Here's the link to the video mentioned in the episode outlining the top 5 biggest problems with SCCM (and how to address them) at go.adaptiva.com/sccm

Learn more about Adaptiva or contact us at adaptiva.com

Full episode transcript: 

Host:

Welcome back to the Endpoint Management podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Alphaeus Mote, one of Adaptiva's Senior Solutions Architects about how the right tools for extensibility and automation can simplify and stabilize endpoint management in large organizations, including a case study from his own experience that shows how different things can be with, versus without, these tools from the experience of one large organization making the switch to Windows 10. As always, links are in the show notes, or you can find everything you need and get in touch with us at Adaptiva.com.

Alphaeus Mote:

This is Alphaeus Mote with Adaptiva, and we're going to talk about how the software upgrade and operating system upgrade procedures within enterprises has gone completely insane and how Adaptiva workflows can replace that insanity with simple automation-ready workflows that deliver repeatable success.

Alphaeus Mote:

Let's talk about software upgrades and operating system upgrades for a second. Because of the amount of things that can go wrong when, for example, doing an operating system upgrade, and all the things that have changed over the years with Microsoft's new standards and things of that nature, pandemonium has really, really become the normal every day within IT. And we desperately need tools as engineers and technicians that allow us to get back to a state of normalcy when doing upgrades.

Alphaeus Mote:

So let's expand on pandemonium just for a second. Some of the things that you can expect to see when you walk into a lot of organizations these days are low success rates on the deployment of updates, software upgrades, and operating system deployments and/or upgrades. There's also the high risk of doing that particular action in the first place. There's a reason why updates don't get deployed on Friday because nobody wants to come in on a Monday with a two-day gap and no coverage and learn that the entire environment is down or has some major issue. So we want to get ourselves into a position to be able to deploy on Friday and be able to come in cool, calm, and collected on Monday.

Alphaeus Mote:

So that's exactly what the workflows and extensibility on top of Adaptiva's platform allow you to do. We've made it so that a lot of the stress can be eliminated and that the knowledge and repeatability can be stored in an application that makes it something you can review, refine, and build upon. We help you subtract complexity and maintenance costs in your organization over time rather than always adding them.

Alphaeus Mote:

One example of this came up many years ago when I was working at the U.S. Postal Service. There was the need to adopt Windows 10 into the organization, and they had already deployed it to pretty much their entire enterprise, but here came the time to upgrade Windows 10 throughout the various versions because they were going to be losing support for the version that they had installed on their endpoints. They had a number of network challenges, a number of storage challenges, they had small offices, large offices, when just using SCCM there was a huge need to collect data about a machine's upgrade status, to move the machine through an upgrade process if it was ready to be upgraded, things like this, and the tools that SCCM was offering just by itself were not really cutting it for the process.

Alphaeus Mote:

If you search online and you look through a lot of different blogs and ways, you will see that there is tremendous complexity to be able to do upgrades. Now, Microsoft does offer some methods to make some of these things simpler, but you kind of end up with a double-edged sword because either if they're simple and not robust enough, or they're super robust and highly complex. And so we're trying to look for the best of both worlds, where we can have a little bit more simple, but still get those complex things done so that there's not so much to do after the upgrade is complete.

Alphaeus Mote:

When Adaptiva was bought in, I was able to go into the Workbench Editor and design a workflow that would deliver content to an endpoint, run the Windows Set-up Analyzation Tool, determine what the upgrade status or capability would be for that particular device, record some information through the use of SetupDiag, then I was able to use those particular registry keys to send data back to the Adaptiva database, and then design a Power BI dashboard that would allow me to make decisions about the upgrade status of a device, and then furthermore, be able to then deploy the task sequence to a particular device as long as it was deemed ready to upgrade.

Alphaeus Mote:

Whereas before if I wanted to do that same sort of process between a workflow and just a task sequence, I would've had to design collection items or compliance items, compliance baselines, and then pull that data, evaluate that data on endpoints, pull that data back to the SCCM database, write a query. And they had tons of devices, over 160,000, so writing these database queries, trying to get the results back from the query took a tremendous amount of time and put tremendous load on the database. And so it was really, really difficult.

Alphaeus Mote:

They also had a custom process that they had put in place prior to any of this ever being done, where they had completely wrote their own Windows 10 upgrade procedure and it was really, really hurting the organization. And so being able to have all these capabilities within Adaptiva really, really did save the day and allowed the upgrade to be done more efficiently. And especially having to deliver a 4 gig piece of content, being able to do that peer-to-peer on an office basis was just a tremendous help. And also being able to deliver that content dynamically from within the workflow was even more tremendous because now we didn't have to schedule collections or packages or applications or deployment windows, we were able to just evaluate and determine everything from within the workflow and it executed within a matter of minutes. It was just a tremendous experience.

Alphaeus Mote:

And here's the thing about the custom process they had built. They had an automation team, they had a number of different overseers over the particular project, and they had developed a process that had taken the Windows 10 upgrade process and they had to, as I mentioned before, deliver that same 4 gig file that I had to deliver without the benefit and capability of peer-to-peer transfer. Because that was such a limitation, they had to rely on an additional tool that could deliver this file in an inefficient manner down to each individual endpoint. They would then have to mount that ISO, execute commands, and then the machines that they had had terrible issues, they had WMI issues and things like that, and so they couldn't always mount the ISO and then they had to perform remediations and Adaptiva was able to help there as well.

Alphaeus Mote:

And so there was just a lot of complexity that drove from us. They also had to get analytics when this particular information so they had to construct scheduled tasks that would run, collect information, send that information back up to a spreadsheet or a database, something along these lines, that would then have to be parsed out and then sent into a dashboard and things like that so they could understand how the upgrade process was moving.

Alphaeus Mote:

And so they were able to get some systems done, but everybody was in pain because the process required so much attention and from so many people and it was hard to get coordinated. And so as compared to being able to leverage the workflow within Adaptiva, that really did reduce the amount of people required, it made us more efficient overall. I would never want to be in a position again where I had to answer the call of having to deploy Windows 10 or upgrade Windows 10 across an enterprise and not have Adaptiva at my disposal.

Host:

Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically so that your management, maintenance, and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at Adaptiva.com.

Here's the link to the video mentioned in the episode outlining the top 5 biggest problems with SCCM (and how to address them) at go.adaptiva.com/sccm

Learn more about Adaptiva or contact us at adaptiva.com

Episode Transcript:  

Host:

Welcome back to the Endpoint Management podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Alphaeus Mote about Adaptiva's incredibly powerful tools for workflow building and automation and how it can deliver a massive reduction on effort and cost of enterprise management administration. If you enjoy this, maybe check out our other episodes about optimizing over WAN and LAN, why peer-to-peer architecture outperforms SCCM by a huge margin, and more. As always, links are in the show notes, where you can find everything you need and get in touch with us at adaptiva.com.

Alphaeus Mote:

This is Alphaeus Mote with Adaptiva and today we're going to talk about how the upgrade and deployment process in enterprises has gone completely insane and how Adaptiva workflows can replace that insanity with simple automation-ready workflows that deliver repeatable success. If you've worked in IT for more than five minutes, you'll know and have experienced the fact that IT ecosystems are a mess. And usually, there's some sort of a goal that organizations are trying to achieve and there's a number of different tools and avenues by which that goal could be achieved. But, because of skill gaps and tools and budgets, things like that, you end up in a situation where you get a hodgepodge of solutions, all webbed together and if that process breaks even in one spot, the whole house of cards comes crashing down. And so being able to have a tool set that is tightly integrated and brings all those things into one section greatly, greatly simplifies that house of cards and reduces the catastrophic failure that could take place.

Alphaeus Mote:

The other thing here is that when constructing your own internal solutions, it just adds to the mess. Being able to partner with a company that provides the ability to get to that goal is ultimately where you want to be. With the Adaptiva software suite when developing in-house applications, there are interfaces that allow those in-house applications to interface with the Adaptiva suite of tools. And if you're writing in things such as C, C++, C Sharp,.net, you can access different APIs or libraries that allow you to access various functionality from the Adaptiva's suite within your third party application. There's also the tool Foundry. The tool Foundry allows you to take various workflows and things that you've compiled within the Adaptiva workbench and compile that workflow into an executable and then set execution policies on that executable that allow that executable to be launched from within a script or called from some other method on demand.

Alphaeus Mote:

There's also the PowerShell CommandLet Foundry. The PowerShell CommandLet Foundry allows IT administrators to create their own PowerShell commands on the server or endpoints by simply clicking a workflow and making the new commands instantly available for use. One example of this is that you could construct the workflow within the Adaptiva Workbench and upon doing so you could make that entire workflow be able to be called from a client by publishing it as a command that follows the PowerShell verb / noun nomenclature. So it could be something like "get Adaptiva client." And basically this would allow you to, as stated before execute that entire workflow from within a PowerShell script to some other method and execute the workflow as if it were running local on the machine. The combination of these tools make it easy to do the incredibly powerful authoring that can integrate into all parts of your ecosystem and the beauty is that things get simpler instead of more complicated.

Alphaeus Mote:

That's the simple version. But the real question is what is the underlying value to an organization? Let's face it. Every company has the need to perform processes in a specific order. And one example I can think of is doing software deployment. When you do software deployment, you have to package the application, which means you have to procure content. You have to determine what the software manufacturer released that application as which is going to determine your deployment style, whether or not they use the MSI or an executable or a batch script, or it's a driver or something along these lines, then you have to deliver the content and then you also have to make sure that the script that you write to do all the steps before the application is installed, installing the application, and then also after the application is installed. And then also ensuring that the user is not interrupted to the best of your ability. Every company has to do that. With the use of the Adaptiva workflow editor, it allows you to set up these sorts of processes in a repeatable way with huge benefits.

Alphaeus Mote:

So here are the four biggest benefits of leveraging the Adaptiva tool set. Number one, you can easily design any workflow you want and it will be repeatable. You can also schedule it and deploy it to a targeted subset of devices or just all devices in general. The workflow designer comes with hundreds of prebuilt actions to make your jobs easier, but also has the extensibility to add in your various customizations such as scripts or running particular tools or things that you may have to do to automate additional processes. One such activity would be being able to interact with the SCCM client from within your workflow.

Alphaeus Mote:

Adaptiva comes with a built-in activity that allows you to refresh machine policy, user policy, discovery data Harbor inventory, and these particular activities are nothing new. We can call them from a number of different suites and tool sets, but when it comes down to automation and being able to do it from within a workflow, you don't have to work up any additional tools or scripts or go figure out how to interface with the SCCM client. You can do it natively from day one. Example two is that you can run and activate these workflows from anywhere in your existing environment, no matter what your deployment strategy might be. As stated before we've got PowerShell, we've got the API Foundry, and we expanded on that a little bit, the tool Foundry and anything else that we may want to include in the future. So you might have people in your organization that might be good at PowerShell for example.

Alphaeus Mote:

They may decide to go that particular route, but you might have really hardcore developers that write software, and they may want to leverage the APIs that allow them to interface with Adaptiva or you might just have a level two technician or a desktop technician, and you may just want to be able to hand them a downloadable executable from a link or carry something on a flash drive that allows them to perform advanced actions that have been already designed and structured with the clickable of a button.

Alphaeus Mote:

Example number three with the overall goal of ensuring consistency and reducing human error is making sure that we develop standards and we adhere to those standards, except for in special cases. I can think of an example in my work history, where I was working at an organization and people used different coding standards on the team that I was a member of and it resulted in the particular process that they came up with would work in a very specific environment. But if you had to move it over to a test environment, if you had to move it to a different machine or a machine that might have been configured differently, then because their variables for example were static and they weren't being figured out at run time, this broke the code and caused all types of issues.

Alphaeus Mote:

We want to get away from those types of things. Inside the workflow editor, you'll still have to develop standards and adhere to those standards. But if you go to extra mile and do those things, your workflows will be dynamic and work anywhere you deploy. The impact of developing standards and adhering to those standards is that it puts the organizational knowledge and process into the tool instead of just being held in someone's head, which is safer for everyone and lets everyone build together. And in addition, if somebody has to leave the organization or transfer for some emergency reason, life change or whatever, you don't have to do a huge knowledge transfer. You can kind of keep moving on and wish them the best.

Alphaeus Mote:

The fourth point is because we're taking IT strategy, developing processes and adhering to those standards, we take the entire ecosystem in the entire life cycle and we make it revealable, refinable, and repeatable and thereby reduce human error. We establish a higher percentage of business continuity. And I know that if I were a CIO or a top IT manager, I would love not to have to just eat lunch at my desk in five minutes and get back to some issue or some large call that's going to take all day. I would love to be able to actually go out and take my different team members out for lunches for an actual hour and come back with no stress.

Host:

Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically so that your management maintenance and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at adaptiva.com.

Here's the link to the video mentioned in the episode outlining the top 5 biggest problems with SCCM (and how to address them) at go.adaptiva.com/sccm

Learn more about Adaptiva or contact us at adaptiva.com

Episode Transcript:  

Host:

Welcome back to the Endpoint Management Podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Chad Kunz about how Adaptiva's Zero Footprint Caching gives you quota-less storage for your content by using the surplus storage capacity of the endpoints already on your network. If you enjoy this, maybe check out our other episodes with Chad about how we optimize over both WAN and LAN networks. As always, links are in the show notes or you can find everything you need and get in touch with us at Adaptiva.com.

Chad Kunz:

Hi, this is Chad Kunz with Adaptiva, here today to discuss with you our Zero Footprint Caching and Virtual SAN management. In previous discussions, we've talked about how we are delivering the content to the office. Then once it gets to the office, how we're distributing that content to all the other clients in an office which need the content. But today's discussion is going to be around where we're storing the content, number one, and number two, how we're managing that content to ensure, once it's been delivered, it's going to be available in two weeks, two months, and in two years, if that content is still valid in SCCM. Of course our cache management is completely self-managing. Once you delete it from SCCM, we will automatically delete it from all of our clients, but so long as it's still valid, good content, we want to be sure you have no re-download events in case content is needed again after the initial deployment.

Chad Kunz:

So to start with the Zero Footprint Caching, similar to our discussion on how we harvest unused bandwidth on our WAN delivery. Here we are harvesting the unused disk space on our clients, giving you a quota-less cache. No need to restrict cache size to 10, or 15 gigs, whatever the case may be. We're going to unlock all of that free space. Now, of course, the first concern is we don't want users to go into their hard drives and see that they're unnecessarily full, and then to have your users wasting time needlessly cleaning up disk space to get below a threshold. And to address that concern, what we're actually doing is we store all of our content in our cache in unallocated clusters. We are not marking this space as being in-use to NTFS. Essentially, we are storing this content in free space. It does not reflect against the usage on any volumes.

Chad Kunz:

So by unlocking all of these gigs and gigs and terabytes, even, in even the smallest of locations with today's hard drive resources, this is what allows us to unlock virtually unlimited cache space for all of your systems management traffic, but further, to be sure that we're maintaining that content, what I think perhaps is the coolest part of this feature is how we're managing these caches. If you think about traditional revolving caches, they're managed on a device-by-device basis. And when they get a cache crunch, a cache deletion request, they arbitrarily remove the oldest piece of content. Well, that oldest piece content, especially in a fixed cache setup could be the last Office 365, three and a half gigs of content in that office. So when your neighbor comes back from vacation next week, and they request that content, they're looking at a WAN download event.

Chad Kunz:

So what we have engineered is what I like to refer to as content awareness. Every time a system receives or removes a piece of content, we notify all of our peers and we maintain this information in a small little file database within our client. Now that we know what content is available on each peer. We also know what content's most prevalent in that office, so that when we get a cache crunch, a content deletion request, rather than arbitrarily removing the oldest, possibly last piece of a content, we are going to remove the content that the most number of peers have, ensuring that content has high availability - that it's going to be available when, and if needed in the future. Additionally, another hidden feature, if you will here, for this, our cache management is we have Wake-on-LAN built into our product. If at the time we send out our request for content none of our peers respond because of this file database because of our services discovery protocol, we are going to know other machines that could still be available in that office, but just shut down, where we're going to be able to send locally sourced magic packs, no need to open up network traffic routing for this.

Chad Kunz:

We're going to locally send those magic packs, try and wake up a system on-site that already has that content rather than going to another WAN download event. This technology, the Zero Footprint Caching and the Virtual SAN was probably the most important reason to a very large retail customer of ours, for deciding to forgo the 1E Nomad solution in favor of OneSite, because they found in their environment, they were cycling through content so quickly. They were constantly looking at re-WAN download events, which was impacting their compliance time for being able to get machines patched, softwares rolled out within X number of days, because as the content would cycle in, it would cycle out just as fast, constant WAN downloads, and this technology has proven successful over the years where they have found when we get this content down to a store, down to an office, we are able to maintain it and all future deployments go extremely quickly.

Host:

Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically so that your management, maintenance, and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at Adaptiva.com.

Here's the link to the video mentioned in the episode outlining the top 5 biggest problems with SCCM (and how to address them) at go.adaptiva.com/sccm

Learn more about Adaptiva or contact us at adaptiva.com

Episode Transcript:  

Host:

Welcome back to the Endpoint Management Podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Chad Kunz about how Adaptiva optimizes over LAN to offload bandwidth requirements from your WAN, speed up delivery times, and more. If you find this helpful, you should also check out our other episodes with Chad about WAN optimization, Zero Footprint Caching, and how our Virtual SAN delivers quota-less storage as always links are in the show notes, or you can find everything you need and get in touch with us at Adaptiva.com.

Chad Kunz:

Hi, this is Chad Kunz with Adaptiva. Here today to discuss with you our peer-to-peer LAN optimization and what we refer to as the memory pipeline architecture. So after previously discussing how we are going to deliver the content across the WAN, now this is about how we are going to be distributing that content among all of the peers in a particular office. And this is really another paradigm shift over traditional peer-to-peer networking. Legacy peer-to-peer has scary connotations out there for a number of people who may have worked with it and that's because it did a model of one serving many. And when you had one machine that was being picked on to deliver three gigs software update package to six or more machines. At that point, you are severely impacting the resources on that unlucky device.

Chad Kunz:

So what we have engineered is a memory pipeline architecture that really flows like a peer-to-peer daisy chain. What happens once that first machine starts receiving content over the WAN, it's now going to share that content with one other system. That machine now shares that content with one other system down the line, and on and on. So we have this daisy chain automatically being built. And for resource sensitivity, we are sharing all of these packets directly through memory. That first packet, it lands in memory. Before discarding it, we are sending that to machine number two, lands in memory, directly out of memory to machine number three.

Chad Kunz:

So of course we're going to have disk read or write operations, but we will not have any disk read operations. Additionally, because of the way the memory pipeline and this daisy chain goes, all of these machines are going to be downloading that same content at that same time. They're just going to be downloading different packets at any given different millisecond. So it's extremely efficient. And again, with our checkpoint restart technology, if any machine down in the middle of the daisy chain or even that machine that's downloading over the WAN, if those machines should drop offline, we're immediately going to re-form this daisy chain automatically. Once the new source has been established, we are going to send that checkpoint restart, resume the download based on the last packet received.

Host:

Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically so that your management, maintenance, and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at Adaptiva.com.

Here's the link to the video mentioned in the episode outlining the top 5 biggest problems with SCCM (and how to address them) at go.adaptiva.com/sccm

Learn more about Adaptiva or contact us at adaptiva.com

Episode Transcript:  

Host:

Welcome back to another episode of the Endpoint Management podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Chad Kunz about some of the core technology that lets Adaptiva optimize over WAN, to dramatically improve delivery times and completion rates while eliminating congestion and network throttling. If you find this helpful, you should also check out our other episodes about WAN optimization, zero footprint caching, how our Virtual SAN delivers quota-less storage, and more. As always, links are in the show notes, and you can find everything else you need or get in touch with us at adaptiva.com.

Chad Kunz:

Hi, this is Chad Kunz with Adaptiva, here to talk to you today about Predictive Bandwidth Harvesting and how Adaptiva does WAN optimization. The first thing before getting into our technologies to note is the difference and the real paradigm shift from traditional, legacy WAN delivery systems. The issue is those protocols are reactive in nature, and the way that they work is every time it sends information and it doesn't receive any delay metrics, it's going to double the amount it sends, double the amount it sends after that, so it starts building up its send size window.

Chad Kunz:

At the point the congestion is hit and it receives that via delay metric and realizes that there's now congestion on the line, it now needs to back off, but it does so very inefficiently and it backs off by cutting its send size window in half. But at this point, it's now contributing to WAN congestion as it backs off. Due to this, the nature of these protocols, that's why throttles, rate limiting needs to be put in place, where you're going to only be sending your systems management traffic capped at 10 or 15% during business hours. Which obviously is super inefficient, because if you have bandwidth that's available, why not be able to use it? And that's what the predictive bandwidth harvesting of the adaptive protocol brings us.

Chad Kunz:

We have the ability to monitor the network characteristics in real-time, and we aren't just doing this on a NIC by NIC basis. We have visibility into the entire pipe, and we're monitoring this by listening in on specific protocols that the routers use to exchange information. We're closely scrutinizing our sends and receives. And with this information, we're able to paint a picture of what the router queue lengths look like. We keyed in on router queue lengths because that's the best indicator of when congestion is about to happen. Because if it's still in the queue, it hasn't hit the pipe and contributed to congestion.

Chad Kunz:

So with this router queue length information, where we're monitoring both on the ingress and the egress, of course, we are now painting what two machines are going to do is determine what is the threshold for congestion on this particular link. And as we're monitoring these cues and the threshold for congestion approaches, we're going to back off before we ever contribute to any congestion, allow all that other business traffic to go in front of us. Then as those queues come down and there's 10% available, we'll add about 9% to that pipe. If it gets down to there's 90% available, we're going to be able to utilize about 89% of that remaining bandwidth, which makes this the fastest way to deliver content without impacting any other business traffic.

Chad Kunz:

Additionally, one of the really great things about this protocol is it's the most reliable as well, and super efficient. Our protocol is built on UDP, so it's a lot less resource-intensive than TCP protocols, but this is not an "unreliable delivery protocol." We have sequenced all of our packets. Every packet being sent to a receiver is going to be acknowledged back to the sender. Therefore, any packets that are missed, the sender will be able to go ahead and resend those, to be sure that the content is delivered in full, which of course at that point, we are going to hash validate, and we're going to hash validate on the entire content, and each different file within is also hashed, so very, very secure implementation on a UDP as well.

Chad Kunz:

And with the sequencing, of course, it gives us checkpoint restart. Any time a content delivery has been interrupted, maybe one particular receiver at an office has gone offline, new receiver is going to stand up. It's already received all of the packets that the original receiver has received as well, so at that point, it's going to send the checkpoint restart back to the parent office, to the sender machine on the last packet it received, so we're going to be able to resume that download exactly where it left off.

Chad Kunz:

With this UDP sequencing technology, we have been proven over possibly the most ridiculous test that I've ever encountered, and by sharing this with a number of customers, the most ridiculous test they'd ever heard of. Which specifically, we were given the challenge of proving we could deliver reliably every time over a 19k link with four-second latency and 50% packet loss, at which point we were able to, it took a while, but we had zero failures under those conditions.

Host:

Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically so that your management, maintenance, and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at adaptiva.com.

Here's the link to the video mentioned in the episode outlining the top 5 biggest problems with SCCM (and how to address them) at go.adaptiva.com/sccm

Learn more about Adaptiva or contact us at adaptiva.com

Full Episode Transcript: 

Host:

Welcome back to the Endpoint Management podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Gary Walker about why peer-to-peer with UDP is so much more resilient compared to BITS and TCP. If you enjoy this, maybe check out our other episodes with Gary about why peer-to-peer performs so much better than a server-based architecture, and also how it delivers huge reductions in cost and associated overhead and maintenance. As always links are in the show notes where you can find everything you need and get in touch with us at adaptiva.com.

Gary Walker:

Hi, this is Gary Walker with Adaptiva, and I wanted to talk to you today about some of the resiliency that's built into our product from a networking standpoint. One of the things that we do that's different from a lot of the products that are on the market is the protocol that we use is UDP, which is sessionless versus TCP, which has to maintain a session. I was working with a client that had a lot of remote locations in a country that didn't have great infrastructure and they were over 19.2 links, and they were trying to push WIMs out to these machines, OS WIMs over a product that used TCP-IP, and they had two to three second latency between packets. The TCP sessions kept dropping. So it took them forever to get content to all those remote machines so that they could upgrade the OS on those machines.

Gary Walker:

They put us in and we use UDP, which is sessionless, which what that means is, if it's two seconds between packets, no big deal, we're not going to drop a session because there is no session to drop. We're going to pick up and send to the very next packet. Also because we are using UDP, there's a lot less overhead. And what that means is that every packet we send contains more data. So we're going to get more data through the same pipe than what you would if you were using TCP. And because we have to manage that control portion, our product is intimately aware of what's going on on that network, and our bandwidth management is going to back off. If we send a packet to a remote office, that machine, isn't go going to say that it received that packet if there's congestion on its end.

Gary Walker:

So we're checking that congestion on both ends. So regardless of how many links are in between those two, it's all going to play out in those end routers. So we're not going to saturate a network that's already saturated. Where if you're using a control, a TCP portion, and a packet gets dropped, that protocol is going to immediately say, "Resend that packet." Where we're going to say, "Wait a minute, there's already a lot of traffic on the network. I'm going to wait a little while before I ask for the next packet to be sent again." Not only that, we also have the ability to buffer those, because when you're looking in like an NPLS circuit, you could easily get a packet out of sequence by a millisecond. Well, we can buffer that and wait on those to come in and re-sequence those so that we're going to minimize those re-transmissions.

Gary Walker:

When we're sending that content, we do full checkpoint restart. Let's say, you're on prem, you start getting a deployment, you shut your machine down, you go home, you turn your machine on and you didn't even connect on VPN, you just turned your machine on, it's going to pick up right where it left off. But this time it's going to be getting it from our CDN or from an internet peer over the internet, right where it left off. And then it goes back on prem, switches back, picks up again. The other thing is when we start sending content to a machine, it can become a source for other machines the minute it starts receiving content. So you don't have to download that entire package, register with some internet server saying, "Hey, I have this complete source and I can serve that to other clients." When you have to wait on all that, your cache hit ratio goes way down. The minute we get a block of data that machine can be a host for another machine and provide that content to it.

Gary Walker:

So we're going to have a much better coverage and we're going to get that data out to those clients much quicker. And, again, it's all automated because we're aware of the network, we're aware of your location, we're aware of where the content's coming and where it needs to go, and it's all done automatically for you. You don't have to do anything.

Gary Walker:

We've been tested in some really, really poor networking situations. One of the one that comes to mind is we had a customer that they had a rapid disaster team that when a a natural disaster would occur, they would send out teams to these areas hit by say a tornado or a hurricane. And they would basically put up a tent and set up a satellite link and they would take their laptops from their office with them. They could be getting in the middle of getting a deployment and they go to that remote disaster recovery office, and they still need to be able to be patched because sometimes these offices, even though they're temporary, they could be there for a month or two months, depending on how long that disaster lasts.

Gary Walker:

They bring their machine in, turn it on, and we pick up over a satellite link, where before they were on a LAN link. And that satellite link, that's adding a quarter of a second delay up and a quarter of second delay coming down. We work seamlessly with that, getting that data out to those machines and they were able to perform their job. They didn't even know that they were still getting patches and data that they needed to perform their jobs. Because if you leave at a moment's notice, you may need a piece of software that you didn't think of and you need it pushed to that machine in that remote office to be able to handle that. We were able to deliver that content to those locations without any issue.

Host:

Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically so that your management, maintenance and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at adaptiva.com.

Here's the link to the video mentioned in the episode outlining the top 5 biggest problems with SCCM (and how to address them) at go.adaptiva.com/sccm

Learn more about Adaptiva or contact us at adaptiva.com

Full Episode Transcript: 

Host:

Welcome back to the Endpoint Management Podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Gary Walker about how peer-to-peer architecture creates huge reductions in cost, and associated overhead and maintenance. If you enjoy this, maybe check out our other episodes with Gary about why peer-to-peer performs so much better than a server based architecture. And also, why it's so much more resilient when compared to BITS in TCP. As always, links are in the show notes so you can find everything you need, and get in touch with us at adaptiva.com.

Gary Walker:

Hi, this is Gary Walker with Adaptiva, and I wanted to talk to you today about how we can help reduce your administrative overhead of managing your endpoint environment. Everything has to be managed and you have a finite set of resources to manage those. So, we're going to help you by automating, and we build in technology into our product, so that you don't have to do a lot of the stuff that you would have to do manually in other endpoint management solutions. For instance, one of the things that you have to do in Config Manager is you have to set a cache limit. With us, our caching is quota-less. We make use of the unused clusters on the machine, and it's hidden from the OS.

Gary Walker:

And we hide the folder, so that your end users don't see that, "Hey, this cache folder has 20 gig worth of data free. I'm getting low on hard drive space. I'm going to start deleting stuff." Well with us, it's hidden and we're making use of unused clusters. So what that means is, we're going to make use of the free unused space on that drive, until it gets down to a percentage, which is all configurable, centrally. You don't have to do that remotely. You configure that centrally through policies. And when that machine gets low on free hard drive space, the way we manage cache is at an office level. And why that's so important is, when you're talking about these small remote offices that may only have five machines, and one of those machines is really tight on hard drive space, we manage it at an office level.

Gary Walker:

So, if that machine that's tight on hard drive space has to free something up out of its cache, it's going to look at the content that's within its office. And, whichever has the most prevalence is the one it removes first. So, if I have 10 machines in a remote office, and let's say they each have a hundred gig free of hard drive space, I have one terabyte worth of effective cache space in that remote office. And what that does, is that allows Adaptiva not to have to send that data across the WAN more than once. That way, we can keep as much unique content on the other side of a WAN link as possible. Again, increasing the speed at which you can get content out there, and the speed at which you can remediate those machines.

Gary Walker:

The next piece that we do, is when you're looking at where a machine needs to get content, you have to do boundary management within Config Manager. And if you're talking about internet peer-to-peer, you have to set up groups. You have to manually define these groups of where you want people to be able to share content back and forth. Our internet peer-to-peer uses a built in geolocation service. So, we know the latitude, longitude of the public IP address of the machine coming in. And based on that, we return the sources closest to that machine.

Gary Walker:

What that means is, you don't have to create those groups. You don't have to manage that. It's all done for you. We're returning the most efficient place to get that content. So, the managing of those groups and boundaries can be very time consuming. I was at a large client as a consultant, and we had a full-time person that all they did was maintain boundaries. That, that was their full-time job, because if it was misconfigured, it could cause impact to the network, which could impact the business. And so, we had to constantly every day get a list of all the potential subnets, make sure that they were all matched up to the right distribution point, because every day that seemed like there was either a new subnet added or removed. And we had to make sure those all matched up.

Gary Walker:

With Adaptiva, that all goes out the window. So, we don't have to do that. So we're going to reduce that admin overhead that you have to manage that environment, because it's all automated into the client. The client automatically goes to a parent office to get content. Where in SCCM, if you're missing content on a distribution point, your admins get an alert saying that it couldn't find content. So, you either have to configure it to fall back to a remote distribution point, which means you would have to have the throttling configured so that you're not going to saturate that WAN link when those machines fall back. Or, you're going to have to have your admin put that content out on that distribution point, before the distribution even starts to occur. With Adaptiva, that's all automated.

Gary Walker:

If we can't find content locally, we will go to a parent office and that's all defined in the network topology. So, you can easily change that if you want it to go to a different parent office. And, we limit that to a single data stream coming down to that office so that we are not sending ... If you send out software updates to a remote office, and there were 10 updates in that distribution with the default configuration, you're going to have 10 simultaneous data streams going to that remote office. With Adaptiva, you're going to have one. And, we're going to manage that stream, and we give you the ability to prioritize that. So, when you're looking at that, we give you visibility into all that WAN transfers, through our Live Flow technology. So, I can show you where all your WAN transfers are going, and give you the ability to change the priority of any of those that are in-queue.

Gary Walker:

So, if you got a service call where someone's needs a particular piece of content, and you look the queue and you see there's three things going to that remote office and that one's number three, I can, on the fly, change its priority, move it to the top of the list. And within 30 seconds, it's going to be the one downloading to that office. I can also, if the network team comes to me and says, "This remote office has got network issues, and we think it's SCCM related," even though it's probably not. If you're using Adaptiva, you can easily pause the traffic to that office and say, "Well, now we're out of the equation." Most of the time, they're going to find that it's not you, because Adaptiva does such a great job of managing that bandwidth. And then, you can re-enable it, and it picks up right where it left off, with full checkpoint restart.

Gary Walker:

So, with our workflow engine, you can also automate many of the tasks that you're doing manually today. And with our API Foundry, you can integrate our tool set into existing tools. I just recently worked with a customer that wanted to incorporate us into their internal support portal, and they wanted to be able to execute workflows in Adaptiva. But, they wanted their support personnel to be able to access it through their normal support portal, because they didn't want introduce another tool to them. So we were able to show them with three lines of managed code, the how to call our API call, and be able to make Adaptiva functionality be present in their web portal. And that way, they can reduce the work that those individuals have to do, because they don't have to jump to another tool. So, we can automate just about anything. If you can think it, we can probably build it.

Gary Walker:

So, we talked about eliminating the infrastructure, but associated with that infrastructure is a lot of administrative overhead. We had a customer that had over 1200 distribution points and with Adaptiva, that went down to one. They were able to get rid of 1199 distribution points. That effectively was a full-time equivalent resource that managed those, to make sure that they were patched, to make sure that they had the licensing. To make sure that they had maintenance windows set for them, so that when they did patch them, that they rebooted them at certain period of time. Making sure that they had the proper HVAC and all that in the remote offices. Just getting space in a remote office is sometimes hard. Making sure that the power is on to them all the time, in those remote areas. That all goes away when you replace those with Adaptiva, and you don't have to manage those. So, you don't have to worry about maintaining all those licenses, all that hard drives, and all the stuff that could go wrong with physical infrastructure when you've replaced that with a peer-to-peer technology.

Host:

Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically, so that your management, maintenance, and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at adaptiva.com.

Here's the link to the video mentioned in the episode outlining the top 5 biggest problems with SCCM (and how to address them) at go.adaptiva.com/sccm

Learn more about Adaptiva or contact us at adaptiva.com

Full Episode Transcript: 

Host:

Welcome back to the Endpoint Management Podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Gary Walker about why a peer-to-peer architecture is so much simpler, easier, and more efficient than deploying tons of servers for endpoint management. If you enjoy this, maybe check out our other episodes with Gary about how P2P delivers huge reductions in cost, and associated overhead and maintenance, and also why it's so much more resilient when compared to BITS and TCP. As always links are in the show notes, or you can find everything you need and get in touch with us at adaptiva.com.

Gary Walker:

Hi, I'm Gary Walker. I'm the Director of Strategic Engagements at Adaptiva, and I've been with the company for quite a long time. Prior to that, I was an SCCM architect. And one of the things that I learned during my time architecting solutions is the pains that it takes to architect a solution without the addition of a peer-to-peer solution. I was working on a customer where we walked in the first thing you do is you sit down and you need to get a lay of the land, and you ask them how many sites they have. And I got three different answers from across the room, and it's like, this is going to be fun, because I need to know where those sites are to put this infrastructure out there. I need to know where to put those distribution points.

Gary Walker:

Then I asked them for a network topology diagram and they laughed at me, and I'm thinking, this is going to be even better. Then I needed to know the standing utilization, and they didn't even know where their links were going to. So it was... And I'm sure that you've run into this when you've tried to architect a solution, and then you try to get that and it's not a point in time because it's fluid, right, it changes. So I architect the solution and then two days later, the network team makes network changes and I didn't know about it, and now I have a site that's not working.

Gary Walker:

Well, that's where a peer-to-peer solution comes into play, where we can dynamically manage that bandwidth so that it doesn't matter whether I'm on a T1 link or an S3 link or a 10 gigabit fiber link, because we're going to dynamically manage that bandwidth, we're going to adjust based upon whatever the standing utilization is, and I don't have to deploy any infrastructure. I don't have to have any distribution points for config manager to operate in the smallest to the largest environments.

Gary Walker:

We replace all that with Adaptiva OneSite being able to do peer-to-peer fan outs across not only on-prem machines, but over VPN and our customers have... And we had one customer that went from 1500 people over VPN to 95,000, with everybody working remote the last year and a half. That posed significant challenges to them, where we were able to come to market with a cloud solution that offloaded that traffic for them. So we can handle that content anywhere, whether they're on-prem, VPN, or just on the internet. So we can do that dynamically without any infrastructure.

Gary Walker:

One of the other things that peer-to-peer helps you with is we don't have to manage the boundaries. If you've managed your config manager environment, you know how tough it is to maintain those boundaries and then assign those boundaries to the correct distribution point. Not to mention you have to also configure throttling. You're going to throttle that network to whatever the network team says, and they're always going to tell you to throttle it so that it doesn't impact them. And you're going to cap that bandwidth. So let's say they say you can have 20% of the network bandwidth. Well, that's great, you're getting 20% of the network bandwidth, but what about on Saturday and Sunday? Shouldn't you be able to get more? Or what about after hours when there's... If there's 70% free capacity on that link and you're down here at 20%, that means there's 50% of bandwidth that's just going to waste. Adaptiva's going to make use of that by dynamically adjusting.

Gary Walker:

In your config manager configuration with Adaptiva, you'll set one boundary, one large boundary, and then we handle everything else. We dynamically create offices based upon the IP information from the client, so that you don't have to do anything. We have a very large customer with over 16,000 locations, and I asked him the other day, I said, "What do you do when the network team creates a new subnet?" And he said, "Nothing, because it automatically comes up, Adaptiva automatically identifies it," and they were able to provide us business logic that we put into an automated workflow that would look at the machine name, and, based on that name, it had enough information in there for us to determine the location of that machine. We would automatically look up, see if there's an existing office, and we would add that machine to the existing office. If there wasn't, we automatically create a new one. So they're managing an extremely large environment with 16,000 locations, and they don't have to do anything when the network makes a change.

Gary Walker:

Another important thing is to make sure that your client is healthy, because an unhealthy CM client is not going to get any distributions, not going to get your software patches. So you're going to have to make sure that those clients are healthy. And the more complicated that service is, the harder it is to maintain the health of that client.

Gary Walker:

The Adaptiva OneSite doesn't rely on any subsystems, so what that means is if WMI is corrupt on a machine, we're still running. If the visual C++ redistributables are missing, we're still running. So that means we can still fix those clients with our Endpoint Health product, and we can maintain that health in CM. Matter of fact, we can totally rebuild the CM client, and we do that for a lot of our customers where they have clients that are failing to upgrade in SCCM and with our Endpoint Health solution, we're able to identify the machines that are failing.

Gary Walker:

We've even created health checks where we parse this CCM setup log, look for specific errors, and based upon what error we find, then we go down a different tree in the workflow engine, and then remediate that. We were working with a customer that had about 1800 machines that they couldn't either install or upgrade. They were opening cases with Microsoft, and we were taking that information, putting it into our workflow, and then we were getting these machines that have been dark for months, and sometimes maybe even years, getting them back into their environment so they could be up to date on their patches and getting content.

Gary Walker:

So with our Endpoint Health product, when we run a health check against a machine, we assign it as a policy. And what that means is that even if the machine is offline, when they come back online they're going to get that policy and they're going to execute that. So then you're going to get instant results back from the machines that are online, but then over the course of time, that number is going to increase closer to 100%, as close as you can get to 100%.

Gary Walker:

We gather that information into a database so it's historically available so that you can do trending, so you can see, am I improving over time? How did I look last month compared to this month? Am I making the right decisions in managing my environment? Am I making an impact? We provide you an impact dashboard that shows you how many hours you're saving by running our health checks. How many remediations are you doing? How many recurring remediations am I doing? Maybe that's pointing to a problem area. So we give you this tool to be able to give you all that right in front of you in a single pane of glass.

Gary Walker:

With the new work from home and work remote model that a lot of our customers have adopted over the last 18 months, the need to make sure that every machine that's connecting to their enterprise network is patched and up to date on its compliance has become even more important. And the other thing that we've noticed is because they're not connected as often, or it may be more sporadically connected, that their compliance levels have dropped somewhat, and they want to get those compliance levels back up there.

Gary Walker:

Adaptiva can help do that, because we're going to make sure that all the components that make up your... If you're using WSUS, Windows Server Update Services, we're going to make sure that you have the up to date metadata on the client. Many customers don't even check that. If you don't have an up to date catalog, then you don't know what to check on that machine, so then you don't get complete compliance reports.

Gary Walker:

We worked with a customer just recently where they had 3% unknown and when we got drilling into those using our health checks, we were checking to see if those machines were compliant, and we found a large percentage of them were actually compliant, but their state message that got sent back to config manager somewhere got dropped, didn't make it back to config manager.

Gary Walker:

We ran a health check with remediation that resent the compliance report for those machines, and we immediately jumped their percentage by 1% just by running that health check against the environment. Because they were compliant, they just didn't know it. So we were giving them the tools to make sure that what they're managing is going to be as compliant as possible because with all these remote machines, you can't just send a technician down the hallway and look at their machine, They're out somewhere, and, to us, it doesn't matter where they're at, whether they're on VPN or they're just sitting in a coffee shop on wifi. Our health checks will run, we will be able to remediate them, and get them back to being in compliance.

Host:

Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically so that your management, maintenance, and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at adaptiva.com.