Welcome to the Iron Networks Cloud Infrastructure Blog

As many of you know, back in March we changed our name from nAppliance Networks, to Iron Networks.  The reason for this change was that as we shifted our focus away from traditional network edge security and access products towards building up products focused on cloud-based infrastructures, so the nAppliance moniker no longer fit…it no longer represented what we were trying to accomplish.  Iron Networks as a name and a brand reflects what we are trying to achieve as a company…which is delivering turnkey and affordable building blocks that enterprises will need to build up their private cloud infrastructures, and hosters and cloud providers (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS) will need to build up their public cloud infrastructures…all on the foundation of the Cloud OS (Windows Server and System Center) provided by Microsoft.

This change for us coincides with the changes more broadly occurring in the IT market place with the advent of cloud computing and all of the innovations that are happening with the capabilities that the cloud brings.  There many problems that cloud computing solves for a wide variety of organizations, but along with it comes a new set of challenges.  How do you rapidly and cost effectively build out a private or public cloud infrastructure?  How can you choose a cloud service while mitigating the risk of vendor lock-in?  How can you secure access to your cloud resources and tie it all together in a hybrid environment?  What standards can you choose that are out there that will help you with these challenges?  We are strong advocates of the technologies and standards that Microsoft is building and have built up a range of solutions upon their technology to help companies better build these clouds.

Along with this re-brand and shift in market-focus, we are launching this new blog, the “Iron Networks Cloud Infrastructure Blog” in order to disseminate information and best practices around building up the infrastructure for Public and Private clouds using the Microsoft Cloud OS, running Hyper-V as the hypervisor.  We will be discussing and sharing insights based on our real world know how and experience around deploying these solutions and touching on such topics as; Software Defined Networking, Software Defined Datacenter, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Converged Infrastructure, Security and Access, and other topics relevant to this discussion.

Leading the discussions will be Richard Hicks, our Director of Sales Engineering here at Iron, a Microsoft MVP and longtime technologist and technology evangelist.  Richard will be the principal contributor and editor to this blog and will be coordinating with the rest of the team including Iron Networks engineers and marketing folks (myself included), as well as guest authors, to provide regular and relevant content to this blog site for your consumption.  So if you are building a cloud infrastructure…as an enterprise for your private cloud….as a hoster for your cloud service….or you are trying to make sense of how to tie it all together, we aim to provide you with some good information on how you would best do that using solutions from Microsoft and Iron Networks.

Best Regards,

George Davidson