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.