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Issue 5 | October 2014
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4G … A Jump Into The Ocean
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Chairman Hany Khaled Vice-Chairman Mohamed Ahmed Executive Editor in chief Magdy Attia General Manager Mohamed Hamdy Marketing Executive Hany Ibrahim Editing Staff Magdy Ahmed Mohamed Mousa
16 5th generation Free Space Optics wireless bridges
Sales Team Mohamed Ibrahim Essam Salah Ola Samy Financial Management Esraa Khaled
20 Yes, it’s a mobile business
Distribution Mohamed Salah Special thanks to all the : Eng. Mohamed Abdelaziz Eng. Essam Khalil Eng. Mohamed Amr Abd El Monem Eng. Mohamed Youssef Eng. Nourhan Ibrahim Eng. Maria Wasing Eng. Jonas Jacobi Dr. Lubna Abbas Saleh
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Egypt News SECOND REGIONAL FORUM TO HOLD IN CAIRO ICT 2014
The Second Regional Forum for the Digital Arabic Content entitled “Developmental Impact of Arab Digital Content Industry” will be held on the sideline of Cairo ICT 2014 on November 6 - 7 , in the presence of representatives of Arab governments, international and regional organizations, the private sector, global companies and Civil Society organizations concerned with enriching the digital content in the Arab world.
ICT MINISTER MEETS KEY INTERNATIONAL COMPANIES DURING GITEX 2014
The Minister of CIT Atef Helmy met with officials of Hawaii Companies, Oracle and Sutherland where they discussed increasing investment in technology applications and outsourcing. They also conferred strengthening their presence in Egypt during the coming period as the government is ready to provide a suitable climate for investors, qualifying the country to be an attractive place for investment and a promising ICT market. Additionally, the ICT minister met with officials in Red Hat specialized in open source where they discussed means of mutual cooperation as open source applications aim at delivering knowledge to all citizens at the lowest cost, improving transparency, supporting the sector’s growth and promoting the competitive environment for the benefit of the user.
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Arabic News EGYPT RE-ELECTED MEMBER OF ITU COUNCIL
According to the ITU regulations, Egypt takes part at the elections for the Council membership as part of Region D, allocated for Africa. This year, Egypt compete with 16 African countries over 13 seats allocated for the African continent. The team of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) undertook the necessary mobilization to promote Egypt’s candidacy for ITU Council membership at the international fora and through bilateral meetings prior to and during the Plenipotentiary conference 2014. These efforts helped strengthening the Egyptian stance which led to the re-election of Egypt to the ITU council membership during 2018 -2015 for the 14th time in Egypt’s history and the 11th time consecutively.
“IN THE HEART OF TOMORROW” IS THE SLOGAN FOR CAIRO ICT 2014
Under the auspices of H.E. Egypt’s Minister of CIT Atef Helmy,Cairo ICT is about to kick-start its 18th round, with a totally new direction towards bringing professionals together, seeking to build up the future of humanity through technologies that have become easy to access by most human beings. With a focus on two of the fastest growing regions in the world – the Middle East and Africa – Cairo ICT is blessed to be sitting in the heart of this region, with access never as simple within a goldmine of potential users from governments to institutions and from individuals to businesses; and the region has an unquenchable thirst for progress. “In the Heart of Tomorrow” is the slogan for this round, scheduled for November 4 - 7 , at the Cairo International Convention Centre, hinting at the type of technologies that will be presented by world leaders in telecommunication, Information Technology and Media. High level regional and international presence is reaching its peak in the 2014 round of Cairo ICT, with names and faces that rarely meet in one place at the same time. And they will be there to network with you alongside top officials from all corners of the African continent, who have started to make their annual visit to Cairo ICT an annual exercise.
KSA
Algeria
Saudi Arabia retains it seat in ITU Council
Algeria Telecom Selects Ericsson for Broadband Network Transformation
The Kingdom has retained its seat in the elections of the Member States of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), upon the plenary of ITU Plenipotentiary Conference being held Busan, South Korea. Voting was performed for the election of only 48 countries out of 193 member states in the Union, to be members of ITU Council for the next four years. Kingdom has been re-elected for the membership of the Council for Asia and Australia region, and so the Kingdom could have retain its membership in the Council since 1965AD, where it has been re-nominated in all elections from that date on. It is noteworthy that the Kingdom represented by MCIT and CITC has excreted, within its quest for candidacy to the membership of the ITU Council, many early efforts included introductory meetings and communications with the members of the delegations of other countries to introduce the ICT sector in the Kingdom.
Algeria Telecom has chosen Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) for the transformation of their broadband aggregation network. Under the terms of the agreement, Ericsson will consolidate the existing network functions for a simple and scalable architecture using the Ericsson SSR 8000›s Provider Edge (PE) and BNG applications. With the Ericsson SSR 8000, Algeria Telecom will competitively meet the growing demand for residential broadband connectivity and offer secure, high-speed virtual private network (VPN) services for its enterprise customers. In addition, the new converged, scalable IP infrastructure based on the multi-application SSR 8000 platform enables Algeria Telecom to implement new business models and provide multiple service offerings and addresses new opportunities with a quicker time to market.The agreement includes Broadband Network Gateways (BNG) and Provider Edge (PE) applications based on the Ericsson SSR 8000 family and professional services such as project management, solution architecture, deployment and migration services.
UAE
Lebanon
Dubai Smart Government’s mPay app achieves spectacular 600 per cent increase in adoption over first 9 months of 2014
Lebanon’s telecommunications network faces technical challenges
Dubai Smart Government’s mPay app collected AED 105 million over the first nine months of 2014, which is a spectacular increase of 600 per cent compared to the same period last year and demonstrates the rise of mobile app payments in the region. The mPay app showed 215,975 transactions amounting to AED 105 million in the first nine months of 2014, as compared to 50,985 transactions and AED 15 million for the same period in 2013; resulting in a significant %324 increase in transactions and 600 per cent increase in collections. Commenting on these results, H.E. Ahmad Bin Humaidan, Director General of Dubai Smart Government, said: “Great importance is attached to this app as an effective channel for enabling customers to access government services around the clock on their smartphones. Our products and services revolve around the concept of a connected smart government, by providing customized solutions that meet their needs and aspirations, for easing access to all government transactions from one place and through one smart device.”
The 2014 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Conference has opened its work sessions in the South Korean city of Busan in the presence of 52 ministers coming from across the globe. Representing Lebanon, Telecommunications Minister Boutros Harb delivered a word in which he displayed the serious challenges that the telecommunications industry faces in Lebanon, especially at the technical level. “The organization of the telecommunications sector in Lebanon remains a major challenge. Our country was the first to launch cell phone and internet services in the region, but this leading role has been hindered by the country’s slow-paced administrative routine which fails to follow up with the rapid global development at this level,” Harb said in his word. He did not fail to highlight the fact that communications revenues constituted a major portion of the state budget.
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International News
UK
UK TOPS LIST OF COUNTRIES MOST UNDER THREAT FROM CYBER ATTACK
GOOGLE CHAIRMAN SCHMIDT ADMITS AMAZON IS ‘OUR BIGGEST SEARCH COMPETITOR’
Microsoft and IBM have announced a collaboration that will see the two companies host each other’s technology on their respective cloud platforms. IBM Cloud, hosted on its SoftLayer platform, will host Windows Server and SQL Server systems, while Microsoft’s Azure platform will host IBM middleware WebSphere liberty, MQ and DB2. The firms have explained that the partnership should make it easier for customers to use the services and manage their apps in a hybrid cloud environment. The two companies will also make a Microsoft .NET runtime available for IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform, enabling developers to create applications for Azure and IBM Cloud. Returning the favour, IBM is also ensuring that its Pure Application Service is compatible with Microsoft Azure. “With this agreement more customers will be able to take advantage of the hyper-scale, enterprise performance and hybrid capabilities of Azure,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and enterprise and the firm.
The UK has topped the list of countries most under threat from cyber-attack, followed by Germany in second place and Saudi Arabia in third. Security firm FireEye examined the threat landscape across Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA) to draw this conclusion. The results of the company’s research were published in its Regional Advanced Threat Report for EMEA and claims the document offers unique insights into the latest threats for EMEA enterprise security. While the UK and Germany were identified as the most targeted countries, Spain, Sweden and France were the least attacked and Turkey, Switzerland, Italy and Qatar fell in the middle. According to FireEye, government, financial, telecommunications and energy were the most targeted verticals and represented more than 50 per cent of total APT detections.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt has admitted that Amazon is its biggest threat in the search engine market and that a “Google killer” is a cast iron inevitability as the Internet goes forward. The web giant’s head was giving a speech in Berlin that was aiming to change the image of the company in Europe from one that is thought of as a monopoly to a company that is a trusted member of the European Union community. Some of Schmidt’s most interesting comments came on the subject of its biggest competitor and the fact that Amazon’s strength in the online retail sector is something that is a huge challenge. “Really our biggest search competitor is Amazon. People don’t think of Amazon as search, but if you are looking for something to buy, you are more often than not looking for it on Amazon,” Schmidt said, according to Search Engine Land.
INDIA
ITU
US
INDIA INCLUDED IN FIRST WAVE OF COUNTRIES TO RECEIVE NEXUS 6
ITU PLENIPOTENTIARY CONFERENCE ELECTS HOULIN ZHAO AS NEXT SECRETARY-GENERAL
US RETAILERS SNUB APPLE PAY IN FAVOUR OF OWN QR PAYMENT PLATFORM
ZUCKERBERG JOINS BOARD OF BEIJING BUSINESS SCHOOL AS FACEBOOK EYES CHINESE MARKET
AZERBAIJAN AZERBAIJAN ELECTED MEMBER OF ITU COUNCIL
Azerbaijan has been elected a member of the Council of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Azerbaijan earned 94 votes at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan, South Korea, to win a four-year membership of the ITU Council from the Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Poland, Bulgaria, Russia and Romania also became members of the Council. For the first time in the history of Regional Communications Union two of its members, Azerbaijan and Russia, became members of the ITU Council at the same time.
Now that the Nexus 6 is official, Motorola is sharing more details on when the handset will be available in countries around the globe. In a blog post yesterday, the manufacturer stated that the device would be heading to 28 countries by the end of the year, with India included in the first wave. Although an official launch date has not been confirmed, it is expected that the device will be launched in the country sometime in the month of December. Pricing is not available yet, although a leak from yesterday suggested that the Nexus 6 in India would cost Rs. 44,500 720$(). The Nexus 6 is priced higher than earlier generations of the handset, but it does come with cutting-edge specs that include a -5.96inch QHD display, 3 GB RAM, 2.7 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 CPU, storage configurations of 32 and 64 GB, 13 MP camera with OIS and a 3,200 mAh battery. It is unknown at this stage whether the Indian version includes support for LTE networks in the country.
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Microsoft & IBM MICROSOFT AND IBM’S NEW CLOUD PARTNERSHIP GIVES CUSTOMERS MORE CHOICE
ITU’s 19th Plenipotentiary Conference taking place in Busan, Korea, roundly endorsed Houlin Zhao of China as its next Secretary-General. Zhao will take office on 1 January 2015 for a term of four years, with the possibility of re-election for one additional four-year term. The election took place in Busan, Republic of Korea, during the Plenary session of the PP14- conference. Zhao won the position with 152 votes, from 156 ballot papers deposited. He contested the position unopposed.
A number of US retailers are refusing to support Apple Pay, just days after the service launched. According to reports, several high profile stores including Wal-Mart, Best Buy, CVS and Rite Aid are shunning both Apple Pay and Google Wallet, with a new QR-based mobile payments platform on the way. Unlike Apple Pay, which uses NFC to process wireless payments, CurrentC uses a dedicated app and relies on QR code scanning to complete a consumer’s payment. The app will also house the customer’s receipts and loyalty accounts. The retailers opting against support for Apple Pay are part of the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), the collective behind CurrentC’s development. Dunkin’ Donuts, -7Eleven and Wendy’s have also agreed to support the QR-based platform, but it is not yet clear whether they will also offer support to Apple Pay at the same time. CurrentC is currently in beta testing for a proposed 2015 launch, meaning consumers will have to wait before trying the service. Critics have suggested that opening an app and scanning a QR code is a clunky process, while others claim that the platform is more concerned with reducing retailers’ credit card fees than making life easier for consumers.
The Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management has announced the appointment of three hugely successful business professionals to its advisory board. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be joined at the Chinese university by Virginia Rometty, the IBM chief executive, and Carlos Brito, Anheuser-Busch InBev’s CEO. Mr Zuckerberg, will attend the business school’s annual board meeting in Beijing this Friday, with many speculating that he will continue attempts to infiltrate the Chinese market, where Facebook is currently banned. The board often serves as a meeting place for the country’s policymakers. Facebook has been banned in China since 2009, but reports that Mr Zuckerberg will meet with advertising partners and “China experts” during his stay in the country suggest that his may be about to change. The firm’s Instagram app was also reportedly banned on the Chinese mainland during the recent Hong Kong protests. October 2014
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Companies News
Technologies News CHROMECAST
SanDisk
hp
MOVE OVER CHROMECAST, AMAZON’S FIRE TV STICK WILL STREAM NETFLIX AND MORE
TRANSFER FILES EASILY FROM YOUR SMARTPHONE OR TABLET
HP LIFTS LID ON OPENSTACK CLOUD
TWITTER LAUNCHES NEW IN-APP MUSIC STREAMING SERVICE
Using the SanDisk Ultra Dual USB Drive, you can easily move files from your Android(tm) smartphone or tablet to your computer, freeing up space for music, photos, or HD videos. The drive has a micro-USB connector on one end and a USB 2.0 connector on the other, making file transfers a breeze, and it can store up to 64GB of data. The SanDisk Memory Zone app, available through Google Play(tm), allows you to manage, organize, and back up files. - Allows you to transfer files from an Android smartphone or tablet to your PC or Mac computer - Micro-USB connector on one side and USB 2.0 connector on the other - Data storage capacity of up to 64GB - SanDisk Memory Zone app enables you to organize and back up files - USB drive is automatically detected when used with compatible devices
HP has shaken up the world of OpenStack clouds with the launch of its Helion OpenStack community edition. Helion OpenStack community edition is suitable for proof-ofconcept and pilot deployments based on the Icehouse release. HP’s SVP of cloud products and services Bill Hilf said at launch that the company will follow the OpenStack trunk line release schedule in future versions. More information will be made available at the HP Discovery Conference in June 2015, but for now we know that there will also be “more robust management and security” in the commercial edition. HP has also announced a three-month limited trial version of the Helion Development Platform that will allow users to experience the dev platform without having to create a Helion OpenStack environment.
Twitter has launched a new platform enabling users to listen to music directly through the micro-blogging site. Twitter Audio Card lets you listen to audio posted in your timeline on both iOS and Android devices. Users can also dock the Audio Card to continue listening while browsing the Twitter app. The audio service will be compatible with a number of third-party streaming services, with SoundCloud becoming the first platform to sign-up. The streaming service is not limited to music however, with Twitter also confirming that podcasts and other audio content will be supplied by partners such as NASA and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Samsung
Facbook
Skype
Nemza
SAMSUNG’S SPEEDY NEW WI-FI TECHNOLOGY LETS YOU DOWNLOAD A FILM IN 3 SECONDS
FACEBOOK LAUNCHES SAFETY CHECK TO KEEP FRIENDS UPDATED AFTER NATURAL DISASTERS
SKYPE FOR WINDOWS PHONE 8 NOW LETS YOU DOODLE MESSAGES
Nemza launches the first Touch Registration Systemfor exhibitions in Egypt
Skype has announced a new feature for Windows Phone 8 (and 8.1) which allows users to draw on a blank canvas and whizz the results over to friends. This feature comes with Skype version 2.24 for Microsoft’s mobile platform, and it allows you to draw on a blank canvas, or doodle on top of a photo. Anyhow, this isn’t the only change to Skype for Windows Phone – it now supports HD displays, too, should your handset have one. The app has also been tweaked so it resumes faster when you flick back to it, and users can now automatically sign in using the Microsoft Account linked to their phone, again as a time saving measure. These are useful little tweaks for sure, particularly for those with an HD screen who will be able to see their doodled efforts in their full glory. You can grab the Skype app on the Windows Phone store here.
nemza is proud to be the first in Egypt to launch its Touch Registration System in ICS 5 exhibition and continuing this year with ICS 6 and other exhibitions; the importance of the system has been grown up by the exhibitors increasing awareness of the importance of having a simple, flexible, and cost effective registration system that collects live and filtered visitors data. nemza has different technology & innovative solutions like different sizes from touch screens, transparent screens, transparent boxes, virtual reality glasses, holograms, interactive brochures and kiosks for different uses like photo booths. To know more news about nemza and its services, please visit www.nemza.net
Amazon has launched a new video streaming stick to pry users away from the ever-popular Google Chromecast. Called the Fire TV Stick, it’s the latest in a string of new Amazon products introduced to shake up the current market. So how does it work? The Fire TV Stick can connect to an HDMI port on the back of an HDTV where it can stream a selection of movies, TV shows, music, photos, apps and games straight to your screen. These come from sources including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon’s own Prime Instant Video, Spotify and Vevo. It’s an alternative to the Fire TV streaming set-top box that Amazon launched seven months ago. Amazon’s new offering will have to go head to head with a number of other video-streaming gadgets, including Google Chromecast.
Samsung has announced that the new Wi-Fi technology it has developed, formally known as 802.11ad, will enable transfer speeds of up to 4.6 Gbs (575 MBps). In plain English it means that a 1 GB file will be downloaded in less than two seconds. For 802.11ad, Samsung uses neither the 2.4 GHz nor the 5 GHz band, which are used in most routers and devices today, as the technology (which has also been known as WiGig) relies on the 60 Ghz band. And there is a reason why no device that we have in our households today is leveraging this spectrum, other than it being unlicensed at the time of writing this article. Samsung says that it has also developed “the world’s first micro beam-forming control technology that optimizes the communications module in less than 3,000/1 seconds” and “the world’s first method that allows multiple devices to connect simultaneously to a network”. These will ensure that 802.11ad is ready to be used in routers and IoT devices and deliver a seamless experience for users. 14
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Facebook is launching a new feature enabling its members to check on loved ones during times of crisis called Safety Check. With many people turning to social media in their anxious moments, the service will provide peace of mind by letting your nearest and dearest know you’re okay while also marking your friends as safe. Major global disasters have highlighted the important role that social networks play in keeping people connected. The Japanese tsunami in 2011, which affected 12.5 million people nationwide, proved the catalyst for Facebook to develop a specialised response to this type of situation. Its engineers in Japan initially created the Disaster Message Board to make it easier for user to reconnect following a disaster. It was launched as a test in 2012 and received an overwhelmingly positive response. Users can then let Facebook know that they’re safe, generating a notification and News Feed story with the update. Users can also confirm that they are outside the affected area, if Facebook gets their location wrong.
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What is 4G? 4G is the fourth generation of mobile telecommunications technology succeeding 3G which provides mobile broadband Internet access at unmatched speeds, making it much quicker to surf the web on mobiles, tablets and laptops. For the typical user, download speeds of initial 4G networks could be around 5-7 times those for existing 3G networks.
New Speeds…New Generations Just a decade ago, the world was celebrating the launch of the new mobile technology generation 2.75G with the EDGE technology, this latter was providing a theoretical peak speed of about 0.5 Mbps (Mega Bits per Second) a huge step at then three times faster than the former 2.5G presented by the GPRS technology. Fast forward to 2014, the 4G now provides a theoretical peak speed of 100 Mbps, and compared to the previous 0.5 Mbps, it looks as a giant leap out of a small lake to the open ocean full of applications & services for everyone. It’s worth mentioning that this move was not a sudden one, for during these past years, technology has moved from Cloud Based GIS for SMEs the 2.75G, across the 3G, 3.5G & 3.75G. Each represented a new step forward with higher speeds and more capabilities. Some of the current 3.75G networks provide high speeds very close to 4G. Another important note is that actual speeds in practice are different from the mentioned theoretical peak speeds due to the different generations, a recent study about the speeds at different countries showed that Australia has the fastest speed with an average speed of 24.5 Mbps followed by Italy, Brazil & Hong Kong with speeds of 22.2, 21 & 21 Mbps respectively.
MOVING TO THE CLOUD
4G … A Jump Into The Ocean By: Mohamed Abdelaziz, Business Solutions Manager, ESRI Northeast Africa Mohammed.Aziz@esrinea.com
Mobile phones are now playing significant roles in our daily lives, checking emails, listening to music, accessing social media, finding routes, reading news … etc. couldn’t be easier thanks to our smartphones and the evolution in mobile technology; with each generation of which, we get introduced to more applications & services that change our life style. Currently, we’re living in the 4G era, the fourth generation of mobile technology; many countries have launched it already, and others are on their way. 16
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There is a solid link between cloud evolution and the advances in telecom technologies. The increasing speeds encourage people to move towards the cloud to back-up their valuable data as they that cloud is a safer place away from the risk of losing their data due to devices failure. Beside the ability to access their files anytime anywhere using internet speeds. Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can now make a quick start to their businesses using mobile data lines to manage affordable cloud based tools & software, monitor and plan their business activities anywhere. Even large enterprises will benefit from the mobile internet. Remote branches can connect to the servers at headquarters instead of investing in additional IT infrastructures at these branches.
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4G Applications Entertainment; Speeds provided by 4G enable users to follow HD live shows direct streaming without waiting for videos buffering thus decreasing the need for downloading large videos to watch them later, 4G also allows online gamers to enjoy online games with intensive graphics Medical; 4G networks can empower small medical units located in remote areas to connect with hospitals at larger cities, sharing videos with doctors, transferring X-ray files … etc. Security; sending live feeds directly from surveillance cameras at critical locations to control rooms located hundreds of miles away. This can be applied for premises security and critical infrastructure protection Interesting to know that using 4G networks applies for devices & machines as well, the M2M technology (machine to machine) is continuously expanding now could be even empowered using machine SIM cards connected to 4G networks for maximum speeds and efficiency. That includes our mobiles, computers, TVs, cars, utility meters, and even our refrigerators for some smart refrigerators you can provide information about its’ contents through a small LCD, then you can directly order it to buy the missing items online. It’s expected for 4G networks to give more pushes to M2M which means that more devices will get connected together and larger amount of data will be transferred.
Mobile Operators, New Opportunities & Challenges Worldwide, mobile operators face increasing challenges due to the tough competition. Most markets are approaching saturation levels. Some countries have achieved a mobile penetration exceeding 200% for example, Hong Kong has reached 237.4% in June 2014 (more than two mobile lines per person). In Egypt, we’ve reached a mobile penetration of 114.5% in July 2014 according to the Egyptian ministry of Communication and Information Technology. Saturation means slow growth rates, what makes it worse is the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) where customers can move from an operator to another keeping their mobile number, which means that operators are unable to lock-in their already existing customer. Because of this tough competition, prices are going lower despite the increase in voice & data usage by end users. During the last decade, the global average monthly minutes of use per customer has doubled as the price of minutes has dropped to only one third, causing losses in profits
Geospatial Link There is an obvious link between Mobile and GIS technologies (Geographic Information System, a technology that enables user to visualize, analyze, interpret, and understand data on maps). It is a win-win link where each technology benefits from the capabilities provided by the other one. Mobile operators make use of GIS technology in different ways; one of the common uses is mapping the network coverage, that was the case in 2G & 3G as well then with the advances in GIS technology, some operators used GIS to publish their coverage maps to the public. For the 4G technology, it is not an exception; the default scenario is that the business & technical teams use the maps to visualize the locations of their sites, distribution of traffic, revenues, etc... by doing some analysis provided by GIS tools, they can easily set a priority plan for locations where establishing 4G coverage is required which may then be published to customers so that they can instantly use 4G services. Mobile operators and service providers often use GIS technology to maintain their efficient service levels and attain customer satisfaction, by locating and analyzing customer complaints, managing operations & maintenance activities, visualizing business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) on maps hence providing managers and decision makers with geospatial enabled dashboards that could be integrated with BI systems (Business Intelligence) for showing the organization performance at different regions. On the other hand, GIS technology has benefited from the increasing speeds in mobile internet, today more people are able to visualize rich maps using their mobile devices, commonly using smartphones to check locations and find destinations. For professional use, there is a value for in-field teams working in different sectors such as utilities, energy, security, health…etc. these teams are now able to access office servers and visualize maps online directly from their mobile devices; consequently they can do the required edits and updates without the need to return back to office. Decision makers using high speed mobile internet can access geo-enabled dashboards visualizing the organization performance on maps anytime & anywhere thus making more informed decisions that utilize both mobile and GIS technologies for boosting the business
, WHAT S NEXT Sky is the limit. The huge increase in speeds will never satisfy the ambitious human being, 5G generation researches are in progress. Speeds are expected to exceed 1 Gbps reaching 10 Gbps which means that mobile network will be even faster than the current fiber optics, imagine the new applications that will appear as a result of these potential speeds. If we called 4G a giant jump into the ocean, then maybe the 5G will be a jump into space
Accordingly, mobile operators are seeking new revenue channels other than airtime such as value added services (VAS). The new competition is about the creativity and the ability to think of new ideas for better services. 4G is opening new doors for mobile operators allowing them to provide more services, for example, they can achieve new revenues from the high definition TV, supporting M2M technology. 18
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History of Free Space Optics
Free Space Optics is immune to radio frequency interference & congestion problems
Originally developed by the military and NASA, FSO has been used for more than three decades in various forms to provide fast communication links in remote locations. Scientists were in labs developing prototype FSO systems in Germany in the late 1960s, even before the advent of fiber-optic cable. While fiber-optic communications gained worldwide acceptance in the telecommunications industry, FSO communications is still considered relatively new. FSO technology enables bandwidth transmission capabilities that are similar to fiber optics, using similar optical transmitters and receivers and even enabling WDM-like technologies to operate through free space.
How Free Space Optics / Laser Communications Work
5th generation Free Space Optics wireless bridges By: Eng. Nagy Atta, Sales Director, African Waves Email: nagy@africanwaves.com Imagine an outdoor wireless technology that offers full-duplex Gigabit Ethernet throughput. A technology that can be installed license-free worldwide, and can be installed in less than a day. A technology that offers a fast, high ROI. That technology is Free Space Optics (FSO). This line-of-sight technology approach uses invisible beams of light to provide optical bandwidth connections. It’s capable of sending up to 2.5 Gbps of data, voice, and video communications simultaneously through the air — enabling fiber-optic connectivity without requiring physical fiber-optic cable. It enables optical communications at the speed of light. FSO is a line-of-sight technology that uses invis20
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ible beams of light to provide optical bandwidth connections that can send and receive voice, video, and data information. Today, FSO technology has enabled the development of a new category of outdoor wireless products that can transmit voice, data, and video at bandwidths up to 2.5 Gbps. This optical connectivity doesn’t require expensive fiber-optic cable or securing spectrum licenses for radio frequency (RF) solutions. FSO technology requires light. The use of light is a simple concept similar to optical transmissions using fiber-optic cables; the only difference is the medium. Light travels through air faster than it does through glass, so it is appropriate to classify FSO technology as optical communications at the speed of light.
FSO technology is surprisingly simple. It’s based on connectivity between FSO-based optical wireless units, each consisting of an optical transceiver with a transmitter and a receiver to provide full-duplex (bi-directional) capability. Each optical wireless unit uses an optical source, plus a lens or telescope that transmits light through the atmosphere to another lens receiving the information. At this point, the receiving lens connects to a high-sensitivity receiver via optical fiber. This FSO technology approach
has a number of advantages. It requires no RF spectrum licensing. It is easily upgradeable, and its open interfaces support equipment from a variety of vendors, which helps enterprises and service providers protect their investment in embedded telecommunications infrastructures. It requires no security software upgrades. It is immune to radio frequency interference or saturation. And FSO units can be deployed behind windows, eliminating the need for costly rooftop rights.
Choosing Free Space Optics or Radio Frequency Wireless Optical wireless, based on FSO-technology, is an outdoor wireless product category that provides the speed of fiber, with the flexibility of wireless. It enables optical transmission at speeds of up to 2.5 Gbps and, in the future, is capable of speeds of 10 Gbps. Optical wireless also eliminates the need to buy expensive spectrum (it requires no FCC or municipal license approvals worldwide), which further distinguishes it from fixed wireless technologies. Moreover, FSO technology’s narrow beam transmission is typically two meters versus 20 meters and more for traditional, even newer radio-based technologies such as millimeter-wave radio. Optical wireless products’ similarities with conventional wired optical solutions enable the seamless integration of access networks with optical core networks and helps to realize the vision of an all-optical network.
Free Space Technology in Communication Networks Free-space optics technology (FSO) has several applications in communications networks, where a connectivity gap exists between two or more points. FSO technology delivers costeffective optical wireless connectivity and a faster return on investment (ROI) for EnterprisOctober 2014
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Free Space Optics Technology FAQ Q: What is free-space optics (FSO) technology? A: FSO is a line-of-sight optical technology in which voice, video, and data are sent through the air on beams of light at speeds up to 2.5 Gbps, more than 1000 times the capacity of an E1/T1 fixed line. es and Mobile Carriers. With the ever-increasing demand for greater bandwidth by Enterprise and Mobile Carrier subscribers comes a critical need for FSO-based products for a balance of throughput, distance and availability. During the last few years, customer deployments of FSO-based products have grown. Here are some of the primary network uses: Enterprise, Government, Military Because of the scalability and flexibility of FSO technology, optical wireless products can be deployed in many enterprise applications including building-to-building connectivity, disaster recovery, network redundancy and temporary connectivity for applications such as data, voice and data, video services, medical imaging, CAD and engineering services, and fixed-line carrier bypass. Service Provider FSO technology and optical wireless products can be deployed to provide high-speed backbone, RF/Wi-Fi-WiMax aggregation and Private lines. Mobile Carrier Backhaul FSO technology and optical wireless products can be deployed to provide 3G/4G/LTE backhaul connectivity, backhaul redundancy, remote antenna extension and Greenfield mobile networks. Mobile Carrier Base Station “Hoteling” FSO-based products can be used to expand Mobile Carrier Network footprints through base station “hoteling”. 22
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Q: Is FSO a new technology? A: FSO systems were first developed during the 1960s both domestically and internationally for secure communications by military. Recent advancements in the technology — and the skyrocketing demand for bandwidth where fiber-optic cable is unavailable — have created a need for FSO-based products in commercial communications networks. FSO systems have been deployed for several years commercially in enterprise networks where a single end-user has a local area network linking two or more buildings. FSO-based products have been deployed worldwide. Q: What’s optical wireless? A: Optical wireless, based on the latest in FSO technology, is a new category of products that has been created to solve the need for highspeed, last mile connectivity across corporate campuses and between Mobile Carrier network towers. Q: How does free-space optics technology work? A: FSO-based optical wireless systems act the same as a piece of fiber-optic cable. The systems take information data streams from fiber-optic cable, transport it on invisible beams of light between locations, where it once again connects to fiber and to end-users through an add/drop multiplexer.
Q: What speeds (bandwidths) are available with optical wireless products? A: Up to 2.5 Gbps (total aggregated link capacity of 5 Gbps).
doors or indoors on building rooftops, exterior walls, towers, behind windows or any combination. If there is a line-of-sight and appropriate distance, an optical wireless connection can be made between two points. Q: Does weather affect FSO-based optical wireless products? A: FSO-based products can provide 99.9% availability. This availability is achieved through a multi-beam system, such as some products have 8-beam system. Q: What distance can be supported by FSO? A: FSO-based products can bridge distances as short as across-the-street all the way up to 4 km.
Q: Is free-space optics technology safe? A: Yes. They meet or exceed standards set by U.S. and international regulatory bodies.
Q: What protocols are used in FSO systems?
Q: How long it takes to install FSO link? A: An FSO link can be installed, aligned and operational in less than an hour, with full installation taking no more than half a day. Units can also be placed indoors to transmit through glass and windows. Q: Is the data using FSO link is secured? A: The narrow, highly directional transmission all but eliminates eavesdropping or interception making FSO ideal for high security applications such as financial, military or medical. FSO links can also use encryption to further enhance security.
A: FSO-based products are agile enough to integrate within any service provider network (Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, SONET/ SDS, ATM, TDM and FDDI).
Q: How are FSO-based systems deployed? A: Optical wireless systems can be installed outOctober 2014
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Yes,
Strategy
it’s a mobile business
By: Eng. Hesham AbdElsalam - General Manager - MAIN TELECOM,Egypt Hesham@maintelecom.com
The old definition of a mobile worker was someone who spent the majority of his or her time working from the road. Typically, this was sales or support person, or a high-level manager or executive. That definition has changed. Of course, traditional field force still exist, but their ranks have been expanded greatly by number of knowledge workers and other employees who also routinely use smart devices to perform their jobs when they are away from the office. A growing number of employees are using their smart device even when they are working from the office, more than their desk phone. Indeed, 85 percent of consultants say mobile phones are used in their organizations; 66 percent consider them the most popular endpoint in use, higher than any other telephony device.
BYOD: Bring your Own Device By 2016, 80% of businesses will be supporting a mobile work force using tablets. With mobility trend, BYOD is improving business efficiency, continuous upgrades. BYOD helps providing 24
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access to IT resources, and the ability to prepare to perform tasks anytime, anywhere, and from any smart device. Main Telecom built applications that access company data, through android App., Which covers automation communications, and personnel usages too (e.g. vacations, and task complete confirmation). Combined efficiency and user experience are ready to create more business value, help your business reach new horizons.
While... Moving on the go, Keep efficiency grow MAIN TELECOM offers all enterprises› needs to create agile solutions and services that enable Business Process Automation. Our complete profile of software and hardware will enable productivity; mobility and business intelligence whatever your customer is consumers or enterprises, you need to understand their buying habits and their satisfaction level that›s leads superior services.
• Increased business visibility with both past and real-time intelligence to enable strategic, customer oriented decisions • Sound business decisions with data that is consolidated from multiple business, customer and operational systems • Enhanced customer understanding with better access to real-time business indicators that help you anticipate market trends • Accelerated return on investment (ROI) with fast and easy implementation • Reduced operating expenditures (OPEX) with low installation, training and maintenance costs • Single system, to carry all companies’ activities, compares different teams, and groups, who perform similar tasks. • Robust infrastructure, powered by AlcatelLucent Hardware platforms. BYOD give enterprises a head-start, to enhance productivity, improve both employee, and customer satisfaction, reduce operating costs, and changes the way of doing business, towards pleasant experience
Your Egyptian Customers Youth people are the key factor for your growth, they are available through many channels, reach them easily by multimedia communications, and Social engagement. Staying in touch, sharing their views, or even looking for a job, enables long time spent on social media sites. Researchers, forecasts a huge change, in Egypt market, as the technology adoption, and positive attitudes.
32% Of 18-29 years old 15% of 50+ years old own a Smartphone
18-29 Egyptians Use Internet
Graduates use smartphone
Of Egyptians Use Internet
Have Daily Internet Access
Your Customers = Your Business For industries that provide tangible products, service after sales is an equally important aspect of creating and maintaining a positive corporate reputation. Contemporary organizations face a new set of challenges
Mobility: an Opportunity to Ride IT easily • • • • •
In-site, and off-site mobility Immediate notifications on smart phones SMS, email, and Android App. Alerts Both way assignments, and Confirmations Immediate Performance Indicators
Your Saudi Customers ecommerce will reshape retail business in KSA. Petroleum, and tourism are adding power to market. • Do you know that most 3 buying trends, are travel, electronics, and entertainment, preceding health, and food consumption !!! • Do you know that KSA has world most mobile penetration of 180% ?
Saudis Own Cell phone
Buy Online
Use Mobile Internet
Pay by Credit Cards
35% Yearly Increase in ecommerce 14% Increase in mobile penetration
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Loons By: Essam Khalil, CEO DCS TELECOM & VP Telecom Division Egypt Chamber of Information Technology & Telecommunications CIT
If more people get on the internet, that would mean more advertising income for Google. The mere fact that Google is investing in these types of projects, as they have done before with O3B providing high speed backbones over satellite, is a sign that the rate of internet adoption in “internet deprived” regions is not going fast enough. similar example closer to Newtec is an infrastructure project which Newtec realized together with Alcatel-Lucent and one of the incumbent telecom operators in Brazil. The city of Manaus in Brazil, with 2,3 Million inhabitants in the deep Amazonas, was connected using Newtec equipment to backhaul over 1 Gbit of data to the city. This project happened, just because they couldn’t provide the city fast enough with terrestrial capacity.
On 16 June 2013, Google began a pilot experiment in New Zealand where about 30 balloons were launched to provide internet access in unserved areas. After this initial trial, Google plans on sending up 300 balloons around the world at the fortieth parallel that would provide coverage to New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Argentina. Google hopes to eventually have thousands of balloons flying in the stratosphere at an altitude of 20 km (12 mi). But what does that mean for VSAT, and satellite communications in general? Why is Google doing this? There’s no rocket science needed to figure this one out. 26
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The link with O3B: Google is one of the main investor behind O3B. O3B is launching its first series of satellites later this month. The difference between O3B and Project Loon (as Google calls it), is that this project seems to be an experiment in the first place. And Google is not even hiding that. As with lots of their other experiments, like the Google Car experiment, they want connectivity to their services, from any possible device. They also want to control the eco-system around these devices. When Google launched Android OS, they made sure all of their services (Google Mail, Google Docs, …) were on Android. But there is a clear difference between what O3B is doing and this “Project Loon”. O3B is not an experiment. O3B is built for backhauling large amounts of data over satellite, for professional applications in the first place. This capacity is then further distributed using terrestrial technology towards businesses and consumers.
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Basketball receivers
Each balloon can provide connectivity to a ground area about 40 km in diameter at speeds comparable to 3G. For balloon-to-balloon and balloon-to-ground communications, the balloons use antennas equipped with specialized radio frequency technology. Project Loon currently uses ISM bands (specifically 2.4 and 5.8 GHz bands) that are available for anyone to use. The first person to get Google Balloon Internet access this week was Charles Nimmo, a farmer and entrepreneur in the small town of Leeston. Google Technicians attached to the outside walls bright red receivers the size of basketballs and resembling giant Google map pins. Nimmo got the Internet for about 15 minutes before the balloon transmitting it, sailed on past.
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Traceability Solution By: Eng.Mohamed Youssef Mecky Technical Manager in Scan-ware Integrator Computer Consultant Co. Email: myoussef70@yahoo.com
Traceability solutions are needed for many reasons like: - To avoid Commercial fraud. - To know the history of any product. - To follow up who, when and this product had been produced. - To save time and money and effort for searching and solving problems. Traceability solutions were inter all section of industries like Pharmaceutical, Food industries. Below you will find a good example for tracking system inside pharmaceutical factory. Below article will explain Data management system employs smart cameras to validate pharmaceutical packaging Sponsored Content
Smart Track and Trace To prevent drug counterfeiting, pharmaceutical oversight agencies are establishing stricter regulations for manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. The secure electronic version of the chain-of-custody for pharmaceuticals, often called ePedigree requirements, is soon expected to impact all pharmaceutical plants around the world.
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Beyond compliance to ePedigree regulations, drug manufacturers see improved traceability as a way to minimize production and distribution of unsafe or poor quality products and reduce the potential for recalls. In response to these needs, Acsis has developed a serialized packaging data management (SPDM) system that uses smart cameras to validate the presence, accuracy, and readability of pharmaceutical labels and ensure the integrity of packaged product (see Fig. 1). Comprised of six stages that can be implemented in total or independently of each other, the system allows pharmaceutical bottles to be identified and verified, and provides label printing, verification, bottle and label crossreferencing, and bundle, case, and pallet aggregation.
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all the requirements for inspection and rejection of unreadable bottles fully integrated within the footprint of the existing station. Then, a Cognex In-Sight 5400 ID reader configured with In-Sight Explorer software is used to verify the accuracy and readability of the barcode (see Fig. 2). Missed or faulty printed units are immediately rejected into a secure container.
a bottle or the labeled bottle will be rejected at a later point in the process. The preferred method is to have a labeler that can manage the reject process prior to labeling the bottle to minimize the amount of rework required in the event of a bad label. Then a series of processing stages such as insert/outsert verifications and seals are performed that, despite having no direct bearing on serialization, are critical to product safety and package integrity. After the labels are printed and applied to the bottle, each bottle must be associated with a specific label. This involves associating the bottle/unit identifier to the label identifier. To achieve this, the bottle is presented to an array of two vision systems so the bottle/unit identifier and the label identifier are captured simultaneously and presented to the SPDM solution as a joined entity. Based on the joined data, the SPDM system verifies that the bottle/unit identifier and label data are valid. If there are inconsistencies, the system sends a reject signal and the product is rejected.
Aggregation stages
FIGURE 1. Acsis has developed a serialized packaging data management (SPDM) system that uses smart cameras to validate the presence, accuracy, and readability of pharmaceutical labels.
Identification and verification Using an assigned, randomized identity, a unique two-dimensional (2-D) Data Matrix barcode is first printed directly on the container; this number is used as a container identifier and is typically unique for the batch. The container identifier is sent via an Ethernet network connection to the Acsis SPDM system and stored for future use in later stages of the process. This involves upgrading the integrated bottle unscrambling station from Omega Design Corp. to provide bottle inversion that enables underside printing with a Domino inkjet printer. The printing process is engineered in such a way as to not impact the speed of the line; it is fully integrated into the bottle unscrambling and has been tested at rates of more than 250 bottles per minute. The unscrambler has been engineered to have 32
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FIGURE 2. After bottles are unscrambled, a Cognex InSight 5400 ID reader configured with In-Sight Explorer software is used to verify the accuracy and readability of the barcode. During the labeling process, an inline printer integrated into the labeler prints a GS1-compliant barcode that contains a unique serial number for the item as well as other variable data such as batch and expiration date onto the label. Typically this label is inspected on the web prior to applying it onto the bottle. If the label passes the verification, it is applied to the bottle; if not, either the label will be rejected prior to labeling
After containers are labeled, they must be combined into a bundle or a case. The 2-D barcode applied to the underside allows them to be identified after they have been aggregated into a bundle or case. The SPDM system then prints a label to the bundle or case label applicator to identify the aggregated unit. If bundling is used, the bundle is wrapped and a label applied to the top of it that includes a barcode identifying the bundle. This method, using the identifier on the underside of the bottle, allows the system to provide a very robust method of aggregation since all of the bottles for a case layer or a bundle are read at one time. The alternative approach is to manage the state of all the items as they move into October 2014
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the bundler or case packer. This first in–first out approach can be used successfully if the material handling equipment can guarantee the order of the items throughout the process. The Acsis SPDM solution can manage either process. At the end of the line, during case and pallet building, a Fanuc robot lifts the items and presents them to a Cognex In-Sight 5605 vision system that captures images from up to 24 bottles (see Fig. 3). The vision system takes a single picture of the underside of the items and returns a full list of all units read on the image.
FIGURE 3. After drug packages are bundled, a robot lifts the bundle and presents it to a Cognex In-Sight 5605 vision system that captures images from up to 24 bottles. The SPDM system then reads and verifies each bottle/unit identifier against the system’s database, compares successful reads to the expected bundle size, and aggregates the associated label serial numbers to a unique bundle identifier. A barcode reader scans the individual bar34
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code of each bundle. If all the expected values are identified, the SPDM system will allow the items to pass the bundle. If any of the expected units are not accounted for or if any of the barcodes are missing or illegible, the vision system will return a fail and the robot will place the bundle on the reject conveyor. Once the items have been placed in a case, the solution will create a serialized case label for application to the case. This label can be applied automatically on the line or manually if a manual case packing process is being used. Pallet aggregation is performed in a similar manner. First, the operator scans each case identifier; when the pallet is completed, the solution sends a pallet label print job to a label printer. Again, a barcode reader scans the label and the SPDM system returns an error/reject message if an unrecognized bundle identifier is read or if the identifier is not correctly associated to the packaging order. Similar to the labeling tasks, the case and pallet building tasks have been optimized to ensure that the addition of serialization has a minimal impact on the speed of the line. As an extension to Acsis’s ProductTrak for Life Sciences, the Acsis SPDM system is currently installed at several major pharmaceutical companies, allowing them to incorporate data serialization into new and existing packaging lines while maintaining existing machine speed and quality. October
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How two developers built an app in just one week with out writing a single line of code By: Gottfried Sehringer, vice president at Mendix
Recently, LV=, a UK insurer, built a broker workflow app that combined three processes on three systems into one application with an automated tracking and reporting feature. Given the complexity, you might guess that the project took a large team of highly skilled developers months to complete. But here’s the thing: two developers built the production-ready app in just one week — without writing a single line of code! Enter the power of a low-code development platform. The term has been gaining traction in the market to categorise platforms for rapidly building and deploying custom apps without the need for low-level coding. This is made possible through visual development tools where users can easily define the various elements of an application (database, application and process logic, user interface, security, etc.). Other common features include an App Store with reusable templates, widgets and components to further accelerate productivity, as well as social collaboration, enterprise integration and oneclick deployment. As evidenced by the LV= example, the main benefit of low-code development platforms is that they’re capable of slashing project timelines from months to weeks or even days. This time to market advantage is crucial for organ36
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isations struggling to keep pace with rising business demands, particularly as they look to innovate and differentiate themselves in competitive markets.
Meet the low-code developer: One leg in IT, the other in business While much of the attention right now is focused on the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of low-code development platforms, the next logical question for many IT organisations is ‘who.’ While traditional developers certainly use these platforms, there are a variety of other job roles well suited for becoming low-code developers. According to a recent Forrester Research report, “Low-code platforms enable a broad range of developers, including data and process specialists, businessdomain experts, ‘power users,’ and students who aren’t proficient with hand-coding environments.” So what are the defining traits of these lowcode developers? More often than not, they have one leg in IT and the other in the business. This means they have some technical skills but also possess domain knowledge and are good communicators and collaborators. As such, they prioritise solving business problems over
worrying about every little technical detail. And they’re creative self-starters with a keen interest in tackling new projects, driving innovation and adding value to their organisations.
Example 1: Savan Vyas, LV= Insurance
A great example of a low-code developer Savan Vyas, Scrum Master and Mendix Business Engineer at LV=. Savan studied computer science at university and while he always liked application development—particularly the creative side of
it—coding was something that he didn’t particularly enjoy. When he first came across the low-code development platform used at LV=, he says it was the “perfect” fit for him. “You didn’t have to learn 5-10 languages or worry about missing a comma somewhere. You could just focus on building apps that solve business problems.” And solving business problems is exactly what Savan has done—quickly. In less than two years since joining the company, he’s completed six app delivery projects, including the broker workflow app discussed earlier as well as an app that allows distributors/brokers to use the company’s platform to sell insurance policies. Meanwhile, he says his developer friends at other companies are lucky to have finished one project in that same time. October 2014
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Summarising the value of a low-code platform to him as a developer, Savan says “It enables me to do things that I couldn’t do before. It helps me to interact with people, to understand requirements and to deliver the best possible solution.”
Example 2: Javan Berry, Digital Risk
According to Javan, “We’re so fast that we often make changes faster than our testers can test them.” Beyond pure speed, Javan has found greater job satisfaction from being a low-code developer. “I enjoy my job a lot more,” he says. “I used to work in Visual Studio .NET and I hope I never have to go back.”
Low-code developers exist throughout the organisation, waiting to be activated Another good example of a low-code developer is Javan Berry, Business Engineer at Digital Risk, a provider of risk, compliance and transaction management solutions. Javan received his degree in web design and had been working as a front-end developer for more than a decade when he heard that Digital Risk was building a team for their new low-code development platform. He immediately asked to be a part of it. “I really hate coding and saw that a low-code platform would make it easier to build functionality,” he explains. “I was excited about the idea of doing everything on my own, and not needing a developer to finish my designs. I also saw this as a way for me to show greater value to the company.” One of the main projects Javan has worked on is an information management app for one of the company’s clients that allows their customers to view and update information in real time. The app is so popular that the client constantly has enhancement requests.
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While the demand for custom applications has never been higher, traditional, code-based development approaches simply can’t keep pace. The key and inherent value of a low-code development platform is that it brings IT and the business together, enabling rapid, iterative and collaborative development. Apps can be quickly built, seamlessly deployed and easily changed— with little to no low-level coding. But just as lowcode development platforms open the door for a more inclusive and iterative development approach, so too do they open up opportunities for more and different developers. Fortunately, this new breed of low-code developer exists not just in IT but throughout the organisation, in virtually every department. Most simply don’t know it yet and are waiting to be activated with the right motivation and challenge. Are you one of them? Now is a great time to get started and make a greater impact! Several vendors offer free trial versions, one example being the low-code Mendix Community Edition.
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EMPOWERING your cloud with the Ethernet WAN
However, the rapid growth of the cloud has had a knock-on effect on IT requirements in other areas, in particular the bandwidth and latency of a company premises’ connection to other company locations and the wider Internet. So, along with the growth in cloud, there is a growing need for faster connections. In this feature, we look at how an Ethernet WAN can play a significant role in satisfying that need.
Following the third way
The cloud has been one of the most popular buzzwords in computing for some time now, and it’s one that has plenty of reason to deserve the attention it has been getting. In fact, IDC has predicted that 2014 will see spending on the cloud surge by 25 percent, to reach over $100 billion (£62 billion), although this is still less than five percent of the $2.1 trillion (£1.3 trillion) overall worldwide IT spend predicted for the year.
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The cloud is now often combined with social media, mobile computing and big data into the “third platform of computing”, and the Internet of Things is sometimes included here too. But its role in this quartet/quintet is not so much equal as fundamental, because the cloud is the technology that enables the other developments. The content of social media usually resides on cloud servers, mobile computing is vastly enhanced by ubiquitous access to data and files via the cloud, and big data is often hosted in the cloud as well. The key feature of the cloud is that its virtualization means the physical location of the data and services being accessed is subordinate to the ability to access them. This is true of private as well as public cloud implementations, and perhaps even more so. A public cloud implementation such as storage or software as a service will be expected to be delivered from outside the local area network. But the private equivalents could be coming from servers in the building, over the corporate WAN, or even from some form of redundant balancing between the two. An employee will expect this to be irrelevant, and for the service to be responsive and usable, wherever in the company’s range of premises it is being accessed from. But in reality every service, even a redundantly loadbalanced one, is hosted somewhere, and if that somewhere is accessed via a WAN connection rather than the LAN, its usability is going to rely on the potency of that WAN connection.
Connection costs Traditionally, the WAN connections between corporate premises have used leased lines, frame relay or ATM. Leased line bandwidths range from 1.544Mbits/sec (T1) or 2.048Mbits/ sec (E1) to 44.736Mbits/sec (T3) or 34.368Mbits/ sec (E3), but prices can start at $1,000+ per month, and rise from there. So only the largest corporations have been able to afford the fastest versions, and even these are slow compared to the LANs they connect. With most desktop network interfaces now capable of Gigabit Ethernet speeds, a traditional WAN connection is likely to be orders of magnitude slower – tens, or even hundreds of times – which will be very obvious to end users. A Synchronous Optical Networking or Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SONET/SDH) line is quite a bit faster at 155Mbit/sec, and ATM can reach gigabits per second by aggregating leased lines or SONET/ SDH, but both are in the price range of telecommunications companies and very, very large organizations. Allied with this is the complexity of these kinds of WAN connection compared to a LAN. With the latter, essentially the same protocol and technology is used across the entire network, from end users to backbone, even if the latter is fiber rather than copper. But where the LAN meets the WAN, a router switch will need to convert the Ethernet protocols to the alternative packet structures of frame relay or ATM, and then back again at the other end. The hardware to do this is expensive and requires specialized knowledge to set up. It also introduces latency and bandwidth constraints of its own.
Clouding the issue All of this has made delivery of private cloud services over traditional WAN connections problematic. A June 2014 survey by the Cloud Industry Forum found that 78 percent of orgaOctober 2014
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nizations had formally adopted some form of cloud service. The situation has been further complicated by the gradual shift from private to hybrid cloud, where internal and external services are woven together as seamlessly as possible into a combined whole. Some parts of a hybrid service will be coming from the internal LAN, while others will be arriving from the WAN or Internet connections. But only about
10 percent of businesses are looking at a pure cloud approach, according to the Cloud Industry Forum survey. It’s clear, therefore, that a faster WAN connection at a much more affordable price than the traditional implementations is a necessity to take full advantage of the current cloud-oriented trends in IT provision. This is where the growing interest in Carrier Ethernet comes in. Where
the traditional routes to high-bandwidth WAN connectivity are too pricey, and consumer-grade broadband technologies lack some important quality of service features that are necessary for corporate WANs, Carrier Ethernet has been specifically tailored for this kind of application. While the latest version 2.0 specification of Carrier Ethernet has standardized the service even across different carriers, ever since its inception
there have been some very good reasons why Carrier Ethernet has been the ideal technology for WANs. For a start, it is still essentially Ethernet, so a systems administrator who understands a LAN won’t need much extra training to cope with an Ethernet WAN. But right from the definition of Carrier Ethernet in 2005 by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), it has clearly been specified with the scalability, reliability, quality of service and management attributes in mind that are suitable for a WAN, and Metro Ethernet services and the MEF existed for a few years before that as well. The first iteration of Carrier Ethernet defined ELine services for point-to-point connections and E-LAN services for multipoint-to-multipoint connections, with metropolitan and regional links. E-Line is ideal for connecting two branches, while E-LAN can connect multiple locations, with virtual versions of both allowing them to carry multiple connections across the same infrastructure, for example if the WAN serves a community of businesses sharing multiple premises in an industrial area. However, with Carrier Ethernet 1.0, the infrastructure needs to be supplied by a single provider, which limits its flexibility and reach. Premises outside the infrastructure of the provider won’t be covered by the service, and will need to rely on traditional WAN technologies instead.
Ethernet at the next level Partly for this reason, in 2012 Carrier Ethernet was widened with some new specifications that formed the second generation. An important development here is the new E-Access service type, which allows a single Ethernet provision to run across the infrastructure of multiple vendors while maintaining its quality of service. This vastly expands the potential reach of an Ethernet WAN, making it a much more viable option. The benefits can be considerable, too. Carrier Ethernet is already rolling out modules support42
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ing 100Gbits/sec, with 10Gbits/sec and 40Gbits/ sec already in wide use. Commodity services matching SONET/SDH, and considerably exceeding T3/E3 performance, are now available for pricing not far off what a single T1/E1 used to cost per month. While this might still be beyond the affordability of small businesses, and too expensive for use with small remote offices, medium enterprises and larger ones can now implement Carrier Ethernet at levels way beyond what was possible with legacy technologies. There are MEF specifications such as MEF
13, 20 and 23 that standardize the implementation of services, so providers can dynamically upgrade or downgrade a provision on request, making for a very flexible range of options. Sheer bandwidth isn’t the only benefit, either. Around three quarters of companies are now using Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), according to Nemertes Research. This is because it can encapsulate packets from many different network protocols, allowing them to coexist. Ethernet fits extremely well into this. It can be carried over MPLS, so can sit alongside other types of network traffic that aren’t part of the WAN. However, the similar or even greater bandwidth available from pure Carrier Ethernet, and its reduced cost, are making it an attractive choice even here, with simpler deployment as well. The Multiple Class of Service ability added with Carrier Ethernet 2.0 means it can provide guarantees for latency-sensitive traffic that make it equally as viable as MPLS for many applications, and potentially more so when pricing is considered.
Ethernet power to the cloud The cloud is still currently the concept that is exciting IT managers the most, and has been for a few years now. The cost savings and management simplification the cloud can provide have very real appeal. But the technology that can empower businesses looking to implement the cloud, particularly in private and hybrid form, is very likely to be Carrier Ethernet. According to Vertical Systems Group, Ethernet bandwidth surpassed that of legacy services in 2012, and is set to contribute over 75 percent of bandwidth by 2017. This is why Infonetics has predicted that $150 billion (£93 billion) would be spent on Carrier Ethernet over the next five years. So if you’re looking to expand your use of cloud technologies, an Ethernet WAN could provide the connectivity you need to make the strategy a success. 44
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How to Get the
accurate. This eliminates the hassle they would have in filling out forms themselves. Compared with plain-text call-to-actions with a simple URL, businesses that use Lead Generation Cards can deliver a 42% increase in engagement, Twitter found.
Most Out of Your Promoted
Tweets
Keep it short Tweets are limited to 140 characters, but you don’t have to use them all. Use multiple tweets to get your message across, instead of jam packing everything in a single tweet. Stay under 100 characters per tweet, which Twitter says gets 18% more engagement. For an even more effective campaign, Twitter suggests aiming for three to six Promoted Tweets for a 17% boost in engagement.
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Drive click-throughs with advertiser tools like Website Cards and Lead Generation Cards. Website Cards let you embed website content and art within a tweet, giving followers context and visually drawing them to your tweet. You can also create call-to-action buttons, and the Card acts as a hyperlink to your website. While Lead Generation Cards work similarly, they also prepopulate followers’ information so they can opt-in to things like coupons and free offers. Because followers’ data comes directly from their Twitter accounts, their name, email and other information are more likely to be
Photos and videos can make all the difference. A really big difference — Twitter’s study shows that Promoted Tweets with rich media have 313 percent more engagement and 52 percent more retweets than those without.
The impact is even stronger when you use Vine and tweet multiple pictures. Specifically, tweets with Vine clips have 256% more engagement than those with just a single picture, and tweets with a series of photos are 173% more effective at encouraging engagement than those with just one image. Vines and photo galleries can do everything from showcasing your products and services to humanizing your brand by sharing what goes on behind the scenes, telling your story and sharing your values with followers.
Take advantage of advertiser tools Twitter’s Promoted Tweets is one of the most effective ways to run a Twitter marketing campaign. It’s affordable, easy to use and gives you access to a wide range of targeting and ad-management tools that let you reach the right customers at the right time — all while staying in control of your ad dollars. But with more than 271 million Twitter users worldwide, countless competitors and only 140 characters to convey your message, how exactly does a business make the most out ofPromoted Tweets? To answer that question, Twitter analyzed nearly 200,000 Promoted Tweets to uncover what works and what doesn’t for small businesses. From how long your tweets should be to what type of content ultimately drives the most engagement, here are Twitter’s guidelines and best practices on how to use Promoted Tweets to grow your business.
Use rich media
Be responsive
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Don’t just tweet — interact. Engagement is a two-way street, so if you expect followers to engage with your business, be prepared to engage with them, too. Use Promoted Tweets to hold conversations with users and find out what really matters to them. Twitter recommends replying to tweets at least once a week, asking followers questions and asking for feedback about your business.
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Out with the old and in with the new: How backup changes from physical servers to virtualized environments
By: Bill Andrews, CEO at ExaGrid
Backup is often at the bottom of the list for IT teams – an afterthought even – but having an effective backup and disaster recovery plan in place means considering backup as an important piece of the IT strategy. Over the past two decades, IT departments have hosted dedicated physical servers per application, but as companies move to virtual environments, backup approaches must evolve too. For most IT departments, the rotation for physical servers is: do a full backup of email and databases Monday - Thursday; move to disk only the
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changed unstructured data files (incrementals) on Monday- Thursday; and then on Friday do a full backup of all data in the environment. In some cases, IT departments perform changedblock backups, but the vast majority is a full file incremental during the week with a full backup on Friday. In the physical server world, you back up the data only. In some cases, you may do a complete image-based backup for bare metal restores but the vast majority of backup is data only.
For more than 20 years, IT departments have only had to worry about one thing when backing up their systems: data. As we move into an increasingly VM-dominated data center, there are many factors that need to be considered. The move to a virtual environment and what it means: IT data centers are rapidly moving to a virtualized server world using VMWare, HyperV, and other hypervisors. While virtual servers still use direct attached storage, network attached storage, or storage area network storage, the backup application no longer backs up just the data – now it backs up the entire virtual machine (VM). This includes the guest operating system, the application, all associated system files, and the data. When you’re backing up more than just data and preparing it for a recovery point at a later time in the event of a disaster, the way you think about backup needs to change too. In the past, if a primary server failed for any reason, you would obtain a new server, load the server software or copy an image onto the server, and then restore the most recent data backups to ensure that the most up-to-date data is on the system. In the virtual world, VM backups are typically written to disk. Since the VM is sitting on backup disk, you can simply boot it from the backup system. If the primary systems fail, you can boot a VM off the backup system and users can continue to work directly off the backup system. Once the hypervisor is used to make the primary systems operational, the user activity is transparently moved back to the primary systems through a VM instant recovery, allowing your recovery time to be minutes versus hours. If a third-party auditor is auditing your business continuity, you can boot a VM of the backup system in order to demonstrate that you have a working copy of the entire VM, in-
cluding data. In the past, it was almost impossible to show an auditor that you could recover from a failure. In the VM world, you can simply boot the VM off the backup disk, show the auditor that it is running, and the audit is complete through a “verified” or “sure backup.” Since VMs are sitting in the backup system, you can also boot the VM, apply a patch, and perform tests in a “virtual lab” before rolling it out in the primary virtualized environment to minimize risk.
The critical role VMs play in a DRplagued landscape: Backing up VMs changes how you recover, how you pass internal audits, and how you test outside of the production environment. Changing backing up just the data to backing up the entire VM also changes your backup infrastructure and process. With the need to boot VMs for instant recoveries, boot VMs for auditors, boot VMs to test software changes and updates outside of production, and the need to perform weekly synthetic fulls, disk is required in the virtualized backup world as you cannot boot from tape and you cannot easily read/write with tape. For disaster recovery instead of building servers, loading system/application and then recovering the data all you have to do is simply boot the VM as the VM has everything needed, including data, to make the replacement systems production-ready. In virtualized environments, the changed storage blocks are tracked by the hypervisor via changed block tracking (CBT). The backup application picks up the changed blocks and copies them to the backup storage target. Unlike traditional physical server backup where a full backup is performed every Friday night, in the virtualized world each backup is the changed blocks only. There are backup window benefits October 2014
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using dedicated appliances with data deduplication versus using straight disk. Using a disk appliance with data deduplication requires a high-speed disk cache in order to store full version VMs in order to be able to boot for many scenarios or to be able to easily perform a synthetic full backup. There are two types of disk-based backup appliances. • The first deduplicates the data inline, which means deduplication occurs on the way to disk and therefore only stores deduplicated data. In order to be able to boot a VM, you need to put a straight disk storage cache in front of the appliance in order to have full VMs ready to boot and then have the longer-term deduplicated storage in the appliance.
to only backing up changed blocks but there is also risk to keeping only changed block backups. If you retain too many CBT backups, the time to restore is painful. In addition, if a block is damaged or corrupted anywhere in the chain, reconstituting a full backup will fail. To overcome this, IT must create a full backup, sometimes called a “synthetic full” backup, at least once a week. With the need to boot VMs for instant recoveries, boot VMs for auditors, boot VMs to test software changes and updates outside of production, and the need to perform weekly synthetic fulls, disk is required in the virtualized backup world as you cannot boot from tape and you cannot easily read/write with tape.
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• The second type of appliance has both built in to a single integrated appliance. These appliances have a disk cache or “landing zone” in order to maintain the most recent VMs in their full form ready to be booted or restored and then store all the deduplicated data behind that. Over the years, backup has changed from backing up data to backing up complete virtualized machines with a critical acknowledgement of how DR affects it data center infrastructure. All in all, the move from physical servers to virtualized environments is changing how you prepare, set up, and store backups.
With CBT, most VM backup applications with a weekly synthetic full will see a storage reduction of 2:1 to as much as 6:1. As the retention period grows, so does the disk storage. With retention periods of four to six copies or greater, the amount of disk storage required becomes quite costly very quickly. Therefore, for four to six copies of retention or less, straight disk can be used. With a larger number of copies, disk-based backup appliances with data deduplication are required. Data deduplication appliances can raise the rate of deduplication in a virtualized environment to as much as 20:1. As a result, far less disk is used, and the cost to store a larger number of copies for retention is far less
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IT Systems Resiliency
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What it means and 5 ways SMBs can adopt it By: Derrick Wlodarz, IT Specialist, CEO Park Ridge
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As overused as it may be, the old mantra still holds definitively true: you’re only as strong as your weakest link. This goes for sports teams, business divisions, vehicles, and most anything else in life where multiple links make up the entity at large. It shouldn’t be surprising that IT systems and networks follow the same logic. Yet this very notion is what causes me to cringe when in discussions with new and existing clients. There is a large disconnect when it comes to the average small business owner, as to what technical improvements will actually lead to better stability and resiliency -- all encompassing what they truly care about: uptime. I’m often on the listening end of hearing the joys of all the new hardware customers have decided to invest money in, yet are misguided as to how much of an effect these purchases will have on resiliency (aka uptime). Fleets of new Mac computers or Surface tablets. Shiny new desk phones. Or perhaps expensive new servers with the fancy bleeding edge Xeon processors and gobs of memory. While worthy investments, and definitely mission-critical aspects to many businesses, these purchases do next to nothing when it comes to meeting the resiliency needs of most modern small businesses on their own. Resiliency is the ability for complex systems to stay operational in the face of disaster or outages. In the context of the average small business, this entails the aggregate whole of the core systems that power the IT backbone such as internet connectivity, server connectivity, application hosting, and more. A $1500 Mac is as a crippled as a $250 Chromebook when your office server is down due to failed hard drives. Office 365 is great, except for when your only internet connection is down for half a day and no one can get emails internally. And that fancy $5K server is a massive paper weight if the network equipment it relies on has ethernet ports that fail in the middle of a busy day. Before I get into the ways that we can enhance the resiliency of our IT systems, I want to
shed light on the numerous examples of what this concept looks like in everyday life. Simple analogies make even tough IT concepts easy to understand.
Resiliency in the Real World -- How Does it Look? As an infrastructure geek, resiliency and redundancy are things I am thinking of before comparing any of the finer specs on major IT systems for clients like networking equipment, servers, cloud IaaS, or similar undertakings. But the “average joe” doesn’t always realize the how or what behind what solves these needs -that’s my job to spec, compare, and present as a digestible solution in plain terms. Resilient systems, as I mentioned previously, are far from being relegated merely to modern IT systems. This concept is blatantly prevalent in things we come across every day, even though we may not realize it. Since I live and work in Park Ridge, a very close suburb of Chicago, IL (USA) , examples of the aforementioned are not hard to come by. I happened to attend a Microsoft seminar in Chicago today, and had to take a drive over to the parking garage so I could hop on a CTA train, our local transit system for the city. On my way there, I had to pass numerous intersections with stoplights. These intersection stoplight systems are built for resiliency in the way that each intersection has multiple sets of stoplights for a given direction. Two sets are fairly common; major intersections may even carry three sets per direction. One failing still keeps traffic moving. The gatekeeper at the parking garage was an entry ticket system, so that one can pay upon exit. There were two such machines on separate lanes, and as luck would have it, one was down and out with a cone blocking that lane -- so all cars were passing through a single ticket machine this morning. The larger system as a whole hit a snag, but continued operating in a delayed October 2014
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but functional manner. The CTA train system in Chicago, while having numerous faults with its financials and politics, is fairly intelligently built from an engineering viewpoint. Each train line on the system has at two tracks, one going “inward” towards the city center, and one going “outward” to the phalanges of the city. During normal operation the tracks are used concurrently for two-way passenger flow, but when problems like accidents or outages hit a track, both directions’ trains can pass back and forth on a single track for smaller stretches at a time. Slow, but still resilient in the truest sense.
The CTA system straddles the famous Kennedy expressway that heads into the inner city, which is another system built for resiliency in time of need. When repairs close down lanes, traffic still flows. And heavily congested parts of the expressway feature “express lanes” which are usually used to carry overflow traffic in the direction heavily needed during certain times (generally inward during the morning, and outward from the city center in the afternoon). If disaster strikes or other issues close down too many normal lanes, these “express lanes” can be used to provide additional capacity. Again, resilient by design.
Numerous other complex systems in our daily lives, such as airplanes, follow very similar engineering logic. Due to the inherent dangers of having single points of failure while 30,000 ft in the air, planes almost always now have most core backbone aspects either duplicated, oreven triplicated. Core infrastructure needs on planes like power systems, air systems, hydraulics and other pieces have two to three layers of redundancy for unmatched resiliency in the face of failure during life threatening situations. Not surprisingly, the amount of expensive engineering might that goes into every commercial airplane has led in part to airline travel being one of the safest ways to travel. How does all of this play into modern IT platforms and systems, like company servers and networks and communications services? Resiliency planning, no matter what end form it takes, still provides similar end results. When it comes to the kinds of small and midsize businesses we support, these results are in the form of superior uptime; reduced data loss; lower yearly maintenance fees due to a reduction in emergency labor costs; and above all, less lost productivity. These are the things that almost any small business owner truly cares about when it comes to their IT operational status. If IT systems are only as strong as their weakest links, what do these links actually look like? Here are the ones we are routinely evaluating during upgrade cycles with customers.
Dual WANs: Resiliency for Internet Connectivity
Ever travel on the Chunnel that connects France and England? It happens to be the largest underwater tunnel in the world, and is likewise one of the biggest resiliency engineering achievements of modern time. It’s powered by redundant power sources, and features a triple-tunnel design -- two for normal operation, with a third emergency backup in times of crisis. An otherwise dangerous passage is made extremely safe via rigorous resiliency planning.
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With as many businesses moving to the cloud as is the case today, especially among our client base, the weak link in a full cloud application stack is clearly your ability to have a working internet line during the business day. Some business owners place too much reliance on half-hearted promises from providers of things like Fiber or bonded T1/T3 lines, and believe that the ISP’s promise of uptime alone is worth betting your business revenue on. Coincidence or
not, time and time again I find that these same pipes that promise unmatched uptime are the ones hitting longer downtime spans compared to their less-costly counterparts like business coax. T1 lines that are down for whole mornings, or fiber runs that were mistakenly cut. Whatever the excuse, placing too much trust in a single ISP of any sort is a bad plan for cloudheavy businesses. The alternative? Stop wasting money on premium lines like sole fiber or T3 and instead build your internet backbone in a resilient manner using dual cost effective options such as business coax and metro ethernet lines. In conjunction, a 20-40 person office can easily be run off of two connections which together run in the upper hundreds of dollars range instead of the thousands of dollars range, with better uptime overall and speeds that are near equal to their premium counterparts (barring Fiber at the higher levels, which is out of question for most small businesses anyway). Meraki’s firewalls are one of the best investments a company can make to enhance resiliency with dual WAN pipes, increase security through native filtering, and simplify network management. They are the only network equipment provider to fully allow for cloud management across all their devices. They are, in turn, easy to install and just as simple to support. I’ll recommend them over Cisco ASAs and Sonicwalls any day of the week. We’re routinely putting these dual WAN pipes into play on our firewall boxes of choice, which are units from Meraki’s MX series of devices. A sub 25-person office can invest in a Meraki MX60W for just about $500 before licensing, and they can leverage intelligent internet connection bonding/failover, AutoVPN capabilities between branches, pipe-level malware filtering, and built in 802.11N wireless. Not to mention that Meraki’s support is one of the best in the October 2014
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now offers NIC teaming capability as part of the core Server 2012 and 2012 R2 experience. It’s a mere click-click-click affair and it has worked flawlessly on each install we’ve done. The core tenet of NIC teaming is to provide multiple resilient points of failure in a network communications path to and from servers, and even between switches and firewalls. It’s not feasible to implement multiple switches per network segment for most small businesses, but there is no excuse now NOT to be using NIC teaming in Server 2012 R2.
NIC teaming used to be a messy affair on servers. You needed special drivers, complex configuration, and the right mix of luck. That’s all a thing of the past. Every new server we deploy now is setup for NIC teaming by default, as Server 2012 R2 has it baked into the core OS -- no special crazy drivers required. As shown above, you can opt to connect both NICs on a server to the same switch, but for the less cost-sensitive, going across two switches is ideal as it further increases resiliency in the face of switch failure.
Meraki’s firewalls are one of the best investments a company can make to enhance resiliency with dual WAN pipes, increase security through native filtering, and simplify network management. They are the only network equipment provider to fully allow for cloud management across all their devices. They are, in turn, easy to install and just as simple to support. I’ll recommend them over Cisco ASAs and Sonicwalls any day of the week.
business from our experience. For establishments that require 24/7 operation and cannot have any downtime, such as hospitals, we are even going so far as to implement high availability between multiple firewallswhich adds complexity, but achieves near 100 percent levels of internet and connectivity uptime. You do have to purchase matching sets of the firewall you want to use in HA mode, but Meraki doesn’t ask you to buy dual licenses -- making HA a cost effective option for something that used to be only viable for the enterprise.
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NIC Teaming: Resiliency Between Network Components Most new servers these days come with at least two NIC ports on the back. For higher end boxes, 3-4 NICs isn’t that uncommon. And what do most customers do with all but port number 1? Nothing, to be precise. While implementing resiliency in the form of NIC teaming used to be a touchy and daunting affair, back in the Server 2003/2008 days, Microsoft has brought the technology to the masses. Instead of placing reliance on the NIC makers and their sometimes-pitiful drivers, Microsoft
NIC teaming used to be a messy affair on servers. You needed special drivers, complex configuration, and the right mix of luck. That’s all a thing of the past. Every new server we deploy now is setup for NIC teaming by default, as Server 2012 R2 has it baked into the core OS -- no special crazy drivers required. As shown above, you can opt to connect both NICs on a server to the same switch, but for the less costsensitive, going across two switches is ideal as it further increases resiliency in the face of switch failure. October 2014
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The form of NIC teaming on Server 2012 R2 which we love using the most, Switch Independent mode, allows this feature to be used with any dummy (unmanaged) switch and still function how it was meant to work. When two (or more) NIC links are active and connected from a given server they work in a load-balanced manner, providing additional bandwidth to and from the server. If a link failure happens, either from a bad ethernet cable or switch port (or downed switch, in the case of multiple independent switches), the server can actively route all traffic blindly over the remaining working link or links. I won’t go into the technical nitty gritty, as you can read about it on this great blog post, but the feature is probably one of my favorite aspects of Server 2012 (it’s hard to pick just one). If you have decent managed switches at your disposal, you can create bonded links using multiple ports with commonplace technology known as LAG. The implementation and technology behind LAG varies from switch maker to switch maker, but the core concept is the same as NIC teaming in Server 2012. Creating resiliency through pipelines that can failover in the face of disaster from a single link going down. We don’t implement this often at small businesses, but it’s out there and available on numerous sub $400 switches like models from Cisco Small Business, Netgear’s PROSAFE series, and Zyxel’s switches.
RAID & Windows Storage Spaces: Resiliency for your Data Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) is by far one of the most important aspects of resiliency a company should be using to keep uptime on servers and data sets at a maximum. It’s proven technology, relatively inexpensive, and extremely mature. There are numerous levels of RAID available, all of which serve a different operational purpose, but RAID 1 is by far our favorite flavor of RAID to implement at the SMB 58
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level due to its simplicity and high reliability, especially when paired with SAS or SSD drives. The concept of RAID, or specifically RAID 1, is very simple. Take two or more identical disks, employ a storage controller that can manage duplication of data between them (a RAID card, as it’s called), and you’ve got resiliency-in-a-box for the most part. You can setup numerous storage volumes such as one for Windows, one for file serving, another for long term storage, etc. More and more, we’re tying together high-end SSDs to work together in RAID 1 “pairs” -- one for Windows and HyperV, and another solely for data storage. This tag team has worked well on numerous server rollouts for us. Many IT pros gawk when they see me mention RAID-1, but they forget the holy grail of why I love using RAID-1, as I discussed at length in a previous article. In case of disaster on a RAID-1 volume, I can easily pull a disk out of the array and recover data in next to no time, since the disk is not tied into a complex RAID set that can only be read and written from/to off the original controller card series employed in the server. The security that comes with this failsafe is well worth any of the small shortcomings of RAID-1 like slightly lesser performance. If a disk in a RAID setup fails, we merely go in and replace the failed drive, the array rebuilds, and we are back in business. No expensive downtime. No costly repairs. It’s a tried and true method of keeping critical systems humming, and for some time, this was the only method we would rely on for such resiliency at the hard disk level. Recently, Microsoft has introduced a very interesting, and so far very-stable option to using large RAID arrays for data storage (and SANs, for those businesses that have investigated them) called Storage Spaces. It has been baked into Server 2012 and Server 2012 R2 and our own internal production server has been using it for critical data storage for most of the last year. Storage Spaces is a build-your-own alternative
Who needs an expensive SAN? Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 offer Storage Spaces, a cool new technology that lets you build your own resilient storage backbone out of inexpensive drives. We’ve been using it as an alternative to RAID for our primary client file backup data at our office, and it hasn’t suffered a hiccup in nearly a year. We opted to use Microsoft’s new ReFS instead of NTFS for the filesystem, and this affords for increased reliability and resiliency of the underlying data. Microsoft got this new technology pretty right. to expensive high end RAID arrays and SANs (codeword for nasty expensive storage banks that enterprises buy) which you can piece together with nothing more than servers, loads of standard SAS/SATA/SSD disks (you CAN mix and match), and Windows Server 2012 and up. I won’t dive into the finer tenets of Storage Spaces, as you can read about my thoughts on this excellent new technology and why I think it’s near ready as a prime alternative to RAID for data storage needs. I got a lot of emails from readers after that article asking about whether Windows itself can be installed on a Storage Space, and at least for now, the answer is no. With the improvements being made to SS and the underlying replacement to NTFS, ReFS, I
would not be shocked if this will be possible soon. When that happens, hopefully in the next release of Windows Server, we may be ditching RAID entirely. But do know that there are two great options for introducing enterprise class resiliency to your small business IT systems.
Dual Power Supplies: Resiliency for Server Power This is considered a premium option on servers, but one that we almost always recommend these days for any physical boxes we install. Our favorite go-to servers are Dell PowerEdge boxes, as they are relatively cost friendly and provide such premium features like dual power October 2014
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supplies. Coupled with a 3 or 5 year warranty, we can have replacements in hand for any downed PSUs in a matter of a day at most with no strings attached. Most cheap servers employ the use of a single standard power supply, just like what any standard desktop or laptop has. But if you are running your company’s primary applications or data from a single or few critical servers, is praying for the best and hoping a PSU doesn’t blow out really a contingency plan? I think not.
A good PowerEdge or similar server with dual slide-in power supplies will raise the price tag of the box by a good 10-20 percent, but it’s almost surely money well spent. Not only are the units easier to replace when they go down, which reduces labor costs, but it also prevents downtime because a server can stay operational when a single power supply fails out of the blue. And don’t tell me your business doesn’t care about downtime. It’s likely that you probably just don’t know what an hour of lost productiv-
ity actually costs your business. The Ponemon Institute, a fairly well regarded independent IT research tank, pits the most recent average cost of per-minute downtime at $7900. This is most obviously swayed due to the number of Enterprises factored into the figure, but you get the picture. The calculations to run your own downtime figures are shown here. So is skimping on the extra couple hundred bucks on that new server truly worth it? Run your numbers and then get back to me.
Virtualize your Servers: Resiliency For Production Workloads
Dual PSUs on a server renders the same purpose as dual network cards: in the face of one failing, you don’t have to incur damaging downtime or worse, lick the costs of emergency repair labor. A downed power supply merely alerts you via noise or flashing lights and a software alert, and a spare can be purchased and installed with ease; no downtime required. Running a server without dual PSUs is manageable, but only if you have a hot spare replacement on hand and ready to go, which most businesses trying to save a buck don’t. 60
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The argument for purchasing a new server for every extra need your business may have -whether it be an additional file server, application server, devops environment, print server, etc -- is old hat and antiquated. While there is something to be said for keeping one or two solid servers on-premises to power your workloads, we consult with too many clients that are stuck in a 1990s mentality that a server a day keeps the doctor away. Just the opposite, in fact. Physical servers not only are raw capital outlays that must be purchased and likely amortized, but they have loads of other needs that balloons their operating costs over 3-5 year cycled timespans. Electricity isn’t free. Licensing isn’t free. Security software isn’t free. Backup, maintenance, configuration, and replacement just add to this mess. If you saw the total figures for what each physical server ran your company over the last three years, you’d be quite surprised. Instead of building out on extra boxes, we should be in a mindset of building up by scaling out virtualized workloads on beefier servers. Our favorite hypervisor for getting this done is Hyper-V, the free hypervisor Microsoft bundles into every copy of Windows Server since 2008. We’ve got numerous clients in the field using HyperV on Server 2012 (and 2012 R2) who are running Remote Desktop Services servers, print
servers, application servers, and much more. The other big nicety? Every copy of Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 allows for up to (2) virtual server instances to be loaded and fully licensed. That’s right. You only need to purchase (1) copy of Server 2012/Server 2012 R2 and you have out of the box rights for two more VMs on top of it, for a total of (3) instance of Windows Server at your disposal. That’s a deal if I’ve ever seen one, and we take advantage of it for nearly every customer that gets a new server. We have a client right now that has a separate 2003 Terminal Services box, a 2008 primary AD/ file server and a Windows 8.1 “phone server” that is hosting their PBX software. We will be consolidating all of that onto a single repurposed IBM server running 2012 R2 and HyperV hosting the virtualized aspects. Where’s the resiliency in hosting servers virtually? The benefits are endless. Virtual Machines are hardware-agnostic, which means a Dell PowerEdge can spin up a VM, which can then be passed off to an IBM server, and the chain can continue as and when necessary. The power of NIC teaming can be taken advantage of, along with other benefits of Hyper-V software defined networking. For those with large, mission critical workloads that are 24/7 and need very high availability, you can employ out of the box features that HyperV offers like clustering where numerous virtual machines can provide a load balanced VM set for a given purpose. VMs can be live-migrated between servers which means you don’t even have to take the server down for migration, meaning end users are not impacted in any way. While Microsoft has yet to publicly release the technology, I have heard slivers of rumors from IT pros with connections at Microsoft that Azure is preparing to accept live-migration workloads from on-premise servers, which means you can ideally transition your workloads into and off of Azure on the fly. This will be very neat once released and I’m anxiously awaiting the announcement once this is ready. October 2014
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• Do we have any pieces of core infrastructure that can be re-purposed to provide better resiliency, like managed switches not using LAG yet, or servers that don’t have NIC Teaming turned on yet? • What is the cost-benefit analysis of any upgrade to achieve resiliency, such as the amount of savings from having a server that doesn’t need emergency service for a downed power supply or broken hard drive to get the business back up? • Do any proposed aspects of resiliency introduce fringe benefits, like Hyper-V’s ability to have VMs moved between hosts for future needs?
The ultimate aspect of resiliency through Hyper-V is the functionality known as Hyper-V Replica which serves the same purpose as its name implies: replicate virtual machines between physical hosts across your office network, or even across branches. Unparalleled uptime matched with universal portability of virtual machines means your server is never tied to a physical box like we used to think with the notion of the “back closet server.”
Without answers to the above, toiling over the joys of all the fancy equipment out there is fruitless for a long term approach. Piecing together one-off solutions that don’t fit the agreed-upon needs of the organization may increase short term resiliency, but increase long term costs
due to potential early replacement necessary and associated downtime, to name a few ills we’ve seen from lackluster planning. Better yet, instead of having to redouble on efforts to incorporate systems with resiliency, spend the extra money to get equipment that offers the option to enable resiliency down the road. Don’t need that Meraki firewall yet because you don’t have dual internet connections at the office? So what -- buy the better firewall and enabling the option will take a mere couple hours to configure and test, with zero downtime to normal operation. Making sensible decisions up front during upgrade cycles, especially when planning out server and networking purchases, can go a long way in saving time, energy, and expense down the road, either from replacement needed or from outage costs both in productivity and emergency labor. If I got a dime for every time I had to tell a customer, while explaining emergency labor costs, “I told you so,” I just very well may be rich by now. Or close to it.
In the End, Resiliency is Both Tech- odology for the level of resiliency a small business is planning to achieve through technology. nology And Methodology Just like money alone won’t solve all ills, nor will whiz-bang technology. A dual-WAN capable Meraki firewall is only as powerful as the planning put into how two internet lines will work in unison and the subsequent configuration implemented. And the same goes for anything else, like a fancy dual PSU server or switches capable of LAG between one another, keeping in mind the upstream/downstream devices at each part of this logical “chain”. Resiliency through redundantly designed systems can only be achieved when coupled with proper planning, and more succinctly, a meth62
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Some questions a business owner should be asking prior to purchasing ANY kind of solution should be: • What does an hour of downtime cost our business?
• How many “weak links” are we willing to accept in our network and server design? • What is our cost threshold for implementing resilient systems capable of keeping us operational?
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ACT Tel: +202 33010801/2/3/4 Fax: +20(2) 33440230 marketing@act-eg.com; www.act-eg.com
Africano Integrated Solutions Tel: +202 33452570 Info@africano-trade.com www.africano-trade.com
African Waves Tel: +202 24140321/ 31 Fax: +202 24140308 info@africanwaves.com www.africanwaves.com Advanced Communication Systems (db) Tel : +202 24663879 Fax: +202 26744962 support@db.com.eg www.db.com.eg
Alkan CIT Tel.: +202 25169722 Fax: +202 2516 9560 Info@alkancit.com www.alkancit.com
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Al Kharafi National
Tel: +202 (3) 3367688 Fax: +202 (3) 7609264 egypt@kharafinational.com www.kharafinational.com Alpha Misr Information Systems Tel.: +202 22607344 Fax: +202 22607286 alphags@alphags.com www.alphags.com
Back & Front ITS Tel.: +202 24179937 Fax: +202 24179970 info@backandfront.ws www.bachandfront.ws
BDO Esnad - Business Process Outsourcing Tel.: +202 24134577 Fax: +202 24199077
info@bdoesnad.com www.bdoesnad.com
BinaryWaves Tel.: +202 24177483 Fax: +202 24177192 info@binarywaves.com www.binarywaves.com
C&CC Tel.: +202 22907052 Fax: +202 26907950 www.ccc-eg.com
Cisco Systems Tel.: +202 24885300 Fax: +202 24885400 www.cisco.com
Comsys software Tel.: +202 26908362/3/4/5/6/7/8 Fax: +202 26908361 info@comsyssoftware.com www.comsyssoftware.com
COREations Tel.: (+2) 011 555 88 798 info@COREations.com www.COREations.com
DCS Telecom
Tel.: +202 24006900/99 Fax: +202 24021334 sales@dcs-eg.com www.dcs-eg.com October 2014 Communication D e c . 2 0 1 3 Communication
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Digital Satellites Tel.: +202 33881717 Fax: +202 33881717 Info@digital-satellites.com www.digital-satellites.com Delta Engineering Systems
Tel.: +202 26029505 Fax: +202 26037206 info@ deltasystems- egypt.com
www.deltasystems-egypt.com
Delta Software Tel.: +202 26211222 Fax: +202 26246163 delta@delta-sw.com www.delta-sw.com
ECM
Tel.: +202 26709412 Fax: +202 22768999 info@emak-co.com www.emak-co.com Earth Link For Abroad Networks
Tel.: +202 22736350 Fax: +202 22721436 info@elan-eg.com www.elan-eg.com
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ELTEK
Tel : +202 24052325 Fax: + 2025 246674 www.ELTEK.com
Equinox
Tel : +202 26180415 Fax: +202 26180416 info@equinoxme.com www.EquinoxME.com Egyptian Micro Solutions (EMS)
Tel.: +202 24014583 Fax: +202 2261 4131 ems@emsegypt.net www.emsegypt.net
Egylec Tel.: +202 2574-6681 Fax: +202 2576-0286 egylec@link.net www.egylec.com
Egysacom Tel/Fax: +202 26211591 +202 26208459 info@egysacom.com.eg www. egysacom.com
Eventum IT Solutions Tel.: +203 4270048 Fax: +203 4270049 www.eventumsolutions.com
ECCO Outsourcing
EgyptSat Telecom
Tel.: +202 24886000 Fax: +202 23421659 www.eccooutsourcing.com
Tel.: +202 22612787 Fax: +202 24053949 support@egyptsat.com www.egyptsat.com
EGYMATEC Tel.: +202 37622021 Fax: +202 37621852 info@egymatec.com www.socomec.com
EGYWEB Tel.: +202 26436373 Fax: +202 22414403 info@egyweb.com www.egyweb.com
Etisal Tel.: +202 24887000 Fax: +202 24887001 www.etisal-int.com
Gateworx Tel.: +203 5770100 Fax: +203 5777768 info@gateworx.net www.gateworx.net
Hi Connect
Tel.: +202 26719412 Fax: +202 26719417 info@hiconnecteg.com www.hiconnecteg.com
HitekNOFAL Tel.: + 202-275 49 607/08/09/10 Fax:+202-275 49 612 marketing@hiteknofal.com www.hiteknofal.com
InfoFort
Tel.: +202-33046806 Fax: +202-33046789 secure@infofort.com www.infofort.com
IT Synergy Tel.: +202 35371020 Fax: +202 35371030 info@itsyn.com www.itsyn.com
IT Land Tel.: +202 26907004 Fax: +202 26907005 info@it-lands.com www.it-lands.com
IP Protocol I.N.C Tel.: +202 26215700/800 Fax: +202 26214083 wtawakol@ipprotocolinc.com www.ipprotocolinc.com
Inotek systems
Tel : +202 35719252 +202 35725910 Info@inoteksystems.com www.inoteksystems.com
Intelligent Micro Solutions IMS
Tel: +202 22034324 +202 22050239 Fax: +202 22068577 www.emi.ms
Logica Egypt
Tel.: +202 37610958 Fax: +202 37610958 info@logicaboards.com www.logicaboards.com
JELECOM Tel.: +202 25753095 Fax: +202 25753049 jelecom@hotmail.com www.jelecom.org J R M for Communications Tel.: +202 22721780 Fax: +202 22725465 jrm-nec@link.net www.jrmforcommunications.com
Kemet Corporation
Tel.: +202 22917529 Fax: +202 22908917 www.kemet.com.eg
Mideast Communications Systems (MCS) Tel: +202 2290 9326 Fax: +202 24153565 info@mcsholding.com www.mcsholding.com
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Microsoft Tel.: +202 23539333 Fax: +202 35390303 www.microsoft.com/egypt
Madenty.net Tel.: +202 2626705 Fax: +202 26267067 Info@madenty.net www.madenty.net
Misr Trade & Investment (MTI) Tel.: +202 22055555, Fax: +202 22050677, ecee@tedata.net.eg www.mti-eg.com
Misr International Systems (MIS) Tel.: +202 33036653 Fax: +202 33034228 www.mis-egypt.com
Metco For Engineering Works S.A.E Tel.: +202 22662236 Fax: +202 22663870 a.moussa@metcoegypt.com www.metcoegypt.com
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MAIN TELECOM
Tel.: +202 35848308 +20238361100 Fax: +202 35836226 sales@maintelecom.com www.maintelecom.com Mobiserve
Tel.: +202 26131350/51 Fax: +202 26131355 Info@mobiserveholding.com www.mobiserve.com.eg
Mokalmat Tel: +202 27007451 Fax: +202 27007421 info@mokalmat.com www.mokalmat.com
Mobillink Tel.: +202 21477259 Fax: +202 21477249 wael@mobillink.com.eg www.mobillink.com.eg
NetApp
Tel.: +20 123120429 Fax: +202 26481111 netapp@aptec.com.eg www.netapp.com
Netway Tel.: +202 24176930 Fax: +202 2909413 www.netway-corp.com
Networks Technology and Information (NTI)
Tel.: +202 24043661 Fax: +202 22639518 info@ntiegypt.com www.ntiegypt.com
(Nile IT)
Tel.: +202 23995400 Fax: +202 24172311 info@nile-IT.com www.nile-it.com
Orchida Soft Tel.: +202 26214136 Fax: +202 26214136 info@orchida-soft.com www.orchida-soft.com
(OMS) - Online Modern Solutions Tel.: +202 26714091 Fax: +202 26706016 info@omsme.com www.omsme.com PACC Electronic Engineering & Unitel Tel.: +202 24024244 Fax: +202 24022583 mail@pacceng.com www.pacceng.com
Smart Business Solutions Tel.: +202 22639377 Fax: +202 22619115 info@sbsegypt.com www.sbsegypt.com
SICC Tel : +202 24191616 +202 22911027 Fax : +202 22908819 info@sicc-autoid.com www.sicc-autoid.com Softex Software Tel.: +202 24529717 Fax: +202 24529717 info@softexsw.com www.softexsw.com
SMS MISR
Tel: +2 01111166714 +2 01111166715 info@smsmisr.com www.smsmisr.com
Siptech Communication Tel.: +202 26160303 Fax: +202 23130570 info@siptechcom.com www.siptechcom.com
Smart Technology Company (Smartec) Tel.: +202 33027731 Fax: +202 33459889 sales@smartec.com.eg www.smartec.com.eg
Over The Air Technologies (OTA) Tel.: +20-122302606 Fax: +202-33478530 www.ies-me.com
Ofis Soft
Tel.: +202 33057853/4/5/6/7/8 Fax: +202 33057853/4/5/6/7/8 ofis@ofis-soft.com www.ofis-soft.com
Pavli Soft Co., Ltd. Tel.: +202 22759024 Fax: +202 22700972 info@pavlisoft.com www.pavlisoft.com Reichle & De-Massari R&M Tel: +20 2 22675760 Fax: +20 2 22662031 egy@rdm.com www.rdm.com
Simple Touch
Tel: + 202 25284608 info@simpletouch-sw.net www.simpletouch-sw.net
Softline International Tel.: +202 25172344 / 55 Fax: +202 25172366 info.egypt@softlinegroup.com
www.softlinegroup.com Schneider Electric Egypt & North East Africa Tel.: +202 26189189 Fax: +202 26189263 customer.care@eg.schneiderelectric.com www.schneider-electric.com.eg
Systel Telecom Tel.: +202 27355200 Fax: +202 27359109 systel@systel.com.eg www.systel.com.eg
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Systems Engineering of Egypt (SEE) Tel.: +202 22921100 Fax: +202 22901673 info@seegypt.com www.seegypt.com
Spear Tel.: +202 22879168 info@spearsw.com www.spearsw.com
Technowireless Tel.: +202 26217812 Fax: +202 26218767 maged.elkabbani@ technowireless.net www.technowireless.net
Telecom Arabia Tel.: +2 0101090066 info@telecom-arabia.com www.telecom-arabia.com
Telecom Cluster
Tel.: +202 24734190 Fax: +202 24733858 info@telecomcluster.com www.telecomcluster.com
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Telecom Egypt Tel.: +202 31315401 Fax: +202 31315051 telecomegypt@telecomegypt.com.eg
www.telecomegypt.com.eg
Telecom Misr Company
Tel.: +202 2792518112/3 Fax: +202 27949461 telecom@telecommisr.com
www.telecommisr.com Teleperformance
Tel.: +202 25948800 Fax: +202 25958808 www.teleperformance.com
Universe
Tel.: +202 22875675 Fax: +202 2671-5486
Conversion Factors Storage (Kilo = 1024 bits)
OIL VOLUME CORRECTION FACTORS
hmoamen@universe-eg.com
Bit
8388608
www.universe-eg.com
1 bbl (60 F) = (0.1589873 x CF) m3 (15 C)
Byte
1048576
API Gravity
Correction Factor (CF)
Kilobit
8192
0-6
0.9997
Kilobyte
1024
7-35
0.9996
Megabit
8
36-51
0.9995
Megabyte
1
52-64
0.9994
Gigabit
0.0078125
65-78
0.9993
Gigabyte
0.0009765625
79-91
0.9992
Terabit
7.62939453125E-6
92-99
0.9991
Terabyte
9.5367431640625E-7
Petabit
7.4505805969238E-9
Petabyte
9.3132257461548E-10
Exabit
7.2759576141834E-12
Exabyte
9.0949470177293E-13
MASS
Zettabit
7.105427357601E-15
1 pound (avoirdupois)
= 0.45359237 kg
Zettabyte
8.8817841970013E-16
1 ounce (avoirdupois)
= 28.349523 g
Yottabit
6.9388939039072E-18
1 grain
= 64.79891 mg
Yottabyte
8.673617379884E-19
1 tonne (t)
= 1.000 kg
1 long ton
= 1.016.0469 kg
1 short ton
= 907.18474 kg
Victory Link
Tel.: +202 37624480 Fax: +202 37624490 vlinfo@victorylink.com www.victorylink.com Virgi Tech Corporation
Tel.: +202 26359609 Fax: +202 26327683 www.virgitech.com
LENGTH TATAS Tel.: +202 23938151 Fax: +202 23930722 tatas@tataspro.com www.tataspro.com
United Distribution
Tel.: +202 2402990 Fax: +202 6371599 info@ud-eg.com www.ud-eg.com
Wireless Stars Tel.: +2 0106585333 Fax: +202 26181469 www.wstars.com
1 inch 1 foot 1 yard 1 mile 1 British nautical mile 1 international nautical mile
Xerox Egypt Tel.: +202 24612612 Fax: +202 24612712 xerox.egypt@xerox.com www.xerox.com
= 25.4 millimetres = 12 inches = 0.3048 metre = 3 feet = 0.9144 metre = 1,760 yard = 1.609344 kilometres = 1.8532 kilometres = 1.852 kilometres
AREA 1 square inch 1 square foot 1 square yard 1 acre 1 hectare (ha) 1 square mile
= 6.4516 cm2 = 929.0304 cm2 = 0.83612736 cm2 = 4.046.8654 m2 = 0.40468564 hectare = 2.4710538 acres = 2.5899881 km2
o
o
SPEED 1 mile per hour
= 1.609344 km/hr
1 foot per second
= 0.3048 m/s
POWER 1 Btu60/61 per hour
= 0.2929486 W
1 foot-pound per hour
= 0.3766161 mW
1 horsepower (boiler) 1 horsepower (electric) 1 horsepower (hydraulic) 1 horsepower (brake)
= 9.0950 kW = 746 W = 746.043 W = 745.69999 W
TEMPERATURE o
Degrees Fahrenheit ( F) Degrees Centigrade/ o Celsius ( C) o Degrees Kelvin ( K)
o
= ( C x 9/5) + 32 o
= ( F - 32) x 5/9 o
= C + 273.15
o
= F + 459.67
o
= K x 9/5
Degrees Rankine ( R) Degrees Rankine ( R)
o o
October O 2 0c1t o4b e r
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IMS design and audit data centres, computer rooms and IT infrastructures. We also offer training services to help individuals involved in these projects to understand the key issues effecting good design and management of data centres. DESIGN
IMS works directly with IT directors and prime contractors to analyse the IT equipment requirement and then translate that into a physical specification for space, location, power, cooling and interconnectivity requirements. We provide a full design package that allows the client to go to tender with a vendor-neutral, standards-compliant design requirement. We assist with vendor selection and then with ongoing project oversight and then final audit and sign-off on behalf of the client. We are not affiliated with any manufacturer or installer and all our designs are based on industry standards and best practice.
AUDIT
CAPITOLINE
DATA CENTER DESIGN AND TRAINING IMS can audit all IT infrastructure projects from small computer rooms to large data centers. All our audits include improvement plans and audits can be tailored to meet the your requirements, e.g.
TRAINING
Our specialized training and certification schemes take in data centre design and ongoing operational management techniques and requirements. Over the last five years we have trained thousands of people from hundreds of companies in dozens of countries. Our training is recognised for Continuing Professional Development by CIBSE and Continuing Education Credits by BICSI
INTELLIGENT MICRO SOLUTIONS L.L.C. 15 AGAKHAN TOWERS, 4th FLOOR NILE CORNISH, CAIRO, EGYPT TEL : (002) 02/22090835 - (002) 02/22050239 - FAX : (002) 02/22090577 Email: admin@emi.ms - magdy@emi.ms www : www.emi.ms