready to launch FirePOWER services. New cloud security solutions (Cloud Access Security, OpenDNS Umbrella, etc.) were announced, familiar products (ISE, AMP, etc.) were updated.

I would like to note that new items have appeared in other areas. For example, new server models have appeared, and the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions have continued to actively develop. In general, updates have touched almost all decisions.



I think readers are already a little filled with Cisco and it's time to betray the HPE baton.

HPE has added 3Par storage systems this year. The new 3Par 8000 and 3Par 20000 lines have appeared. In fact, this update of the current line (they should replace the 3Par 7000 and 10000, respectively): a new, more productive hardware. The solutions are built on the updated generation of ASICs (Gen 5), have more efficient processors and more memory (in the context of the cache). The architecture of new storage controllers is designed to work with flash-arrays. SAS 12 Gb / s is now used as an internal disk bus. And the external ports FC 16 Gb / s have become the standard for these systems.



Another new data storage solution is the HPE ConvergedSystem 250-HC StoreVirtual. The solution belongs to the family of software-defined storage systems. This storage system is based on HP ProLiant servers, VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization systems, as well as specialized HP StoreVirtual software. The solution consists of three or four nodes. One node supports up to 7.2 TB. I would like to remind you that StoreVirtual solutions previously had the name LeftHand.



This year, the company continued to update the lines of its servers. This, of course, is about the servers of the 9th generation (Gen 9). In particular, I would like to draw attention to the new models of the simplest rack servers - DL 20, DL 60 and DL 80. In the conditions of the current exchange rate realities of our country, they can be quite interesting. DL 60 and DL 80 servers support the installation of up to two processors (Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3) and 256 GB of RAM. True, these servers are equipped with only one power supply.



A significant event this year was the acquisition of HPE by Aruba. In this regard, the line of wireless solutions should undergo great changes. As we all know, Aruba is one of the key players in the wireless market. Also, this vendor has wired solutions (switches, security solutions, etc.). Therefore, we can expect a practical complete overflow of the Aruba product line in the HPE portfolio.

Aruba has introduced a new access point series 320 that supports the standard 802.11ac wave 2. These access points provide data transfer at the physical level for the 5 GHz band at speeds up to 1.7 Gbit / s (4 spatial streams are used). They support Multi User MIMO and Transmit beamforming (TxBF) technologies.



During this year, updates occurred in almost all HPE solutions. For example, the backup equipment line was updated and supplemented (LTO-7 support appeared). The HPE Synergy system was announced: it combines network and computing components, storage facilities and management software (a kind of blade server) in a single package. Updated server solutions for demanding computing (including Big Data) - HP Apollo and HP Integrity Superdome X. New switches appeared and active development of software-defined networks (SDN) continued.


Separately, we would like to mark the new line of HPE Altoline switches. They are primarily designed for installation in the data center (have ports of 10 Gb / s and 40 Gb / s). These switches are a disaggregated solution for open networks (Open Networking). This means that we can install any network operating system on this switch. For example, this line is fully compatible with Cumulus Networks Linux NOS.





Now let's get to the new Microsoft.

This year, Microsoft has released a new version of its client operating system. A feature of Windows 10 has become cross-platform: now we have a unified OS, both for the Xbox One console, a smartphone, and for a regular PC. This should simplify the development of universal applications (Universal Apps) for a new OS (once developed and works everywhere).

The new version of the corporate mail system Exchange Server 2016 was also introduced this year and differs from its predecessor in the updated architecture. Exchange Server 2016 is initially available in the cloud. In general, the current policy of the company is such that products first appear in a cloudy environment and only then in the form of on-premise solutions. This year has confirmed this thesis.

In addition, Microsoft has not forgotten about its unified communications platform Microsoft Lync, which not only updated to the new version, but also changed its name to Skype for Business (Skype for Business). Over the past year, new Skype for Business mobile clients were released for all major platforms (Windows Mobile, iOS, Android). Updated the desktop client within Office 2016, which combined the possibilities of creating quick meetings, demonstrations and trainings, improved the user interface. In the Skype for Business solution, a tighter integration with Skype services (now you can call and write them from the Skype for Business corporate client) and the ability to integrate various video conferencing systems have appeared.

Also this year we saw the updated Office 2016, including Office 2016 updated under Mac OS X (the previous release was already in 2010). An updated version of Visual Studio 2015 was introduced.

Microsoft has announced the appearance of two more significant products (moreover, there is already a technical preview): the Windows Server 2016 server operating system and the updated System Center 2016 product family.

The new server operating system promises to be quite interesting, especially in terms of virtualization (Nano Server, Windows Server and Hyper-V containers will appear, embedded virtualization, Hyper-V cluster update scheme, Storage Spaces Direct, etc.) will be improved.

I would like to note that with the arrival of Satya Nadella, Microsoft soared into the clouds and continues to soar there. Over the past year, most of the updates have been associated with cloud platforms (the company's current motto is cloud first, mobile first). Significant updates were made to Office 365 (Azure ExpressRoute, Mobile Device Management, PowerBI, etc.), the capabilities of Microsoft Intune, Mobile Application Management and Azure were expanded.



This year, Vmware introduced the sixth version of its vSphere product. Of the most interesting innovations of this version, the following can be highlighted:

Other products have also been updated this year: Horizon View, Site Recovery Manager, etc.



This year was full of new developments. Not all, of course, appeared on the shelves of our homeland. Something only had time to report, something else is being certified. Some solutions are already actively used.

We tried to note those moments that seemed to us significant or just worthy of attention. If we have missed something important, you can always indicate this in the comments.

Ahead of the holidays and the new 2016, in which we will see even more new solutions, technologies and products. Anyway, let's hope so.

Once again, we heartily congratulate you on the upcoming New Year!

Let all conceived plans always come true, difficulties bypass, and good luck helps in all endeavors.

We wish you good health, joyful mood, well-being in the family and success in your work!

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/273737/

More articles:


All Articles