Connections Plus May 2015 by Annex Business Media

MAY/JUNE 2015

+ THE MAGAZINE FOR ICT PROFESSIONALS

STORAGE Complexities

ALSO: Industrial IoT

HDS Connect

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CONTENTS Fe a t u r e s

18 Storage Complexities An entire industry is being completely overhauled

26 The 3D Printing Phenomena A disruptive technology with huge potential

Departments 26

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Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Note

Infrastructure Systems

Networks & The Cloud

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New & Noteworthy

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>> The Digital Enterprise >> Cognitive Computing 15

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May/June 2015

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Stolen bikes, spare parts

and IoT t Internet of Things World held May 12-13 in San Francisco, SigFox, a Labage, France-based company that hails itself as the only provider of dedicated cellular connectivity for Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine communications, announced a breakthrough any victim of a stolen bike would embrace. Partnering with Samsung, which launched its own IoT platform called Artik, the two demonstrated a simple set up and operation for tracking stolen bicycles. A nice idea, you say, but what is the big deal? In SigFox you have a company that plans to roll out the low-throughput only network in 60 countries within the next five years. In Samsung, you have a multinational electronics company that can push IoT devices and services into any number of different markets, be it for consumers or commercial users. Artik, the company, said, is a system-on-a-chip that will meet the requirements of a range of connected devices, from wearables and home automation to smart lighting and industrial applications. The platform itself consists of integrated productionready modules, software, development boards, drivers, tools, security features and cloud connectivity.

Zach Jory, worldwide IoT and industrial digital strategist with IBM Corp., wrote recently that the reality behind the Internet of Things is just starting to catch up to the hype, but real opportunities for it are available now: “Things are connecting, recording, reporting, reacting and providing insights that drive informed actions. Estimates of the value of this flourishing marketplace vary widely, but even the more conservative estimates indicate a huge opportunity. “As much as 90% of all data generated by devices such as smartphones, tablets, connected vehicles and appliances is never analyzed or acted on.” At the Fluke Measure of Innovation Summit (see article p. 6) the industrial flavour of IoT was on display, specifically Fluke Collect Assets, a cloud-based wireless system of software and test tools that provides maintenance managers with a comprehensive view of all critical equipment. Among the presenters was Michael Stolze, managing director of Prüftechnik Alignment Systems GmbH in Ismaning, Germany, who spoke about Industry 4.0, a term that was first used in 2011 at the Hanover Fair and which, according to Wikipedia, refers to the “fourth” industrial revolution. Stolze talked about factories that will have smart machines that communicate with each other and the goods they are producing or handling, and even analyze their own condition parameters. “They will be able to order their own spare parts, plan their own maintenance and schedule a repair,” he said. “Industry 4.0 is no longer just a vision; it has already started. But with that we need to jointly prepare for Maintenance 4.0.” C+

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I nf r a st r uct u re S ys t e m s

Predictive maintenance gets leg up

in the Industrial IoT world By Denise Deveau Everett, Wash. – The future of Industrial IoT stood front and centre as a theme at the Fluke Measure of Innovation Summit here in May. The event served as the launching ground for the newest enhancements to its Fluke Connect platform, Fluke Collect Assets. The management tool is viewed as a major step forward in extending IoT in the connected industrial plant world. Fluke Connect Assets is a cloud-based wireless system of software and test tools that gives maintenance managers a comprehensive view of all critical equipment, including baseline, historical, and current test tool measurement data, current status, and past inspection data. Managers can set up and sustain a predictive maintenance (PM) or condition-based maintenance (CBM) system with minimal investment by enabling one-touch measurement transfer for more than 30 Fluke Connect-enabled tools. (Plans are to closely double that number before year end). Managers can use a number of dashboards to analyze multiple types of predictive data (e.g. electrical, vibration, infrared images) captured by maintenance technicians on the shop floor using a web browser of smartphone.Technicians can also capture and share data via their smartphones with a cellular or Wi-Fi connection. “This announcement is essentially Fluke’s first foray into IoT, starting Alexander Bardakov, a Fluke industrial applicawith handheld instrution engineer, was part of the demonstration team. ments,” says Melissa Hammerle, business unit manager, Fluke Connect Mobile, adding that it is designed as an implementation that can be done without involving the IT department. “This has been developed from an ecosystem perspective versus a software silo.” While the focus is on plant maintenance, it could be developed for other segments over time, because it uses an open architecture to enable integration to other systems, including ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CMMS (computerized maintenance management system). “We see good applications for field workers and indus6

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Mike Meisner (left), a manufacturing test engineer with Fluke Corp., conducts a tour with delegates attending the company’s Measure of Innovation Summit at its headquarters in Everett, Wash.

tries like oil and gas. All things are on the table for consideration.” Dave Hart, vice president of customer transformation for ServiceMax, a U.K.-based provider of field service management offerings, noted he sees great value in having a cloud-based management tool for field engineers. “It could touch all sectors: oil, health, manufacturing organizations, and more.” The capabilities of a cloud-based management system have been vastly improved with the advent of large-screen smartphones and the ubiquitous use of social media tools, he added. The continued rollout of 4G has also been a major contributor. “There’s nothing worse than the circular band of death when you’re waiting for downloads. When you get into 4G, the world is your oyster because video streams can become incredibly useful.” Speakers at the event included Mary Bunzel, worldwide industry leader, manufacturing for IBM Corp., who discussed the impact and trends in the world of the Industrial Internet of Things. “There are all kinds of working processes in the field and inside the four walls of the plant where you have the ability to hear what equipment is saying and speak back to it,” she said. Having the capability to evaluate and understand equipment to that level opens the doors for new revenue streams in a smart manufacturing environment, said Bunzel. “Condition-based maintenance means you can right size your investment in maintenance and assets at the right time because you have a sense of what’s going on with equipment.” This can even extend to wearables to improve safety when working in hazardous materials. www.connectionsplus.ca

Infra s t ructure Sy stems

While the focus on asset reliability and condition assessment tools won’t change in principle, the need to use intelligence and analytic tools is yet to be uncovered, Bunzel said. “They are an integral part of the business process. Already 22% of factories use M2M communications for internal tools. We are seeing adoption rate [of connected equipment] increasing 55% over the next two years.” She believes Fluke Connect can play a big part in the business analytics picture. “What if you have the insight to connect a quality issue back to a situation where the startup of a piece of equipment created energy fluctuations [that ultimately affected the end product]? What if you could connect the same capability to SCADA and MES (manufacturing execution systems) or even weather conditions? If you can see how everything is connected and having an impact on product quality; that is the Holy Grail.” This is not exclusive to the world of large manufacturing, Bunzel added. IoT can be simple and very real for smaller plants as well. “The whole idea is to get to the root cause of the problem and optimize scheduling of maintenance and resource. Predictive capabilities can significantly improve maintenance managers’ strategies and their ability to anticipate pending performance issues. It’s not really about the software. It’s about the process.”

Chris Bohn, business unit manager of Fluke’s thermal imaging, explains the connection between the technology and the Internet of Things to a group of summit attendees.

Terrence O’Hanlon, CEO of Reliabilityweb.com, a specialty publishing company based in Fort Myers, Fla., said he’s been dreaming about predictive maintenance since 2002. “It’s a recurring theme. It makes more sense to predict and prevent a failure rather than fix it. The best asset is the one you already own.” An interesting perspective on the future of Industrial IoT was provided by Michael Stolze, managing director, Prüftechnik Alignment Systems GmbH in Germany. He spoke about the growing conversations around the concept of Industry 4.0 in which smart factories have smart machines that communicate with each other and the goods they are producing or handling, and analyze their own condition parameters. “Machines will take over,” he joked. Another key aspect of IoT in industry is the fact that machines are able to learn and get better all the time. “They will be able to order their own spare parts, plan their own maintenance and schedule a repair,” he said. “Industry 4.0 is no longer just a vision; it has already www.connectionsplus.ca

Speakers at the event included Glenn Gardner, a product planner for Fluke, who has 10 years experience in plant engineering and predictive maintenance.

started. But with that we need to jointly prepare for Maintenance 4.0.” As Joe Van Dyke, vice president of operations, Woburn, Mass.based Azima DLI, a provider of predictive maintenance analytical services and products noted, “Automation is not just intelligent circuitry and programs insides sensors. Once you put information in the cloud, you can use analytics to derive answers. That is where a lot of the power is going to come from. After all, Google know what you’re looking for before you type in the words. That type of (artificial) intelligence can go into condition monitoring as well. It will just take a AD_2015_Cat_qtr_Layout bit of work.” 1 5/5/15 9:51 AM Page 1

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I nf r a st r uct u re S ys t e m s

HDS probes into the future at

Connect Data centre design focal point of discussion at corporate event. By Lynn Greiner

turing hand-crafted infrastructure configurations for one or a few applications, into a standardized industry for assembling machine-generated infrastructure configurations for many applications.” However, Roberto Basilio, vice president of product management with HDS, said today it is extremely difficult to predict what will be around in a decade. Technology, he said, is changing too fast, with more happening in the past five years than he has seen in his entire 30-year career. He was willing to hazard a few short term ideas, though. “In the next five years, we will see a lot of systems running on semiconductor storage,” he said, noting that he’s loath to specifically say it will be flash because of the rapid pace of change. To hook things together, he added, there will be a Hitachi Data Systems used the conference to outline future roadmaps and product initiatives. move to some kind of IP connection. “It may be Key among them is the firm’s Social Innovation Strategy, examples of which were on display SCSI over IP. There’s going to be a consolidation. at Connect 2015. I don’t think it will be Fibre Channel over Ethernet because that doesn’t make sense.” What he is sure of is that organizations will have to continue to Las Vegas, Nev.. – The data centre of the future is a nebulous thing. As technology changes, so too do the visions in techie crystal balls. use some sort of physical connectivity among system components Some of those visions are tied to whatever a vendor can, or is for the foreseeable future. “We are ages away from any wireless planning to, produce. That makes it particularly interesting to talk connection for data,” he says. However, he does think wireless to someone who produces, well, pretty much everything that lives might be a possibility in other areas. Michael Hay, vice president and chief engineer, global solutions, within a data centre’s walls, as well as a lot of what feeds into it. At a conference hosted by Hitachi Data Systems Corp. (HDS), strategy and development in the information technology platform which is just such a company, media and analysts heard a series of division of HDS, said he is looking to optical photonics as the conpredictions about the data centre of the future. Many, such as the nection of the future. continued move to consolidation of systems into virtual machines, “Today copper tends to rule the day, but we’re looking at optical with the accompanying smaller physical footprint and lower power as costs come down. We offer both,” he said. “We are playing both and cooling requirements, were what one would expect. The foot- ends of the stick, because we have to. We are doing research on print of data centres is going to shrink, with the exception being ser- optical photonics, mostly on 100 gigabit Ethernet, low power.” In the storage realm, Basilio believes that disk drives are going vice provider data centres, which are going to scale out even more. Again, that is no surprise. In fact, a 2003 white paper by the Meta to be around for a long time. Like tape drives, they will be used, but Group said much the same, namely that the “data centre of the differently. He predicted a resurgence of cold storage and optical future will be a simplified, commoditized, virtualized set of compu- media. “Tape is not a medium we can keep for a long time, but optitational, storage, and network resources that is enabled by ubiqui- cal is measured in centuries,” he noted. Hay, too, had thoughts about storage. “I keep hearing about latous, interoperable standards. “Such standardization of components and interfaces will enable tency problems with next generation storage,” he said. “Storagethe transformation of what is essentially a craft industry for manufac- class memory is about 10 X slower than DRAM, and that may force 81

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Infra s t ructure Sy stems

Social Innovation Takes Hold While the data centre sits in the centre of everything, the exciting things happen elsewhere when that processing power is put to use. HDS has built vertical offerings on the underlying technology it said are designed to help make peoples’ lives easier and safer. It calls those initiatives its social innovation. “In the next 10 years, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities,” said Ravi Chalaka, vice president of worldwide solutions and social innovation marketing. “Public safety and disaster response will be the number one concern of governments. We need to leverage data from the third platform.” Social innovation is the integration of IT, big data, analytics, and industry expertise to help make a safer, smarter, healthier society. HDS is working with customers, partners, and academics to solve problems using technology. The three key tenets of its strategy to deliver social innovation are: • Build things that generate data. • Build hardware and software that capture, manage, and analyze big data. • Have the domain expertise and technology to turn data into value. The company is focusing on four market segments: the smart city (including public safety), smart commerce, smart industry, and smart environment. Only a few of the pieces currently exist, including some of the public safety applications, but HDS plans to build out the rest over the next few years.

another application rewrite. “So ironically, the storage operating system we have, and its cache-heavy architecture may provide an interesting pattern. Then we move into fabricland, and it’s going to be optical in some form. So our storage devices can now be disaggregated, all connected through optical – PCIE over optical.” Backups, Basilio said, have their own problems – there is no time to do them anymore. Traditional approaches will not work, so he sees people duplicating data to begin with. And restoring from backups? He had no predictions, noting that it was a problem in the 1980s, is a problem today, and Also on display was will be a problem in the future. the robot EMIEW 2. Hay predicted that the definition of the data centre itself will change. Big installations will shrink; only the core apps will be onsite. “People will think of the data centre www.connectionsplus.ca

in terms of what is onsite and what is offsite,” he said. “It will probably be filled with lots of alternative processing technologies, like in-memory computing. “I find it interesting that when you dig into in-memory, it starts to look more like the Hadoop architecture, but less nodes, and when you look into Hadoop, it starts to look more like a SAN architecture. There are a lot of users that are being contrarian. We are entering this era where inverting things, or being contrarian, seems to be more natural.” Sean Moser, senior vice president, global portfolio and product management, said the company has recently started an “interesting project about a robotic data centre. Think about it as huge tape library, with robots going up and down the racks and pulling and swapping components. For that we are starting to look at cabling concepts, but we don’t know how it’s going to go.” There will be flexible programmable hardware, but that in turn creates problems with programming it – and that has to become easier, Hay said. “I think that’s what’s exciting about the data centre of the future,” he said. “People are being contrarian. We will have multiple types of processors working together.” And in that environment, he thinks fiber interconnects probably make sense.

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I nf r a st r uct u re S ys t e m s

STANDARDS

Delving into

Signal-to-Noise Ratios By Paul Kish

or this month’s column, I wanted to provide an update on the new amendment to the Ethernet standard that is under development in the IEEE 802.3bz task force to support the next generation Wave 2 Wireless Access Points. The NGEABT amendment, which stands for “Next Generation Enterprise Access BASE-T”, defines Ethernet Media Access Control (MAC) para metres, physical layer specifications, and management objects for the transfer of Ethernet format frames at data rates of 2.5 Gb/s and 5 Gb/s over installed-base, balanced twisted pair Category 6 and Category 5e cabling. The question that remains to be answered is what are the use cases that can support 2.5 Gb/s and 5 Gb/s data transmission over Category 6 and Category 5e cabling? The TIA TR 42.7 subcommittee has opened a project to address this question in collaboration with the IEEE 802.3bz task force. Let’s delve into this a little deeper to understand how this would work. It is still early to determine the details of the Physical Layer Device (PHY) implementation for NGEABT; however, we know that it will be based on the 10GBASE-T PHY. 10GBASE-T defines a PHY implementation that uses PAM 16/DSQ 128 encoding where 3.125 bits of information are encoded onto one symbol at a rate of 800 MegaSymbols/s per pair. To ensure satisfactory data transmission at 10 Gb/sec requires an average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 26 dB or better in order to meet the Bit Error Rate objective 1012, i.e., less than 1 error in 1,000,000,000,000 bits of information, over a minimum bandwidth of 400 MHz. Category 6A cabling is required in order to meet the alien crosstalk specification for 10GBASE-T operation for a distance of 100 metres. Scaling back to a data rate to 5 Gb/sec, and keeping the same encoding, reduces the Symbol rate to 400 MegaSymbols/s per pair over a minimum bandwidth of 200 MHz. What do the SNR characteristics look like for Category 6 cabling? As a benchmark exercise, some time ago, we performed alien crosstalk measurements on 12 45 metre Category 6 permanent links bundled together every foot. Both the alien Near End Crosstalk and alien Far End Crosstalk noise from all 11 disturbing permanent links were added

Paul Kish is Director, Systems and Standards at Belden. The information presented is the author’s view and is not official standards organization correspondence.

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Figure 1 – Signal-to-Alien Crosstalk Noise for a 100 m Category 6 Channel

together as a Power Summation on a victim permanent link. The results were then scaled to a worst case channel of 100 metres as shown in Figure 1. At each frequency, the signalto-noise ratio in dB is the difference between the total alien crosstalk noise level (red trace) and the signal level at the far end (green trace) on the victim channel. As the frequency increases, the signal-to-noise level decreases. For this example, the SNR approaches zero at a frequency of 350 MHz for a scaled 100 meter channel. The Table within the Chart shows the average SNR over a frequency band of 400 MHz, 200 MHz and 100 MHz. For a bandwidth of 400 MHz, the SNR is 16.3 dB and does not meet the 26 dB objective. For a bandwidth of 200 MHz, the SNR is 26.2 dB, which just meets the objective for this example. For a bandwidth of 100 MHz, the SNR is 33.3 dB and meets the SNR objective by a large margin. Just as a curiosity, for the same example, I scaled back the length of the channel to 37 metres and reworked the signal-to-noise ratio at 400 MHz and obtained a result of 26.2 dB, which meets the SNR objective for a BER of 10-12 at 10 Gb/s. So in conclusion, yes it appears to be feasible to support 2.5 Gb’s and 5 Gb/s data rates over installed base Category 6 cabling for distances up to 100 metres, however, to confirm and validate this, a larger data set representing different alien crosstalk environments and installation conditions and different types of cabling is needed. For any given installation, it would be prudent to do onsite alien crosstalk measurements once the alien crosstalk criteria are established. C+ www.connectionsplus.ca

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N et w o r ks & T h e C l o u d

The Changing

Cyber Security Scene Symantec exec says ICT personnel need to not only understand their adversary, but prepare for them. B y Pa u l B a rker

As cyber attacks go, this one would have been both impressive and financially crippling had it actually happened. Pharmaceutical firm Bromley Weyland partnering with County West General Hospital in a major drug trial in the U.S. involving 10 patients suddenly found that critical data relating to the trial had been altered and manipulated so badly it showed that some patients taking the drug and being monitored had actually flatlined. Fortunately, it was all part of Symantec’s fourth annual Cyber War Games held in March, an exercise created, says Michael Garvin, its director of global privacy ethics and compliance, as a means so that company employees can learn how an attacker operates. “The games give Symantec employees of all technical levels a first hand opMichael Garvin: CWG allows portunity to learn how an atparticipants to experience an attack tacker can exploit networks, from start to finish. applications, products, solutions and more, through a simulated real world environment,” he wrote following the event. “Obtaining this unique knowledge about threats allows our employees to help cultivate their security IQ and change the way they think about emerging threats and cyber criminal tactics. “CyberWar Games simulations differ from regular training exercises, in that they are a fully immersive experience. Instead of having our employees go through disconnected individual hacking exercises, CWG provides a complete interactive challenge with an objective. This allows them to experience an attack from start to finish and understand the tools and thought processes that hackers commonly use.” In a recent interview with Connections+, Garvin described it 12

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as a “personal skills development opportunity and team-building opportunity.” In the 2015 edition, 1,500 registrants each playing on a team of four participated in a preliminary round of hacking. The top 40 individuals, chosen from a grading system based on performance, then advanced to the finals in which they were given three days to not only get into the West General patient database, but also patient records in order to obtain information on how the drug trial was doing and how it was being administered. “That could be very valuable information for someone,” Garvin said. “The other half of the exercise was to sabotage the drug trial, change the data so that an obligatory body would say, ‘you know

what, we saw an adverse reaction, you need to halt going to market with this thing.’ There are a number of different reasons why people would be interested in that. “Motivations might be purely financial. If the company is publically-traded and it has to send out a notice to the press announcing it has to pull the drug, we know what that is going to do to their stock. If I was able to do that and I shorted their stock, I could make a significant amount of money. Likewise, if I had a buyer for the information, if I steal it, I could stand to make a lot of money selling that to a competitor.” www.connectionsplus.ca

Ne t wo rks & The Cloud

”

You don’t go on the battlefield if you have never had a grenade go off around you.

”

The 40 finalists, said Garvin, had a lot of success over the three days for it allowed each to be able to mimic the typical behaviour of an attacker. A presentation he was scheduled to give at the 16th annual Privacy & Security Conference Reboot in Victoria earlier this year, but was forced to cancel due to illness, revolves around just that. Entitled The Adversary’s Footsteps – Understanding Cyber Criminal Motives and Techniques To Improve Cyber Security – in it, he uses a quote from Sun Tzu, the noted ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher, who once stated “if you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” According to Garvin, cyber security professionals and all ICT personnel need to not only understand their adversary, but prepare for them. “Sun Tzu had a very valid point. We are trying to block and tackle an attacker, an adversary, without in some cases a good understanding of them. We probably know why they want to do it – the same reason you rob a bank because that is where the money is – but we do not understand in a lot of cases about the depth of how they are doing it. Also, understanding some of the techniques or tools and techniques to do it is important. “A better understanding of the motives and the method gets us into a place where we can better determine how we should prepare for it and approach it when it happens. “Another part of this quote that’s very interesting is about knowing yourself. There has been a lot done in risk management obviously over the last decade or so, but you come back to the question of how much do we really know about our capabilities? Are we sure that when something happens not only our technology, but our people are prepared to respond.” Garvin likened it to a soldier being trained at boot camp before www.connectionsplus.ca

they go off to war. “You don’t go on the battlefield if you have never had a grenade go off around you. We need to prepare for the situations. How we are training information security professionals not just initially, but continuously is an evolving battle for lack of a better word.” With 70% of organizations lacking the staff to counter cyber security threats, according to research firm Ponemon, he said the time has come to take a different approach when it comes to thwarting an attack. Pilots, he said, combine classrooms with flight simulators to learn and continuously practice, while cyber security professionals train and prepares using 19th century techniques. Opening up the communications channels across the entire organization when it comes to cyber security is critical: “The thinking used to be that I can defend and I can always stop attacks. The thinking now is starting to shift: Something is eventually going to happen and I will get compromised. “We have seen a realization that someone who is determined and working on you 24 hours a day they will find a way. The question is can the organization detect that and respond to it quickly enough so it doesn’t become a breach. A compromise means somebody has got into my organization. The question is does it become a breach? Do they actually steal data back out? He added that organizations need to get everyone on a level playing field so that if you are having discussions related to security, “we are all talking about the same thing. The further you can reach out into IT and the further you can reach out into to the business units, the better it will be. May/June 2015

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N et w o r ks & T h e C l o u d

CENGN’s goal:

Revive ICT eco-system ing in Canada but was mostly focused on The Centre of Excellence in Next Generation global mandates. It’s exciting to think about Networks, otherwise known as CENGN, is an CENGN’s pure-play focus on accelerating industry-initiative not government-initiative and technology that could create the next madeas a result, will function differently, says Rich in-Canada telecom superstar.” Dusome, its president and CEO. Each project selected from prospective “There is a big difference,” he told ConnecSME submissions receives commercialization tions+ in a recent interview. “The federal govacceleration support equivalent to $50,000 – ernment has kick-started CENGN financially, $100,000. but industry leads it.” “The whole idea was to let them know The seed money he refers to is the $11.7 milabout CENGN and how they can participate lion over five years announced in November by by entering one of their projects if they had an Ottawa that helped to establish an organization idea,” he said. formed by a consortium of corporate, academPlans are underway for a repeat perforic and research organizations. mance in 2016, but with a break in the travel. Founding members include Altacel-Lucent, A likely plan will be to split it up and have a Allstream, BTI Systems, Cisco, EWA Canada, Western Canada swing and follow that up EXFO, JDSU, Juniper Networks, Rogers and with a roadshow in Eastern Canada. Telus. Rich Dusome: NGNs are a $5 trillion market. Wherever the venue, the goal is a simple “Next-generation networks are a $5 trillion market, and presents megatrend opportunities for countries and one as far as Dusome is concerned: Revive the ICT ecosystem. According to CENGN, the key to next generation networks companies that can move quickly,” Dusome said earlier this year. “We need people who want to plant Canadian tech on the global (NGNs) is interoperability between software, hardware and a mulmap in a big way.” titude of products from many different vendors. “CENGN’s Physical He made the comment at the start of a national roadshow this and Virtualized Multi-vendor Platform, for both OpenStack and Enwinter with stops in Edmonton, Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto terprise, lowers the barrier to entry for companies and researchers. and Ottawa. This platform provides an environment to collaborate, test, comAt each venue, Dusome and others presented the “CENGN val- mercialize and create standards for the new technologies needed ue proposition” to prospective Small to Medium-sized Enterprises to run NGNs.” (SMEs) and researchers that have products and services in technologies such as Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Both address the growing demand for exploding Internet conA list of CENGN benefits for SMEs with promising tent on multiple platforms, and also underpin cloud-based applicatechnologies includes: tions, security and the Internet of Things (IoT), the association said • Dedicated engineering team and experts in in a release. communications including SDN and NFV As well as “promising SME and institutional technologies that could be commercialized in a three to 15-month period, CENGN • Physical and virtual multi-vendor commercialization, is on the hunt for top-gun research talent” to staff its Ottawa multitest, certification, and validation platform (open stack vendor test and verification lab and enterprise stack) “We are always on the lookout for the best talent,” said Dusome, • Dedicated high-speed fiber networks who was the catalyst behind the hiring of more than 2,000 engineers • Additional services for validating advanced products, in his last position as director of product management for Cisco applications, and services including: performance, Systems Canada in Ottawa. His 28-year career also included stops certification, verification and conformance testing at Bell Canada and TD Bank. “We need people who want to plant Canadian tech on the global • Business, legal, marketing and mentorship support. map in a big way,” he added. “I’ve spent most of my career work-

No Shortage Of Support

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May/June 2015

www.connectionsplus.ca

Ne t wo rks & The Cloud

From IBM

to Avanade Canada It turned out to be a career move Jeff Gilchrist simply could not turn down. IBM Canada Ltd. certainly would have remained a safe haven for this executive – he had been with the firm’s Global Business Services unit for 11+ years and responsible for its Communications Sector when he left – but a return to a more consulting role appealed to him. “It was an interesting opportunity,” says Gilchrist of his decision to leave IBM and join Avanade in November 2014 as head of its Canadian operating unit. Avanade was founded in 2000 as the joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft and currently has 22,000 professionals in 20+ countries. It is system integrator/consulting organization – Accenture is now the majority owner, but with an obvious Microsoft bent. Apart from the fact he was familiar with the consulting firm, having worked there in a past life when it was known as Arthur Andersen and was impressed with the “pedigree” of both organizations, there was another reason. “I have been in the IT professional services area for most of my career,” he says. “I always felt it was challenging to address large clients, but not enterprisesize (organizations with revenues in excess of $1 billion) in Canada. When you work for an IBM or Accenture, it can be tough to deal with them even though they are substantive-size companies. “I have never really seen an example of how any of these organizations have figured out a way to deal with the $100 million-$1 billion-size companies very effectively. They are just not set up. IBM is really good with a Royal Bank, for example, or a Bell Canada, part of my previous client set. “It is the middle space that is our sweet spot and where we focus.” An example of that is Tridel, an industry leader in condominium development, which recently ripped out its “aging” enterprise resource planning system. According to Tridel CIO Ted Maulucci, the ERP system was not “tuned to how our company is set up. We needed to achieve compliance across our organization and find a system that would help us deal with the challenges of cross-company accounting.” Avanade implemented Microsoft Dynamics AX on the ERP side as well as Microsoft Dymanics CRM, which contains social, mobile, analytic, reporting and advanced capabilities. “The process of purchasing a condo unit that has not yet been built doesn’t happen overnight – it can take up to three years from the time a customer invests in a unit to the date they move in – and a lot of information is accumulated along the way,” Tridel stated in a case study. “Customer care workers did not have a 360-degree view of customers and communication tracking was inefficient.” Gilchrist describes Avanade as a system integration consultancy that focuses in on three areas: large infrastructure upgrades, Microsoft Dynamic installations such as what took place at Tridel, and finally, collaboration. In other words, “making employees more effective in how they communicate with each other.” He points to Avanade’s way of operating via tools such as SharePoint, One Notes and Skype for Business (formerly known as Microsoft Lync) as examples of this new reality. “The family room and the living room are coming to the corporate boardroom in terms of communication. I would hypothesize that (Skype for Business) is an www.connectionsplus.ca

Jeff Gilchrist discusses his reasons for signing on with the Accenture-Microsoft venture. By Pa u l Ba r ke r

example of that. It is becoming more and more expected. The number of times I have used a handheld since arriving here might be five. I am not on a mobile either. I use a soft phone through my PC. “My heritage is the telecommunications industry. I have spent a lot of time in that space. Those organizations are basically having to come to grips with the fact there is a sea change occurring here and they have to figure out how to play in this space.” As for the cloud, he says there continues to be a lot of interest and discussion, which reflects results of a recent Avanade study that showed hybrid cloud adoption moving from “hype to reality and reaching a tipping point for adoption within three years.” The study noted that hybrid cloud solutions represent an opportunity for “IT to align itself with C-suite priorities, delivering strategic value to the business in a secure and properly governed manner.” May/June 2015

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Mo b i l e Mo v e m e n t s

Musings & Forecasts From Barcelona B y Pa u l Ba r ker

Barcelona, Spain – Mobile World Congress delivers a plethora of opinion about the current state of the ICT industry. Below is a sprinkling from the MWC 2015 edition, which took place in Barcelona, garnered either through one-on-one interviews with Connections+, press conferences and blogs.

Jason Hoffman: Head of Cloud Technology at Ericsson “Cloud technologies to date have fallen short. There are two axis 16

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within the industry today. On one hand we have this need to actually innovate and develop new applications and use data within our businesses much more rapidly than before. That means, in some cases, ungoverned clouds. “We also see behaviours where people are not innovating. They are very concerned with governance and security and locking down the infrastructure from a policy standpoint. “A lot of global executives are in fact making this trade-off between speed and risk. They are making a tradeoff between governance and innovation. We think there is an opportunity here to sit www.connectionsplus.ca

M o b ile Movemen ts

down and say, ‘how do you put an infrastructure in place that allows people to rapidly innovate, produce new applications and combine data in new ways yet actually have a phenomenal governance modeling order to make all the stakeholders happy.”

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As for IoT, unfortunately not everything that can be connected

Dr. Kevin Curran School of Computing and Intelligent Systems University of Ulster Member of the IEEE

should be

than there are connected humans. Real time IoT will require even more reliable communication links, lower transmission delays (latencies) and extreme throughput to serve the data transmitted by hundreds of billions of sensors and machines.”

Brent Cohler Director of Mobile Marketing SAP

connected to

“Enabling enterprises to run simple and make their customers or consumers’ lives, better. the Internet. That encompasses everything we do. “Wearables stick out (in Barcelona). This is the “When it comes to IoT we have been talkyear we will see again if there is a market for smart watches. I do suspect that even the manuing about it for years, but now the stories are starting to materialize in real use cases. What facturers realize it’s a niche market. I think Apwe are seeing will continue to skyrocket on this ple came closest in what we have seen so far when it comes to wearables by making it a notification hub without trajectory that it has already on …” On Day One of MWC15, SAP CEO Bill McDermott, wrote that trying to replicate the functionality of a phone, because that does not work on your wrist. But if you can answer a call without having mobile is no longer just about apps, it is about enabling a single, to constantly reach into your pocket to grab the phone then that cohesive value chain that begins and ends with empathy for the individual user on the device of their choosing. can help. It makes you more productive “Everything begins with the user because 21st century mobile “I don’t get the focus on the fitness and the health so much. I am a fitness freak myself, but I know I just have to run. I don’t need experiences require user-specific context as the key ingredient. We these things to tell me. I don’t believe people pay attention after can’t unlock the value of technology if we don’t understand (and the first day. These are probably designed by people in Silicon use) all available information about that individual. Where in the Valley who are fit 20-year-old males without any kids. When they world are they and where are they trying to go? What are they trystart to test the market they will find that not everyone is obsessed ing to accomplish? What are their interests, challenges, likes and with fitness as they are. limitations? “As for IoT, unfortunately not everything that can be connected “All of this information is as significant for a business traveler as should be connected to the Internet. it is for a field mechanic on the job. This information is context – and “There are going to be a lot of flaws and we are going to see context is the fuel that drives the mobile experience.” leaks that we have never seen before. Things are being connected that no one ever envisioned they would be connected to a network. Carl Piva There is no encryption, there is no security, it’s wide open. There Vice President Strategic Programs are going to be problems when data is collected on a scale of this TM Forum magnitude. “Traditional telco models that used to work so well a few years ago are collapsing one after the other. There is no value in trying to revive those again. You have to go outwards and find other ways of Jane Rygaard making money. Head of CEM, Core & OSS “We are at an inflection point. There are two really big options: MCA Portfolio Marketing You either try and squeeze the most out what got you there or you Nokia “The whole experience part with regard to analytics and how to use can actually embrace the change that is bound to happen and big data in the right way is critical. Big data is just a technology, but make sure that you lead. “What will enable the next big shift in this world will be the fact what do we do with the output of it, how do we use it and what data all of this telco-grade hardware that we have been used to seeing is available? We talk about five key trends here: The cloud, IoT, big data and will be replaced by low-cost IP fabric with software on top that you can repurpose based on your needs and the current requirement analytics and smart location experiences. An example of that took place at the Nokia booth where the com- of the day.” It is, said Piva, better to be nimble than big. pany demonstrated the “possibilities of mobile connectivity for IoT. TM Forum is a non-profit global industry association, which The transition to IoT, it said, means that “we will soon live in a world with between 10 and 100 times more Internet-connected devices helps “its members transform and succeed in the digital economy.”

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May/June 2015

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COV E R S TO RY

STORAGE

Complexities

Increasing volume, emerging applications and new technologies are completely overhauling the data storage industry. B y D a v e We b b

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t’s a bit of a cliché now: We’re generating and collecting more and more data every day. Quite famously, Google Inc.’s Eric Schmidt once said that every two days, we create as much data as we did from the dawn of time until 2003 – about five exabytes of data. That was in 2010. Since then, data capture has been growing by 30-40% each year in Canada, according to Dave Pearson, research manager for enterprise storage and networking with IDC Canada. “The biggest long-term trend for storage in Canadian enterprises, and really, right down to the consumer level, is data growth,”

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The volume, velocity and variety of data being collected are unprecedented.

Pearson says. The cost of data storage continues to fall, so affording to capture the data isn’t the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is managing that data. Complicating the issue is the fact that the type of data being collected is changing as well, says Paul Lewis, chief technology officer with Hitachi Data Systems Canada. “It’s really divided between structured and unstructured data,” Lewis says. Structured data – the stuff of databases – is growing predictably. “Databases are attributable to specific applications that create that data,” Lewis says. You know the number of users, you understand your business, and you have a good idea of how much data you’re generating. “What is not known and forecastable is the human data that gets generated and the machine data that gets generated,” Lewis says. Human data consists of files created – documents, presentations, audio files, web content, etc. – might be growing at 10 times the speed of structured information, Lewis says. Let’s not forget data in log files, sensors and cross-application connections, says Milan Shetti, vice president and chief technologist with Hewlett-Packard’s storage business unit. “The volume, velocity and variety of data being collected is unprecedented,” Shetti says. “The number of data capture elements has changed dramatically,” says Jeff Wilson, business unit executive for storage with IBM Canada. For example, medical imaging used to be film-based; now, it’s full-colour and three-dimensional image files that can be terabytes in size. There’s also an increase in regulatory and compliance issues that affect the amount of data enterprises have to keep track of, says Wilson. “10 years ago, did we need to save every e-mail? 10 years ago, we could make the choice to throw them out after a while. We know now (that) for audit reasons, for compliance reasons, for legal reasons, we’ve got to keep those e-mails. “It’s not only the proliferation of items that can capture data, but the need to keep the data for longer periods of time.”

On the social side, “it’s both internal and external,” Lewis say. Internally, it’s about new ways to collaborate with colleagues; externally, it’s about interacting with clients in a variety of formats according to their preference. But mobile and social data growth will soon be eclipsed by the data generated by sensors and telemetry, Pearson says. “Machine-to-machine communication isn’t quite there yet, but it’s going to be the largest driver of data creation ingestion and storage,” Pearson says. Lewis concurs; if human-generated data is growing at 10 times the speed of structured data, M2M data might be growing at 100 or even 1,000 times the rate. Research firm Gartner Inc. forecasts 26 billion connected units; IDC forecasts that will generate 35 zettabytes of data. (A zettabyte is 10 to the 27th power.)

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Three Platforms In the past, data was generally created by IT professionals themselves, says Mike Sharun, country manager for EMC Canada. He calls this minicomputer and mainframe-generated data “Platform 1” data. Platform 2 data is created by applications, and requires a rigid structure and “more care and feeding” – for example, disaster recovery and business continuity. Platform 3 data, unstructured data generated by machine telemetry, sensors and social media, requires “cheap and deep” storage. Since you don’t know what queries you’re going to run in the future, you capture and store it all just in case. Sharun compares it to an opinion poll question that is asked of every member of the population, rather than a sample that’s accurate to +/- 3.5%, 19 times out of 20. Platform 2 storage depends on infrastructure for resilience – think banking or OLTP transactions – while Platform 3 data resilience is built into the application itself. Infrastructure requirements are different; running Platform 3 data on a Platform 2 infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive, Sharun says.

Changing Topologies Mobile and Social Mobile technology and social applications are creating a substantial amount of new information today, Lewis says. Enterprise users are expected to have more than one mobile device – smart phone, laptop, tablet – with data and applications duplicated on each. www.connectionsplus.ca

“Storage is everywhere,” says Shetti. In the past, running a limited catalogue of applications out of a data centre, the formula for provisioning storage was a simple one, “a finite map from a planning perspective,” he adds. “It was very structured, planned growth, and there was usually overprovisioning.” May/June 2015

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“When I started in this business 30 years ago, the way people bought storage and the way they planned for storage was they sat down on a semi-yearly basis, and they had a deterministic workload, they knew where the data was coming from, and they planned for that data growth and they bought accordingly,” says Wilson. That “scale-up” topology – built around storage area networks that allow compute and storage resources to scale independent of each other – is now complemented by “scale-out” topologies. Servers with internal storage are daisy-chained; storage is close to the compute workload, but there’s a risk of overworked – or underworked – servers. In a “shared something” topology, storage grows in chunks, pod by pod, says Shetti. And software-defined storage, using commodity x86 hardware with commodity Ethernet connectivity, is beginning to emerge. But the topologies aren’t displacing each other, he says. Rather, they complement each, serving different purposes in different storage tiers.

Changing Hardware Virtualization is allowing the application side of the data centre to shrink. That is not happening on the storage side, says Carrie Higbie, global director of data centre solutions and services for Siemon Co. “Just the amount of data we store… people do a report 20

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and say, ‘What if we captured this data and this data and this data also?’ I think it organically grows in organizations,” Higbie says. “Where you see other parts of the data centre shrinking, you don’t see that same shrinkage in the storage world, just because of the sheer volume of data that people expect to have on hand.” But developments in solid state and flash storage are helping storage keep pace with the demand. At the advent of the Internet, storage and compute resources weren’t the bottleneck; the network was. Moore’s Law-scale leaps in network and compute performance left storage in the dust. “Storage spent a long time relying on spinning disks,” says IDC’s Pearson. There was on-chip cache, followed by RAM, then a huge gulf in storage retrieval performance. Solid state and flash storage have helped fill that gulf, Pearson says, and the cost-perterabyte is falling at almost the same rate that data creation is rising. Shetti estimates the price of solid state storage is falling by 2530% every 24 months. On the fabric side, too, storage is making performance gains, Higbie says. Fibre Channel (FC), the choice for storage area networks (SANs) for years, has come under assault from Ethernet fabric and software-defined networking recently, but standards are evolving. While 40Gbps Ethernet’s speed surpassed FC’s 16Gbps, the next generation of Fibre Channel – FC Gen 6 – bumps the speed www.connectionsplus.ca

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to 32Gbps, but with a twist: Using parallel connections, FC Gen 6 will allow speeds of up to 128Gbps. Fibre Channel is still shipping 11 million ports and 11 exabytes of storage a year to enterprise SANs, Higbie points out. But there is no one-size-fits-all fabric solution. FC may be the better choice for block-storage based environments, while Ethernet has advantages in terms of cost and management. Hence, new storage technologies like FC over Ethernet, which allows companies to extend FC networks on cheaper fabric.

Mobile technology and social applications are creating a substantial amount of new information today.

Changing Applications The elephant in the storage room, though, may be analytics: the Big Data movement. Companies that want to have a better understanding of their customer transactions don’t know what connections between various data points have meaningful relationships until they interrogate the data; hence the need to capture as much unstructured data as possible – Sharun’s “cheap and deep” platform. Big Data also creates velocity demands for storage infrastructure, says Jean-Paul Isson, Montreal-based global vice president of business intelligence and predictive analytics at job search firm Monster Worldwide Inc. Batch processing, which used to be the predominant data storage workload, is periodic. Big Data enables real-time analytics applications that need real-time data access. Fraud detection applications have to crunch through huge volumes of data about a transaction almost instantly. Online travel firms compete on prices that are constantly changing. “Even seconds is too late,” Bisson says. “It is putting a lot of pressure on storage.” Big Data applications such as Hadoop and high-performance in-memory analytics are also changing the relationship between I/O and memory, says Bisson. And that’s changing the time-honoured strategy of tiered storage.

Tiering It’s simple enough in theory: Data that gets used more often resides on faster media, while data that isn’t used as often – backup and archival material – lives on cheaper media that’s not as fast to access. The traditional formula was: Tier 1: Online storage, usually based on an FC fabric, with (then expensive) spinning disks holding the data. This is data that applications will need to access as they’re running in real-time. Tier 2: Nearline storage. This is data that has to be accessed occasionally, but not in real-time. Less expensive media requires www.connectionsplus.ca

C OVER STORY

more time to bring the data into the system: Think OLTP records that might have to be batch-reported, for example.

Tier 3: Offline storage. This, in most cases, is archival data that will rarely be accessed, but has to be maintained for regulatory and governance purposes. Offline data has to be mounted to be accessed, and the medium of choice is still tape. Tape not only isn’t disappearing, says Pearson, but spend on the technology isn’t falling. It’s a well-understood technology, with necessary expertise readily at hand. But this “cold storage,” as Pearson calls it, is also being moved to cloud environments instead of removable media, as companies try to meet archival demands without adding more infrastructure. It’s high-capacity, but lower performance, than the technology used for upper tiers. And in the cloud, data is cheap to add, but expensive to retrieve, says Lewis. That’s allowing “incredibly cost-efficient” tape to hold its ground as the archival medium of choice.

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Tiering Evolved Big Data and real-time, in-memory analytics have changed the tiering equation. So has the falling cost of flash and solid state storage. “I think the concept will still be the same,” Shetti says of tiering – the most active data goes on the highest performance (and most expensive) media. But the demands of new applications together with the affordability of lightning-fast storage technology have created demand for a new tier: Tier Zero. Companies generally only use 3-5% of their data, says Sharun, so a small amount of Tier Zero storage – available to applications virtually in real time – can make a big change to the storage and application dynamic. Managing the tiering of storage was largely a manual job, an admin with a spreadsheet deciding what goes where. Thanks to the three Vs – volume, variety and velocity – manual management isn’t practical anymore. “Not all types of data are created equal,” says Lewis. “When you need flash, you really, really need flash.” So much of the evolution of storage technology involves automating tiering management as much as blinding hardware speed. “Tiering has changed dramatically,” Sharun says. Environments have become too complex to promote or demote data on an application-by-application basis. C+ Dave Webb is a Toronto-based freelance writer. He can be reached at dave@dweebmedia.ca. May/June 2015

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COV E R S TO RY

Key Trends Influencing

ENTERPRISE STORAGE

By Carlo Spalvieri

he data centre continues to evolve as new technologies and delivery models improve services and remove time and cost from overall IT management. Though a number of recent innovations have improved performance and reliability throughout the data centre, organizations today still must manage complexity, and, often times, IT leaders and staff spend too much time keeping their infrastructure running rather than focusing on new services to support their business or organizational goals. This year is expected be a great one for enterprise storage, particularly in terms of technology to help support and improve current IT approaches, as well as new delivery models poised for prime time. Many of these trends offer greater flexibility, agility and a more simplified storage infrastructure as well as improved performance often delivered in less space. Large enterprises are not the only ones that will lead the way in embracing these new approaches. Many of these trends will have great appeal to SMBs, as well. Big or small, our customers continually tell us that they want to cost effectively keep pace with data

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growth with solutions that offer agility and less complexity in their data centres. The following five enterprise storage trends are expected to heat up and help address these issues.

Flash Adoption Flourishes Flash storageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to handle data at much faster rates than traditional spinning disks has organizations weighing the options of performance versus cost. Starting this year, most organizations will look to benefit from enterprise flash drives. They also will seek vendors that can combine various flash drive types (i.e. write- and read-intensive SSDs) with spinning disks (HDDs) to get flash performance when needed and lower cost storage for colder data at an optimized cost in one storage array. Looking down the road, we are expecting to see larger capacity SSD drives in a fairly short timeframe, which will drive down costs of flash even further. All-flash arrays have generated plenty of buzz, but organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid storage at greater numbers. www.connectionsplus.ca

C OVER STORY

Our customer data shows that more than 97% of our customers deploying flash are opting for a hybrid approach that combines SSDs and HDDS in their arrays. Fundamentally, this hybrid approach provides the performance benefits of flash and the cost benefits of disk. It also allows for dynamic tiering possibilities, keeping cold data on HDDs and making critical hot data more readily accessible on SSDs. In either form, be it all Flash, or Hybrid, Flash drives will have a very large positive effect on how storage is designed and delivered to provide better business benefit.

Flash In The Server

The relationship between servers and storage will continue to evolve as customers demand the fastest possible access to their most critical applications. As a result, more organizations will embrace flash technology embedded in servers, placing storage physically as close to compute as possible. For example, technology such as Fluid Cache for SAN, provides server-side caching performance integrated with an external array to also benefit from SAN manageability and data protection capabilities. Regardless of how it is deployed, the end result is decreased response times for applications, specifically those in industries such as healthcare, finance and retail, where instant transactions can define the customer experience.

SDS Moves From Possibility to Reality Software-defined storage (SDS) has generated a significant amount of interest over the past year. There are many definitions for “SDS,” similar to the subjectivity around the many flavors of “cloud computing.” We will begin to see the industry settle on a narrower definition over the next year or so. SDS will continue to attract attention thanks to promises of deployment flexibility and simplicity of management and orchestration. High scalability and industry leaders’ validations will help fuel momentum for solutions that further enable a simple, flexible and agile IT environment for the growing digital data that organizations must manage, access and store. We expect many more organizations will begin to seriously investigate the value of SDS in their environment.

Converged Platforms Simplify IT Convergence is part of a fundamental shift in the way people can approach IT. Data sets are expected to continue to grow at much faster www.connectionsplus.ca

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IT leaders and staff spend too much time keeping their infrastructure running rather than focusing on new services to support their business or organizational goals.

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rates than organizations’ IT budgets, particularly with the impact of mobile devices and the “Internet of Things” on corporate data centres. Organizations looking to refresh IT will take a harder look at converged platforms that promise simplicity by seamlessly integrating compute, storage and networking into a single offering. Bearing in mind that every organization’s needs are different, and can change dramatically over time, customers demand converged solutions that can grow and scale in any direction, such as scaling compute or storage independently. Locked-in ratios of compute to storage performance to storage capacity will have to make way to architectures that can adapt on the fly.

Hyperconvergence Offers A Different Approach

Hyperconverged platforms that tightly integrate compute, storage and virtualization resources, will continue to gain popularity. These platforms provide a great way for IT professionals to reduce complexity in their data centres and allow for simplified scaling. Hyperconverged appliances are ideal for offering a simple to manage and predictable scale IT infrastructure to data centre, virtualization and storage teams. While these offerings are diverse enough to meet a variety of needs, key use cases include VDI environments, remote office or branch office environments, virtualized server workloads and development and testing for companies of all sizes. Hyperconverged platforms allow IT organizations to effectively shift their focus away from daily operational challenges to longer term strategies that can deliver value to the business. As the data centre continues to change, the storage industry is evolving right along with it. Organizations small and large have many of the same challenges and opportunities, albeit at different scale. The latest storage trends will improve both current infrastructures and new convergence and hyperconvergence approaches, as well. Innovations like flash, server-side flash, SDS, convergence and hyperconvergence are poised to make 2015 an exciting year in enterprise storage. As a result, IT leaders will have greater options to improve performance, better manage costs, and find opportunities to dedicate more resources to help achieve their ultimate goals. C+

Carlo Spalvieri is an Enterprise Storage Strategist with Dell Canada. He has 15 years of experience in the storage industry.

May/June 2015

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Industries that need flash, fast By Mike Sharun he rise of flash storage has coincided with the rise of Big Data analytics, hyperscale computing, massive databases, and other I/O intensive workloads. While these can be the catalyst for new services or revenue streams to be created within the business, organizations large and small are recognizing that they may need to rethink their storage strategies, especially for applications that require high performance and quick response times. In this article, we look at the top five industries that can benefit most if they can take advantage of flash storage, and the opportunities it can bring to them: 1. Financial Services: Francisco Gonzalez, CEO of Spanish banking giant BBVA perfectly highlighted the problem the financial services industry is facing when he commented: “Banks need to take on Amazon and Google or die. The shift to digital requires a complete overhaul of banks’ technology.” Part of that overhaul should be looking at when, and not if, flash technology is implemented into the business. With higher I/O rates and no-moving parts, flash can help with all of the struggles financial services organizations are facing in the increasingly competitive digital world. Take the area of risk management, for example: new regulations require banks to take a relatively conservative line on their risk exposure, which determines how much of their customers’ money they can invest. Without a ‘real-time’ view of their investments’ risk exposure, banks will be at a competitive disadvantage. As such, Flash has the potential to provide the capacity for large scale analysis, and allow customers a real-time view of their market exposure, increasing their ability to invest their customers’ funds and grow their potential upside accordingly. 2. Retail: The retail industry is experiencing an explosion of data like never before. Competitive pressure is at an all-time high. Incumbents are facing extreme challenges from low-price upstarts. The strongest weapon in their arsenal to fight back? Data. In a recent survey of U.K. decision makers, 74% of respondents from the retail sector claimed transforming their organization’s model to meet customer requirements is key to unlocking the next wave of growth for their organization. Flash will help them keep real-time tabs on inventory, pricing and deals, helping them adjust pricing, for example, on many tens of thousands of products and SKUs, making regional adjustments and sending instructions to systems to move products from sources of surplus to sources of demand. Without the kind of speed and I/O intensity Flash supports, it’s simply more difficult to be competitive. 3. Gaming: Online gaming and gaming through social networking sites has experienced significant growth, with more than 80 million Facebook users actively participating in social gaming, and Zynga reporting 118 million users of its most popular game, Farmville. It’s not just social network gaming either. Take Twitch for

Connections+ May/June 2015

example, a service that allows users to upload, share and watch recordings made in video games online. Its growth is so rapid that it now claims the fourth highest Web traffic in America, behind only Google, Netflix and YouTube. Video games are now played in professional competitions with huge adiences, and the best players have become famous. What has allowed companies like Zynga and Twitch to experience such high level of growth is that they ensure they consistently deliver a seamless customer experience. With improvements in latency and downtime when compared to traditional storage devices, flash delivers against this requirement. 4. Entertainment: From HD to 3D and high-quality 4K (four times the resolution of HD), the media and entertainment industry continues to push the boundaries of the experience the viewer has on their screen. At the same time, these innovations are pushing the need for storage systems capable of handling massive file sizes; a single minute of 4k shooting will typically take around 5GB of storage. How the industry tackles this issue of storing and managing such large data sets has become such a familiar problem that it’s been made famous in HBO’s Silicon Valley, a television series documenting the rise of a fictional start-up company that developed a universal compression algorithm far more powerful and efficient than anything that exists today. While the algorithm itself may be fictional, the need to compress and de-duplicate such large files is where the benefits of flash appeals to so many businesses. 5. Social Networks and online services: Internet-based services such as social networks demand near-real-time access to the growing mountain of data those services access. They need the agility to move things around; for example dynamically repositioning adverts, or providing data in real-time to advertisers with real-time bid calculations. These require high IO rates and low levels of lag. Given the scale of operations supporting the (hundreds of) millions of users social networks attract, the data centres companies like Facebook and LinkedIn build are so big that the benefits flash brings can have significant ramifications on the organization’s operations. Flash has the potential to meet many different business needs; from providing a more efficient way of storing information, thanks to its aggressive dedupe and compression capabilities, through to increased resilience and faster performance. There’s no doubt that every business will experience its benefits in the future, but some definitely need it sooner rather than later.

As Country Manager, Mike Sharun oversees the day-to-day management of EMC Canada.

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TR E N D I NG

The 3D Printing Phenomena This ‘disruptive’ technology is adding a whole new perspective on the business landscape.

By Ian Har vey

Photos courtesy of Proto3000

n vacation in Cozumel, Mexico last spring I met a woman walking a happy and energetic English bull terrier fitted with a prosthetic leg. I asked her where she had found the prosthetic on such a small island centered on tourism. “We sent some measurements back to the States by e-mail and they 3D printed the components for a custom fit,” she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Certainly five years ago it wouldn’t have been. Now everything has changed and is changing still because of 3D printing – more formally called additive manufacturing. While critics might dismiss the technology as stuck with prosthetics and iphone cases, other see much bigger impacts in the not so distance future. In a report entitled Disruptive Manufacturing: The effects of 3D printing Deloitte consultant Benjamin Grynol predicts: “3D printing will potentially have a greater impact on the world over the next 20 years than all of the innovations from the industrial revolution combined” That’s a big leap from where we are now, but not implausible. Things have evolved rapidly: While the Internet is twittering about 3D printers making a gun, 3D plotters are also being used to create buildings from concrete laid down like toothpaste and also pre-cast architectural details; research is ongoing into creating skin or other organs from individual cells.

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TRENDI NG

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3D printing will potentially have a greater impact on the world over the next 20 years than all of the innovations from the industrial revolution combined.

Food is being printed out in custom shapes and sizes, forming everything from intricate chocolate to pasta shapes. Dentistry, jewelry making, car assembly, transplant surgery and avionics are just some of the sectors, Grynol says have been affected or will be. The classic combination of technology, materials, pricing and innovation which has driven 3D printing to the mainstream is like many overnight successes, decades in the making. The root of 3D stretches back to the 1980s which converged in a 1986 patent for a stereolithography machine invented by Charles Hull. Fast forward 30 years analysts at Canalys calculated the 2013 3D printer market, including sales, materials and associated services, at US$2.5 billion globally. It further projects this will grow to US$3.8 billion this year and to US$16.2 billion by 2018 – that’s a compound annual growth of 45.7% over five years. Still, there is some ways to go yet, as Dr. Stoyan Tanev, associate professor, at the University of Southern Denmark’s department of technology and innovation and jointly an adjunct research professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University’s Technology and Innovation Management Program points out. “There are different kinds of disruption, technological disruption and consumer disruption,” he notes. The former applies when new technologies start to improve or change how we work, such as better laptop screens. The latter is a whole change in consumer behaviour, such as the decline in newspaper readership as Internet use climbs. While 3D printing has a niche in manufacturing for rapid prototyping and customized product on a one-off or low production run basis, it is still somewhat limited in terms of materials and volume. Indeed, says Reuben Menezes, marketing manager, at 3D print company Proto3000 in Vaughan, north of Toronto, until recently the technology has been a well-kept secret with most of the money from sales going back into R&D. “Right now the cycle is in ‘entrepreneurialization’,” he said. “It’s in the hands of business. The next cycle will be consumerization when it will be in the hands of the consumers.”The parallel is in computers, he explains. At one time desktop PCs were office tools rarely found in the home. Then they became consumerized. On the other end of that cycle, cutting edge technology for consumers was so cutting edge and easy to use – like the iPhone and iPad – they forced their way into offices and pushed back into the entrepreneurialization cycle. The technology is taking off, says Menezes, because the barriers to entry are falling on several fronts and driving it to the consumer level. “Not everyone can design something to print, but there are files which can be downloaded to print,” he said. “Hoover offers vacuum cleaner parts which can be 3D printed.” The 3D printing ecosystem is aligning slowly, notes Menezes, pointwww.connectionsplus.ca

ing to Adobe’s Photoshop program, which now includes 3D design and printing capability while industrial design standard Autocad also offers a free “lite” version for students of their 3D program used worldwide by engineers and architects. Printing out replacement parts for your dishwasher or car isn’t happening yet on a grand scale but it’s on the horizon. When it does happen it will be a much more consumer-led disruption, impacting warehousing, tooling, supply chain, logistics and retailing. WalMart Canada for example, list five 3D printers, ranging from $1,098 to $4,977 while other start ups are vying to built a home version to retail for as little as $100. “You can get started commercially for less than $5,000,” Menezes says. “The automotive and aerospace industry have been using 3D for concept parts for years.” Underlying all this is an impressive collection of building blocks developed by the so-called “maker” community, modern day tinkerers who have been messing about with 3D technology for a decade. Web sites like thingiverse.com have sprung up while retailers like Staples are installing 3D printers in their stores next to photocopiers. Tanev’s research suggests disruption will be slow initially because 3D printing is opening up new markets and creating new customers. “Manufacturers tend to cater to high value customers who are move vocal and want new features,” he says. “They have to keep producing something new so their customers will replace what they have. With 3D printing, though, they can produce something and bring new customers in.” Initially, 3D was about forming layers of plastic to create an object. Today the list of materials available is growing rapidly with mainstream printers able to handle a dozen or more materials. While some materials used in additive manufacturing are as strong as comparable cast plastics, getting the strength steel is still something of a challenge. Still, Menezes says, that too is evolving. “I think you’ll see a lot of work around nano-based carbon-fiber, though it’s only in the concept stage now,” he said. “In a few years, you’ll be able to do everything.” For the Canadian manufacturing sector it’s a portent of change which will impact the Canadian economy, says the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. In the first of a series of papers on innovation in manufacturing, it singled out robotics and additive manufacturing as key areas for accelerated development to ensure Canada keeps pace with the world. In 2013, the paper notes, Canada counted some 80,000 manufacturing businesses with $590 billion in revenues employing 1.8 million Canadians. The issue, the Chamber notes, is we’re falling behind with Canada now ranked 15th in world in competitiveness and 22nd

”

May/June 2015

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TR E N D I NG

in innovation by the World Economic Forum, positions which are eroding not improving. When it comes to 3D printing, says Scott Smith, director of Intellectual Property & Innovation Policy at the Chamber, we are still mostly dabbling in demonstrations and rapid prototyping, while mainstream applications are not developing fast enough. “The challenge for Canada is scale,” he said. “We’re not moving up on any of those global indexes.” Canadian companies are not competing on investments in technology, he said: “Typically they still have older versions of software, for example, where in the U.S. and elsewhere they have the latest and greatest.” The Chamber’s concerns are echoed in a report from IDC Canada’s director of client hardware research, George Bulat who notes Canada’s automotive industry is lagging behind in adoption of 3D printing compared with the United States. His report, Canadian 3D Printing: Supply and Demand Perspectives notes while the U.S. has already adopted 3DP, it’s still mostly in “pre-production phase” in Canada. “In the healthcare sector, medical and dental end-users are more likely to adopt existing applications for 3D print than to support the creation of and research into new applications.”,” his report notes, adding the big issue as always is cost of acquisition. On that front, it is noteworthy the federal government’s spring budget promised up to $100 million over five years to foster innovation among Canadian automotive parts suppliers. What is needed is some government stimulation, more facilitation than direct investment, to create collaborative technology incubator clusters around additive manufacturing much like those we’ve seen

for technology firms around Waterloo’s Communitech where 1,000 companies have gone on to generate $30 billion in revenues. It’s those kinds of investments the Chamber plans to push in a slate of recommendations to spark debate in the upcoming federal election. “Canada has a number of things going for it and not going for it,” he said in attracting global investment. “Our cost of labour is high and we have an educated workforce but not necessarily in the areas we need. Our cost of energy is on the lower end comparatively. We have lots of smart people but they are all working. You have to find top end people. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program was working at the top end but got diluted by bringing in people at the bottom and the government threw the baby out with the bathwater.” Based on patterns in other emergent industries based around technology over the last 20 or 30 years, Dr. Tanev says, the evolution of additive manufacturing will likely see consolidation of major players and splintering to allow specialization. “With semi conductors, for example, you had companies shift to specialize in just manufacturing, while other went for design and others created the tools for designing and manufacturing semi conductors,” he says Eventually, consumer disruption will play out but he wouldn’t be surprised if some of those hurt most by the initial waves of digital revolution which gave rise to Google and Amazon might strike back with 3D printing, like Wal-Mart. C+ Ian Harvey is a Toronto-based freelance writer. He can be reached at iharvey@rogers.com.

How big will 3D printing grow and how fast? Canasys projects 3D printing to grow to US$16.2 billion globally by 2018 but others aren’t as optimistic. Lux Research, for example, projects 3DP to quadruple by 2024 to US$12 billion globally. Hard numbers are hard to come by for two reasons, one, the rapid pace at which 3D printing is being adapted and two because the market is highly fragmented by sector, application and price point. However, make no mistake, the race is on. Those fast nimble start ups who grabbed the early adopter business are now looking over their shoulders as the big industrial guns like Hewlett-Packard have announced their entry into the game. Also joining the fray are tradition tool machine makers – subtractive technology – who want to protect their market position. Among companies to watch making large scale industrial 3D printings selling for between US$150,000 to US$500,000: • •

3D Systems with about US$460 million in annual revenues based in South Carolina Stratasys based in Israel with about US$325 million in revenues.

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May/June 2015 www.connectionsplus.ca

• • • •

• • •

•

Hewlett-Packard which has no 3D revenues yet but just entered last year with its own technology based on its inkjet patents. Voxelhet founded in Germany in 1999. ExOne Matsura is a Japanese tool maker founded in 1935 which has recently launched a hybrid million machine combining the additive manufacturing process with lasers sintering metal powder with a milling process – computer controlled metal lathing – to finish the product. Yamazaki Mazak Corp. is another Japanese tool maker, founded in 1919 which has also launched a hybrid. Autodesk, is a California 3D design software maker which is now also selling its own 3D printer. Renishaw, a British company and Belgian manufacturer Materialise NV are collaborating on a high level 3D printer with lasers using titanium powder. DMG MORI is a German-Japanese global tool maker shifting from CNC milling equipment to additive manufacturing.

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New & Noteworthy

2 3

1. OMNITRON SYSTEMS

2. BELDEN

3. TRANSGLOBAL SYSTEMS

4. XURON

Omnitron Systems Technology, a provider of fiber connectivity products has introduced the OmniConverter GHPoE/S, a multiport, 60 Watts Power over Ethernet (PoE) Gigabit media converter. It is compatible with the IEEE 802.3af PoE (15 Watts) and 802.3 at PoE+ (30 Watts) standards, and provides 100/1000 Ethernet fiber to a 10/100/1000 copper media converter. Classified as Power Sourcing Equipment (PSE), the OmniConverter GHPoE/S can power the latest generation of high-power 60 Watt devices that have emerged on the market, and extend distances with fiber cabling. www.omnitron-systems.com

Belden recently introduced what it called the “future of 10G Networking” with its new small diameter Category 6A 10GXS cable. The product line addresses a critical market need for a smaller, high performance cable with a simple design for emerging wireless, security and other applications. 10GXS cables are faster and easier to install with 25% diameter and weight reduction, fewer pair twists, increased bend radius, and easy tape removal, Belden says. They also maintain strong performance without compromise through 100 metres and deliver 100W of power without overheating for emerging applications, the company added. www.belden.com

Fiber safety glasses from Transglobal Systems of Canada Inc. are designed to protect installers from the overexposure to dangerous light in a fiber optic system which operates in the infra-red scale outside of the visible spectrum. Technicians are exposed to increased risk and liability when using chemicals and handling bare fibers during termination. Meanwhile, the company also recently launched the Fiber Cable Caddy, which is designed to provide a temporary connection for an emergency or disaster recovery situation in a fiber optic system. Up to six duplex multimode connections can be deployed until a permanent link has been established. www.tsoc.com

Xuron Model 9180 Kevlar shears are designed with tapered cutting blades that have one serrated edge for gripping the slippery aramid woven cloth fabric fibers and a sharp edge for cutting them. Capable of producing a clean, straight cut, these scissors are ideal for splicing applications and feature cushioned rubber handles and a return spring for user comfort, the company says. Eliminating finger loops, Xuron Model 9180 Kevlar® Shears fit comfortably in either hand, regardless of size. The cutting blades are heat treated to Rc 58-60 and have a suggested list price of US$25.25. www.xuron.com

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May/June 2015

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ars ting

ers hem. , e ideal

r ys. n

g 58-60 e

New & Noteworthy oteworthy

5. PLATINUM TOOLS

6. LEGRAND

7. DAINTREE NETWORKS

8. DELL

Platinum Tools recently launched a new Tone and Probe Set during 2015 ISC West. Now shipping, it has an MSRP of US$29.95.The tone generator features include a slide switch to select Tone/Off/Cont a continuity mode to verify if a wire is broken, alligator clips to test pairs, and an RJ11connector for data or phone lines. Features include steady tone, push-to-scan button, and a clear loudspeaker, which allow an installer to quickly trace and identify cable locations on jacks or through walls. In addition, wire bundles are easily penetrated with the tapered probe tip. www.platinumtools.com

Legrand has announced the availability of its new Pass & Seymour Plug Load RF Receptacle, which provides a simple-to-use, wireless solution for plug load control. It works in concert with the Pass & Seymour Plug Load RF Signal Pack and adds to an existing offering of code-compliant controlled receptacles, the company said. Enhanced plug load management is attained when the Pass & Seymour RF Receptacle is installed into a branch wiring system and the low voltage RF Signal Pack is integrated to an occupancy sensor and 24Vdc power pack. www.legrand.com

Daintree Networks’WHS100 wireless sensor provides integrated wireless connectivity and an embedded motion control sensor in one package and operates with the Daintree ControlScope wireless building control offering. It can be used in a range of fixture types, including high-bay, mid-bay, and low-bay luminaires for industrial and warehouse facilities. With a wide operating temperature range and wet location rating, the WHS100 is well suited for manufacturing environments as well as parking and outdoor area lighting applications. The design of the sensor allows for easy installation into the fixture and optimal wireless RF performance. www.daintree.net

The Dell Storage SCv2000 Series provides organizations entry-level storage arrays that contain the same common management and several of the core features as Dell’s higherend SC Series arrays. Features include integrated data protection to support specialized projects, database and test environments, or simple storage consolidation., RAID tiering to optimize capacity, thin provisioning, flash support, datamigration services, and multi-protocol connectivity. Granular data protection allows up to 2,000 snapshots and 500 replications. Starting at approximately $16,850 per array, the new series launches with three models supported by three expansion options. www.dell.ca

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May/June 2015

Connections+

L it e rat u re R eviews

Data Center Solutions: Multi-tenant, Service Provider, Cloud

Rittal’s IT Liquid Cooling Package Rittal provides an innovative cooling solution that provides up to 60 kW of cooling capacity direct to your rack. By bringing the cooling direct to the heat source, energy efficiency is optimised. Rittal’s LCP is a scalable solution that you can expand as your data centre and cooling needs grow. www.rittal.ca marketing@rittal.ca 1-800-399-0748

Anixter has a broad infrastructure offering to fit your current and future data center needs. Anixter cultivates strong relationships with leading manufacturers to provide customers with access to the types and quantities of products they need. With a dedicated technical staff, numerous educational offerings and memberships in many of the largest relevant standards organizations, our dedication to technical expertise makes Anixter a partner that customers can rely on for the latest products, applications, industry trends, standards and emerging technologies. To learn more call: 1-877-ANIXTER

www.rittal.ca

www.anixter.com

Power to the Cable

Free Siemon INNOVATE digital magazine

Power over Ethernet (PoE) has come a long way. With the development of new power-hungry applications and devices, the power delivery requirements have evolved from 15.4W over two pairs to 100W over the four pairs of an Ethernet cable. While the ability to remotelydeliver higher power outputs has many benefits, it also introduces a set of challenges that need to be carefully considered in order to ensure that the final cabling system is compliant with current and upcoming standards.

In this quarterly electronic magazine, Siemon provides educational information on high performance infrastructure solutions for Data Centers, LANs and Intelligent Buildings. Featuring the latest new product innovations, industry standard updates, trends, technical articles, case studies and more. To access your free copy visit:

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To learn more, visit:

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www.belden.com

Graybar Canada’s Comm/Data Solutions Brochure

www.graybarcanada.com

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+ THE MAGAZINE FOR ICT PROFESSIONALS

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At Graybar Canada, the wholesale distribution of Comm/Data represents an extensive list of first class manufacturers and provides a wide range of quality products including wireless networking products, copper/fibre optic cable, telephone headsets, audio/video conferencing products and tools and test equipment. Visit graybarcanada.com/cdlinecard to find out who are best-in-class vendor partners are and which product categories we carry.

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Connections+ 2015 MEDIA KIT The magazine for ICT professionals, Connections+ readership targets individuals who purchase, design, specify, install, maintain and test structured cabling, networking and telecom products as well as facilities management specialists and senior IT executives who are responsible for overseeing the implementation and installation of these initiatives. For more information contact Maureen Levy – 416-510-5111 or mlevy@connectionsplus.ca

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TH E B ACK PAG E

Everything’s going hybrid –

Or is it? By Dave Webb

ail the hybrid vehicle! This technological wonder combines the lower fuel and carbon footprint costs of an electric engine with the power of good old gasoline. Not only that, when the vehicle is in gaspowered mode, it’s actually charging the batteries that drive its electric locomotion. Further, it automatically shifts between gasoline and electric propulsion according to the demands of the road and the driver. It’s a technological miracle that will surely mitigate the cost of energy, the demand for non-renewable fuel resources, and help us create that toupee the ozone layer desperately needs. Well, it might. If anyone would buy the thing. Through 2014, sales of hybrid vehicles in North America held a plucky market share of about one quarter of one per cent of the market. On the high-tech side, hybrid is the direction the market (read, “vendors”) is taking on a couple of fronts. Tech is very much a vendor-led market. Tech vendors have the power to make you change your mind about the way you do things. You eventually had to replace that operating system. You eventually gave up dial-up for broadband. Cloud computing was hype a few years ago; now it’s gaining traction. Thing is, in tech, vendors generally know what they’re talking about. You wouldn’t go back to dialup, and no one’s heading back to Vista anytime soon. That’s because the improvements they’ve sold us on are actual improvements. That’s why, when vendors start chatter about hybrid, it’s worth listening. Most of the chatter now is about hybrid cloud deployments. As I’ve said, cloud itself was planted firmly in the middle of Gartner’s hype cycle not so long ago. Enterprises had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the cloud world – some still do – largely because of the perception of the public cloud as a Wild Data West, with poor security and worse governance. Surveys still show the greatest impediment to cloud adoption is concern about security. In fact, the most costly data breaches – think Heartland or TJX – have been on-premise breaches, not that cloud operations haven’t had their share. With best practices followed, cloud implementations are as secure, if not more so, than on-prem – get the security right, and everybody in that cloud gets it.

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May/June 2015

For even more sensitive implementations, there’s the private cloud. It’s just like the public one, except you don’t have roommates that eat your groceries. In a private cloud, you’re not sharing infrastructure with the provider’s other customers. It can be managed, hosted, or on-prem. Once an organization wraps its head around the benefits of shifting computing infrastructure from CAPEX to OPEX – with the cost-certainty that implies – there is a pretty compelling argument for, if not shifting your infrastructure to a cloud-based infrastructure, at least building out your future applications on someone else’s platform. Here is where hybrid comes in. You’ve already got a substantial investment in your IT infrastructure, but it’s time to grow, and there’s no capital budget. Shifting workloads and data from your data centre to a private or public cloud allows you to combine the best of both worlds. Close-to-the-vest data centre applications and data can be kept in-house; new applications can be built out on a private cloud, which still maintains data and application integrity; public cloud offerings, billed on a per-cycle basis, can handle compute load when scalability is needed, for seasonal spikes or special marketing offers, for example. Data storage is another area where the hybrid model is emerging. Different storage topologies work more efficiently for different data workloads. And the technologies cross over. If you’ve had a storage area network for more than a few years, you’ve got a substantial investment in Fibre Channel fabric. Ethernet now competes with FC for speed, and for the time being, it’s winning the race. But you can extend your FC infrastructure across an Ethernet fabric. The hardware’s cheaper, the speed is comparable, and you don’t have to junk a bunch of expensive hardware. Unfortunately, you can extend the hybrid car analogy to hybrid IT. Some people (okay, let’s call a spade a spade, some men) just want that gas-guzzling, over-powered, underutilized SUV for security-blanket purposes, and the logic of the hybrid argument is simply ignored. Don’t make the same mistake on the IT front. C+ Dave Webb is a Toronto-based freelance writer. He can be reached at dave@dweebmedia.ca. www.connectionsplus.ca

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