ITNEXT November 2013

INTERVIEW | Hu Yoshida, VP and CTO, Hitachi Data Systems | Pg36

“ITDMs should collaborate & strategize”

f o r t h e n e x t g e n e r at i o n o f c i o s

Ashish Khanna AVP-IT, EIH Ltd

BossTalk

5 laws and 5 corollaries Pg 06

Plus

Art of

Big Data: Right Approach, Right Solution

Virtual Deployment IT decision makers bring in innovative best practices in deploying desktop virtualisation technology to enhance productivity Pg12

November 2013 | `100 | Volume 04 | Issue 10 | A 9.9 Media Publication @itnext_magazine www.itnext.com | facebook.com/itnext |

Pg 26

Editorial

Productivity at its Peak What’s that?

With the industry constantly resonating with the refrain ‘increase your agility, enhance productivity, align with business and contribute to the growth of the organization’, the senior IT decision makers have laid out a plan.

They are not influenced anymore by the footprints or increased adoption of any technology per se. IT managers are looking at addressing business needs and are ready to absorb any technology that caters to the need. So what’s new now? Senior IT decision makers have bought themselves into the positive factors that desktop virtualisation has brought in, irrespective of whether the technology has become all pervasive or not.

Senior IT managers are cognizant of the fact that it is critical to enhance the agility in the business with enhanced productivity and reduction in cost, and that appropriate technology such as desktop virtualisation is most suited to this. However, the idea is to find effective ways to deploy the technology and leverage the innovations around it.

IT Next’s cover feature on ‘Art of Virtual Deployment’ in the current edition provides insights into how senior IT decision makers have evolved effective mechanisms to deploy desktop virtualisation tools and found easy ways to deploy them.

The most heartening aspect is that unlike the run of the mill technologies that get deployed resulting in not so many benefits, deploying desktop virtualisation was a well thought out plan. It was embarked upon in a phased manner taking all the business stakeholders into account to ensure that nothing went wrong.

IT managers were aware that the acquisition cost was high with regard to desktop virtualisation, but that did not deter them from absorbing it as the end effect was about enhancing employee productivity which, in turn, impacted business growth positively.

“Senior IT managers are cognizant of the fact that it is critical to enhance agility in the business with enhanced productivity and desktop virtualisation is most suited to this” Geetha Nandikotkur

Blogs To Watch!

2014 - The Year of DaaS ttp://www.brianmadden. com/blogs/gabeknuth/ archive/2013/10/30/vmwarecitrix-microsoft-desktops-asa-service-solutions-will-make2014-quot-the-year-of-daas-quot. aspx How to avoid the 7 pitfalls of desktop virtualisation http://blogs.citrix. com/2013/04/18/how-toavoid-the-7-pitfalls-of-desktopvirtualization/ Attacking the high costs of desktop Virtualisation http://blogs.gartner.com/ gunnar-berger/attackingthe-high-costs-of-desktopvirtualization-part-1/ Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation (MED-V) http://www.microsoft.com/ en-us/windows/enterprise/ products-and-technologies/ mdop/med-v.aspx

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Content NOVEMBER 2013

For the l atest technology uPDATES Go to itnext.in

Volume 04 | Issue 10

Facebook: http://www.facebook. com/home.php#/group. php?gid=195675030582 Twitter: http://t witter.com/itnext LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/ groups?gid=2261770&trk=myg_ ugrp_ovr

Art of Virtual Deployment Page

12 cover story

12 Virtually Right

IT decision makers bring in innovative best practices in deploying desktop virtualization technology to enhance productivity

boss talk

interview

IT decision makers bring in innovative best practices to make desktop virtualisation easy to deploy so as to enhance productivity and reduce cost

15 Easy Steps to Virtual Deployment

IT Managers are making conscious efforts to evolve an effective mechanism to access desktop virtualization and deployment methods

19 BYOD and VDI : Harmoniously Aligned

VDI has become the primary enabler of BYOD due to its core ability to stream data to mobile devices in an encrypted and containerised manner

21 DaaS is Taking Baby Steps

Desktop as a Service is on the anvil as most IT managers are optimistic about its uptake with new platforms like Android and Mac in enterprise scenario INTERVIEW | HU YOSHIDA, VP AND CTO, HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS | Pg36

“ITDMs should collaborate & strategize�

F O R T H E N E X T G E N E R AT I O N O F C I O s

Ashish Khanna AVP-IT, EIH Ltd

BossTalk

5 laws and 5 corollaries Pg 06

Plus

ART OF

Big Data: Right Approach, Right Solution

VIRTUAL DEPLOYMENT

Pg 26

cover Design: SHIGIL NARAYANAN Photo: SUBHOJIT PAUL

IT decision makers bring in innovative best practices in deploying desktop virtualisation technology to enhance productivity Pg12

November 2013 | `100 | Volume 04 | Issue 10 | A 9.9 Media Publication @itnext_magazine www.itnext.com | facebook.com/itnext |

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06 Dr Hugh Thompson, Senior VP, Blue Coat on enabling business with security and 5 laws and 5 corollaries

36 Hu Yoshida, VP& CTO, Hitachi Data Systems, emphasises the need for CIOs to collaborate with vendors in strategising

itnext.in

Simplifying IT to drive Pure value|

MANAGEMENT Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Vikas Gupta

IT Managers leverage converged IBM PureSystems to radically transform and simplify the IT lifecycle so as to drive value

15 minute manager 41 Countering Botnets I K J Latesh, IT Security Professional and Research Scholar, throws light on challenges for IT managers to identify bots across their network and defuse them from action

EDITORIAL

Page

Group Editor: R Giridhar Editor: Geetha Nandikotkur Senior Asst. Editor: Subhankar Kundu

32

DESIGN Sr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Sr. Art Director: Anil VK Associate Art Director: Anil T Sr. Visualisers: Manav Sachdev, Shokeen Saifi & Sristi Maurya Visualiser: NV Baiju Sr. Designers: Shigil Narayanan, Haridas Balan & Manoj Kumar VP Designers: Charu Dwivedi, Peterson PJ, Pradeep G Nair Dinesh Devgan & Vikas Sharma Consulting Sr. Art Director: Binesh Sreedharan

Right Solution, Right Approach 26 Big Data Solutions | As big data goes bigger, IT managers are challenged with the task of identifying data that qualifies for big data and finding appropriate solutions to process it

MARCOM

Designer: Rahul Babu STUDIO

Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Sr. Photographer: Jiten Gandhi

Open Debate

Update 08 Converged Networking to Create Revenue I Cisco has launched Network Convergence System (NCS) to help telcos in India in monetization

cube chat 46 Do What You Love, | Feroz Shaikh, Vice President-IT, Prime Focus quotes Aristotle to express his hunger to learn new things

45 Three Expert Panel | Is Software Defined Networking (SDN) different from Virtualisation and Cloud?’

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INBoX INTERVIEW | RICHARD STALLMAN, SOFTWARE FREEDOM ACTIVIST AND COMPUTER PROGRAMMER | Pg 34

“Freedom is all that matters for users”

Open SOurce challenge | coveR stoRy F O R T H E N E X T G E N E R AT I O N O F C I O s

BossTalk

Business face to IT Pg 08

Insight

Right Mix to Secure Better: Embracing BYOD

Is RecessIon

Pg 30

OPEN CHALLENGE

Sharat Airani CTO, Intellinet Datasys

RIngIng the

Dhananjay C Rokde Global Head, Information Security, Cox & Kings Group

open souRce

THE ECONOMIC SLOWDOWN IS COMPELLING SENIOR IT DECISION MAKERS TO GO OPEN ON THE OPEN SOURCE AS A COST SAVING STRATEGY ACROSS STRATUMS Pg 14

October 2013 | `100 | Volume 04 | Issue 09 | A 9.9 Media Publication facebook.com/itnext | @itnext_magazine www.itnext.com |

OCTOBER 2013

Bells?

Open Source has come a long way since its inception to armour IT managers against recession

IT NEXT thanks its Readers for the warm response

by SU b HAN KAR KU N DU

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P H OTO / IL LU ST R AT IO N / IMAG IN G C R E D IT

P H OTO / IL LU ST R AT IO N / IMAG IN G C R E D IT

Desig n by HARI DAS bAl AN

N

illustr atio n by A N Il T

ow, with the recession alarm banging the ears of economy, senior IT managers across industries are taking a re-look at IT budgets. For the second time in last five years, the IT industry is witnessing a slowdown. The buzz among IT managers seems to be “how about open source?”

What is driving this trend? The major factors are rising software licensing fees, CIOs operating under constrained budgets, internet making way for new delivery models and evolving design architecture considering BYOD. In the current business environment, open source software and technologies beyond software are becoming an integral part of the IT landscape. This is particularly true in the internet age, where content

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InsIde 16 | Innovating with an Open mind 19 | Commercial Viability: A Proven Fact 20 | An Open Challenge?

25 | Setting up an Open Culture

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IT NEXT values your feedback

We want to know what you think about the magazine, and how we can make it a better read. Your comments will go a long way in making IT NEXT the preferred publication for the community. Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to editor@itnext.in.

Why Open Source Congratulations to the IT Next team for publishing a superb stream of articles analyzing the Open Source segment in the Open Source Challenge Edition. The issue features experts representing a cross section of the industry ranging from IT companies to the Government to activists, each providing meaningful insights that matter the most in their respective segment.

IT users have long been grappling with the definition of Open Source as opposed to Free Software and the question if Free Software is really free. The interview with Richard Stallman debunks a lot of myths and gives you a fresh perspective.

The issue also covers all topical hot buttons or trends in today’s IT scenario ranging from Cloud to Big Data to Enterprise Security to BYOD. The presentation, the copy and the design complement one another while assisting in easy reading and comprehension.

www.linkedin.com/ groups?gid= 2261770&trk= myg_ugrp_ovr 300 members

read this issue online http://www.itnext. in/resources/ magazine

Kapil Dev Singh, Founder, Coeus Age

Open Letter

DC Priyan, Managing Partner, Ogilvy Public Relations

5 Organization-Market Imbalances a CIO Must Understand Today, the hierarchies are eroding, boundaries are becoming more porous and unclear, roles are fuzzy and evolving, strategies are fluid and short term, power is distributed and goal is to become change ready.

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I have identified 5 such areas of imbalance - social imbalance, technology imbalance, change imbalance and role-shifts imbalance.

Understanding these imbalances can help the CIO to become aware of and do something about the problems on the surface. All these imbalances also are highly interdependent on each other i.e. they feed into each other and do not exist in isolation. Hence, to do something about them, one needs to adopt a whole systems approach.

Though these imbalances need to be noticed, understood and acted upon by the entire top management (CEO, CXOs and the CIO), I am urging the CIOs here to take a special note.

The following questions the CIOs must continuously ponder upon.

1. How are these five imbalances manifesting in my organization?

2.

What is the explanation for the imbalances and the related manifestations? What are the consequences?

3. What needs to be done to handle such imbalances?

4. How can IT help manage such imbalances?

5. What is the preparedness of IT to be able to handle the imbalances?

6.

What needs to be done to enhance the preparedness of IT? How can SMAC help?

ITNEXT<space> <your feedback> and send it to

567678 *Special rates apply

I really liked the latest issue (Open Challenge) of IT Next, particularly the cover story on ‘open source’. The industry leaders’ views on this topic were very insightful. I’m infact a regular reader of the magazine and it keeps me up to date with the current trends and happenings in the IT sector in India. I’d like to congratulate the team for constantly releasing such great issues one after the other.

Altaf Halde, Managing Director South Asia, Kaspersky Lab India

Boss talk | Dr Hugh Thompson

En ablin g Business w i th S ecu r i t y

5 Laws, 4 Corollaries of Security

W

here is the transformation happening? IT is being aligned with business to enable security officers to rope in more security measures.

Security Perception Changes Before evolving the laws and relevant corollaries, it is also essential to look back as to why the field of information security is evolving faster than ever. Now, senior leadership across enterprises are taking interest.

“A social science concerned with analysis of attacker motivations and business risk, hackernomics is characterised by 5 fundamental laws and 4 corollaries”

Shift in Attackers Attackers are after much more than traditional monetizable data drive hacktivism, statesponsored attacks and IP attacks breaches.

Suggestion BOX

• In the absence of security education, people make poor security decisions with technology • Attackers usually don’t get in by cracking some impenetrable security control, they look for weak points like trusting employees

Change in User Expectations Corollary

Security is being woven into service level agreements and price, process maturity and scale can only go so far--“assurance” is also key.

Today’s Social Concern: Hackernomics A social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of attacker motivations, economics, and business risk, hackernomics is characterised by 5 fundamental immutable laws and 4 corollaries.

5 Laws: • Most attackers aren’t evil or insane; they just want something.

• Security isn’t about security. It’s about mitigating risk at some cost • Most costly breaches come from simple failures, not from attacker ingenuity

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• No budget to protect against evil people but against them who are looking for weaker targets • In the absence of metrics, we tend to over focus on risks that are either familiar or recent • Bad guys can, however, be very creative if properly incentivised • Systems need to be easy to use securely and difficult to use insecurely • Business teams and users are already consuming the best technology at will

This book helps you understand how to think in multiple dimensions and it’s a great bridge between science and business.

The three steps to business assurance are about having continuity, agility and governance.

W r i t e r : D o u g l as H o fsta dt e r P u bl i s h e r : P e n g u i n B o o ks

Dr Hugh Thompson, Senior VP& Chief Security Strategist, Blue Coat

The Plateau Effect: How enterprise is evolving

Update I n d u s t r y

Converged Networking to Create Revenue TRENDS | With Internet of Everything (IoE) being the buzzword around

the networking world, telecom service providers in India have been constantly looking at solutions that could create the highly flexible and manageable networking ecosystem to enhance their end users. Cisco has launched Network Convergence System (NCS) to power it.

The Cisco NCS family consists of three key components that can be managed as a single integrated system for business agility and simplified operations - NCS 6000, NCS 4000 and NCS 2000.

With more than 100 patents, it joins Cisco Carrier Routing (CRS) and Aggregation Services Router (ASR) families

An overwhelming majority of organizations view their Big

a Big Dat Data processing as mission critical.

According to a report, most companies are using or planning to use dedicated big data tools in their production environment to cope up with the influx of massive amounts of data. 56% of respondents are planning to move from RDBMS to a NoSQL data store.

30% of those using dedicated tools are planning to combine NoSQL data store with a Hadoop processing platform.

Source: Gigaspaces

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Recent trends in big data tools and architecture

60.0% 50.0% 40.0% 30.0% 20.0% 10.0% 0.0%

NoSQL Data store...

Hadoop Distro...

trends deals products services people

jReal-Time Event...

Other products...

With the launch of NCS, Cisco is trying to help service providers to have the opportunity to play a central role in enabling new and unique experiences by building on their current infrastructure with NCS. Also, NCS adds a dimension to networking, allowing operators to leverage network intelligence for greater monetization pavements.

In India, Cisco is in talks with leading telcos but no announcement has been made.

Sanjay Rohatgi, Managing Director, Service Provider Sales, Cisco India and SAARC says, “It’s a powerful solution for service providers who are looking to create robust networks, data centers and applications that have advanced capabilities in areas such as programmability, performance, resiliency and scale in order to drive business growth.

We are bullish about the adoption and success of NCS in India.”

Among the global service providers –BSkyB (Sky), KDDI and Telstra are deploying the Cisco NCS to create new revenue streams, simplify operations and deliver exciting personalized experiences to their customers.

NCS’s capabilities enable service providers to not only accommodate growing network traffic but also seize the opportunity created by trillions of programmable devicedriven events generated by the IoE, the networked connection of people, data, processes and things. Cisco claims that NCS has been designed to facilitate such IoE events, which can be ongoing “conversations” creating strings of interactivity between people, applications and devices.

Nikon D5300

Panasonic T31

Nikon India has launched the compact and lightweight entry-level DSLR — the D5300.

It is Nikon’s first digital SLR camera to offer built-in Wi-Fi and GPS functions. It packs in 24.2 megapixels along with a new EXPEED 4 image processing engine.

It’s a budget Android 4.2 based smartphone that runs on 4.2.2 Jelly Bean with a 4-inch display with 800 x 480 pixels. It has a 1.3GHz dual-core processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of inbuilt storage.

Logitech Z600 speakers This allows multi-pairing with three devices at once, making it easy to play music on smartphone, pc and tablet. It can be cou pled with Bluetooth A2DP-enabled device.

Top Vertical Predictions for IT in 2014 and Beyond: Gartner TRENDS | In its annual Predicts research on industry trends titled “Top Industries Predicts 2014, it has featured strategic planning assumptions that CIOs, senior business executives and IT leaders should factor into their enterprise planning and strategy-setting initiatives.

Top industry predictions: By 2016, poor return on equity will drive more than 60 per cent of banks worldwide to process transactions on cloud By 2017, more than 60 per cent of government organizations with a CIO and a chief digital officer will eliminate one of these roles.

By 2017, 40 per cent of utilities with smart metering solutions

Many industries face accelerating pressure for fundamental business transformation

will use cloud-based big data analytics By year-end 2015, inadequate ROI will drive insurers to abandon 40 per cent of their current customer-facing mobile apps Full-genome sequencing will stimulate a new market for

Around The World

medical data banks, with market penetration exceeding three per cent by 2016 By 2016, 60 per cent of U.S. health insurers will know the procedure price and provider quality rating of shoppable medical services in advance Through 2017, K-12 online education spending will increase 25 per cent By 2018, 3D printing will result in the loss of at least $100 billion per year in intellectual property globally By 2017, 15 per cent of consumers will respond to context-aware offers based on their individual demographics and shopper profiles By 2015, 80 per cent of life science organizations will be crushed by elements of big data, exposing poor ROI on IT investments

quick byte

Salesforce Identity to enable CIOs deliver better identity Salesforce.com has launched Salesforce Identity to provide integrated identity services to connect every employee, customer and partner to any app, on any device. It eliminates complex identity silos—enabling CIOs to deliver a simple, productive and customized user experience across every web, mobile and onpremise app. IT administrators can now simplify the process of provisioning and managing their companies’ collection of mobile, cloud and onpremises applications.

Jorma Ollila, ex-chairman of Nokia

“Apple concentrated exclusively on expensive telephones. At Nokia, we had thought of doing the same, but the operators wanted inexpensive models instead”

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ASK THE EXPERT Ways to evolve new strategies with changing IT landscape

Challenges in the Changing IT Landscape Lack of on-site resources, resources deployed in distributed environments and emerging BYOD trend pose a challenge for IT managers. Here are some tips on how to conquer the major challenges How do you help IT managers face the challenges in the changing IT landscape?

Preparing for the future of the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s IT infrastructure is key. Managers today are struggling to do more with less space, money and time. Besides network threats and the ever-changing IT, they worry about equipment failure and lack of on-site resources. Increasing demand for constant availability and changes in the way IT is deployed have also heightened day-to-day challenges and pressures. We provide the backbone of physical IT infrastructure by offering the most manageable and most adaptable solutions, while at the same time keeping them simple to configure, order and install.

Integrated infrastructure solutions include backup power and power distribution, cooling, enclosures, and management software. Adaptable solutions scale from the smallest IT spaces up to multi-megawatt data centres.

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dossier

Amod Ranade General Manager, Datacenter Business Development, Schneider Electric IT Business brings to light challenges faced by IT managers in changing the IT landscape

IT deployments are becoming more complex with technology changes such as cloud and virtualisation. How can IT managers align their strategy with a solution to cope up with this?

Technologies like cloud computing and virtualisation, have a promise for improving asset utilization on the IT side, and thus reducing costs for the organization. But, many of the benefits of Cloud and Virtualisation can get lost, if the physical infrastructure for the data center is unable to cope with this new architecture on the IT side. The new technologies create workloads that are not static in time and space, as a result it becomes very difficult to channel the Power/Cooling to these dynamic workloads, while ensuring right sizing of the infrastructure. IT managers need to design their data centers in a modular fashion, and deploy management suites that help them visualize the supply and demand of Power/ Cooling/Space/etc. Over 70 per cent of reported data center outages are attributed to human error, and a

ask the expert CUSTOM PUBLISHING

“ IT is driving corporates to move beyond challenges of compliance, regulation, management and security ” strong management and monitoring platform can go a long way in preventing these.

Unlike space-filling, energy inefficient servers in house, cloud computing allows you to pay only for the services that you use.

By simply moving to cloud computing, a company seeking to reduce energy consumption and energy expenses can also cut its carbon emissions drastically. Companies are turning to energy efficient strategies to minimise the energy needed to manage all their data. But, there are gaps to fill. For example, Greenpeace International reports that companies not only need to measure how efficiently they are using electricity, but also ensure that the electricity chosen to manage their cloud is clean.

How do you see the IT Manager tackling BYOD? The demand for 24/7 availability is ever increasing.

About 700 million WiFi technology users worldwide have to be catered to. When the market for corporate mobile phones was experiencing its first explosive period of growth, the handsets were basic and functionality restricted. So you pretty much used what you were given--the phones still had novelty value. But today, people want to express themselves; add their own apps, social sites and media--music, video and photos. At Schneider Electric, we see an increasing number of people wanting to add their own laptops, tablets and smartphones to the company network. It shows that the consumerisation of IT is driving corporates to move beyond challenges of compliance, regulation, management and security, to a point where half of all businesses might be making BYOD available by 2017 as there is a business benefit. BYOD is transforming the economics of corporate network computing. Against this backdrop, IT managers should opt for modular IT infrastructure to prepare themselves for increased dependence on IT. Besides, maintaining constant uptime becomes critical for which they should opt for monitoring and management solutions to track the health of IT which can enable them to predict and prevent future problems.

How should IT managers tackle IT space utilisation issues?

Space optimisation

62% increase in DC efficiency is ensured by deploying server virtualisation and optimized power/cooling techniques

Optimise open spaces through better organisation. Utilise solutions that incorporate open frame racks, cable management, and wall-mounted enclosures to make the most of available space in a cost-effective way.

Every building undergoes changes over time., resulting in negative impact on building performance, lower productivity and higher energy and building maintenance costs.

To address this problem, many companies are “recommissioning” their buildings as a way to fine-tune and update building performance.

Increased density and heat load Ensure that you use proper cooling to manage the added heat from the increased density in your space. Utilise row/ rack based cooling to provide proper air flow and ventilation for an ideal IT environment. Row/Rack-based cooling is also much more efficient while handling higher densities.

Remote site management Remote sites can be easily managed with monitoring software that allows you to manage and control all of your environments from a single location or device. Having a single centralised dashboard allows you to proactively manage your IT environments and avoid potential downtime disasters.

Energy efficiency Save energy by implementing energy efficient UPS systems and provide clean power while simplifying the IT space.

Also, make sure your power and cooling are best designed for your needs by rightsizing and implementing modular designs to maximise efficiency.

Availability for Transition to the Cloud Transitioning to the cloud can be a beneficial business practice, but brings a greater need for constant availability. Ensure that you have a rightsized UPS solution which provides enough runtime to get you through a blackout.

Consider an extended runtime UPS if you do not have a generator, which will allow your equipment to ride through longer blackouts.

The section BROUGHT YOU BY

We believe that the tips below would help in resolving the IT space challenges

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art of virualising desktop | cover story

IT decision makers bring in innovative best practices to make desktop virtualisation easy to deploy so as to enhance productivity and reduce cost

By Su b hank ar K u nd u & n G e e t h a Desi gn by hari das bal an | i l lu st rat i o n by s h i g i L narayanan

Innovations in desktop virtualisation are being increasingly leveraged by

Inside Pages 15 | Easy Steps to Virtual Deployment 19 | BYOD & VDI: Harmoniously aligned 21 | DaaS is taking Baby Steps 24 | VDIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Licensing cost justification

business functions and units to make the processes effective and efficient, which in turn results in enhanced productivity. Senior IT managers at large are working on use cases around quick IT infrastructure delivery time for service centres in order to put business-critical plans in place. Manufacturing plant users are hopping on to the desktop virtualisation platform over WAN to enable cost saving through procurement of thin clients rather than desktops or laptops.

There is little doubt that desktop virtualisation is making inroads across enterprises and IT heads are ready to embrace the technology so as to drive down cost and enhance productivity; this, despite the fact that the acquisition cost on the desktop virtualisation is considered to be high.

However, the key difference here is to find out if IT managers are taking the right approach to meeting their business demands and boosting productivity.

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“Having effective management capabilities,

IT managers now need not worry about how to provision these desktops or the apps to be consumed on a different device, but think

of effective ways of managing the virtual desktops” Srikanth Karnakota Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft.

Team IT Next embarked on a study to find how desktop virtualisation is being perceived and the effective mechanisms of deploying the same. Interestingly, IT managers are making concerted efforts to build the right virtual environment in terms of choosing the right virtualisation hypervisor, choosing the right security to make the virtual environment secure,

the right monitoring tools to evolve a monitoring mechanism to ensure relevant alerts, the perfect backup strategy for valid backup and educating and documenting, which is a crucial step.

Srikanth Karnakota, Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft, says, “The roots of desktop virtualisation technology is not in desktop but in server technology which is the backbone. If we

Why Desktop Virtualisation?

Enhanced productivity and efficiency Improved management and maintenance, helpdesk tickets down Power savings compared to traditional PCs Optimum storage utilisation Desktop virtualisation has enabled faster booting time of desktops, which earlier used to run into minutes Security and governance have improved. Antivirus, patch update etc., now happen on the virtual layer/master image rather than on physical machines and impacting its performance. Audit of end user systems has become much simpler and consumes less time as compared to set-up with physical machines

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look at Windows Server 2012, the latest we launched a week back, we have taken desktop virtualisation to a whole new level altogether; because now, within the server, IT managers can do different kinds of activities--host desktop, pool desktop or a hosted session.” “Having the server platform, IT managers don’t need to buy additional infrastructure, or any additional capabilities. Having effective management capabilities , IT managers now need not worry about how to provision these desktops or the apps be consumed on a different device, but think of effective ways of managing the virtual desktops and ensure that the cost does not spiral up on both storage and networking on a different device,” says Karnakota.

Clear Strategy in Place IT managers are taking a 360 degree approach in evaluating various functions which could be impacted with desktop virtualisation deployment. For instance, they are evaluating desktop as a service model in working out a cloud model, observing the BYOD trends to bring in necessary interfaces.

imaging by pe terson pj

Right Virtual Strategy

art of virtualising desktop | cover story

Easy Steps to Virtual Deployment IT decision makers are making conscious efforts to evolve an effective mechanism to assess the desktop virtualisation environment and deployment methods Is Virtual Deployment an Art? Deploying virtualisation methodology is an art, as deployment of desktop virtualisation requires detailed asessment of one’s IT environment, and implementation strategy differs from one organisation to another.

Anoop Handa, EVP & CIO, Fullerton India says, “Deployment of endpoint infrastructure and embracing new technology such as desktop virtualisation for end-user computing comes with its own challenges due to its inherent impact on the end-users across the organisation. Desktop virtualisation deployment can be termed an organisation-wide ‘IT enabled Transformation/Change’ initiative.

To streamline deployment of desktop virtualisation and make it easier, the following key steps are recommended: etailed assessment of current D desktop computing environment Compilation of users and categorisation of users basis function, geography, data requirements, data volume and need for availability of local data Appreciation and awareness of a variety of end-user peripherals-printers, biometric devices, scanners, etc Review of bandwidth availability at various locations that access centralised data

centre environment Evaluation of technology and final selection of the most relevant and most effective technology in consideration of longer term vision and organisational fitment Selection of the ‘right’ implementation partner Building up a comprehensive ROI/ business case and listing down all

“The very first step is to do the profiling of users after a successful proof of concept of technology at your organisation which will further help in getting the sizing right”

Sachin Jain CIO, Evalueserve

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cover story | Art of Virtualising desktop benefits – both IT benefits as well as beyond Testing the waters through a pilot test / proof-of-concept Evaluation of test results and resolution of identified concerns/issues “And only once you are confident and the test results positive, should you embark upon this journey on a wider scale and progress with complete deployment,” says Handa.

Nilesh Goradia, Head Pre-Sales, India Subcontinent-Citrix, emphasises that the first step of desktop virtualisation be to identify user groups or user types in an organisation.

“Areas to look at – what are the user groups? What kind of things do you do using a physical desktop? What kind of applications do you use on it?

Within that, we also try to test the compatibility of the application such as a newer environment where the application will run,” he says.

Goradia further adds, “The second part would be the design of the solution.

Design is important because DV does not work on a stand-alone mode as it involves a lot of components such as blade, servers, storage, applications, networking; if tried on the Internet, there will be critical security components which will be involved.”

So, all these components have to work in sync if one has to deliver a particular

solution effectively. The hard disk components need to talk to each other. A wrong design can lead to wrong implementation. It leads to a dissatisfied user.

According to HP’s Vikram K, Director, ISS, HP India, some easy steps to deploy virtual desktop are: 1. Understanding users’ application and workload 2. Doing a proof of concept for a small number of users with actual intended deployment to test all use cases 3. Designing the solution which includes choosing the right virtualisation platform and methodology 4. Sizing virtualisation hosts (servers), storage and networking infrastructure for the requirement 5. D eploying the full solution in production to enable users to have access from their client devices like tablet, smart phones etc Sachin Jain, CIO, Evalueserve, recommends that one should always look for used cases from his/her organisation to build a case of desktop virtualisation. “The very first step is to do the profiling of users after a successful proof of concept of technology at your organisation which will further help in getting the sizing right.

These users should then be taken through a test phase to further filter or add more users on the basis of

“Deployment of desktop virtualisation comes with its own challenges due to its inherent impact on the end-users across the organisation”

Anoop Handa EVP & CIO, Fullerton India

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performance and user acceptance. Post that, the team should focus on execution in a phased manner without disturbing the entire organisation at the same time. This approach will also help in discovering and handling unexpected challenges/issues,” adds Jain.

Best Practices to Sustain the Strategy Besides putting their best foot forward to deploy effective methods, IT decision makers are learning their best lessons by way of putting in place the best practices.

Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Services India, drives high availability, security and backup recovery and retention as the best practices in the desktop virtualisation environment.

He adds, “High availability in the VDI set-up is configured to provide availability to end users and flexibility to work without disruption.

This also enables the end user to be connected to his workplace without any disruption even when he is travelling.”

Prabhu ensured taking adequate steps to keep the VDI set-up intrusion-free as the company was publishing VDI on the internet.

Frequent Breakdowns Communication happens through the SSL VPN solution, which is integrated with dual factor token-based authentication.

As a best practice, all backup of shared storage should configure with retention time. Disaster recovery for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) requires many of the same measures one would take for conventional PCs: backup methods and careful planning. In fact, VDI can make it even easier to recover data because information is not stored on end-user devices.

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Deploying virtualisation methodology is an art, as deployment of

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Some of the best practices are given below for reference:

Gas Phase Filtration • Most efficient system for purifying the air • Based on advanced Honeycomb technology using chemical filters • Bry-Air EcoScrub looks sleek and works quietly • Designed to complement the servers

1. Achieving the best end user experience An important consideration for selecting host rendering versus client rendering is the quality of the end user experience. End users care about the image display quality and experiencing no

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However, the lessons that Prabhu and his team learned by way of applying best practices was to make sure the reasons for the project were well-defined. In addition, these were important: Senior management support to address change management How to support heavy users Making sure the network infrastructure is up to the task You cannot have all users covered by a single vendor Integration with the surrounding ecosystem Program management and organisational structure for the implementation Ramesh Vantipalli (Head EUC India & South –Systems Engineering & Technology), VMware, says the real value in converting to a virtual desktop environment is realised only when a variety of seemingly conflicting requirements are met: a) the end users are happy, b) the corporation’s needs for security and compliance are met, c) the IT organisation has the control it needs without having to add costly resources, and d) the overall system performance and cost of ownership are improved.

28 cm x 10.3 cm

cover story | art of virtualising desktop

Effective Steps in Deployment Evaluation of Technologies Approach document to Senior Management with Executive Summary POC of Comparative Technologies etailed Business case with D Business, Quantitative and Qualitative benefits inalisation of Solution in CIO F Council

Project Plan Finalisation BOM Finalisation Procurement Installation and Configuration Testing Phase: (Application testing and ecosystem Integration) GO-LIVE

Techno Commercial comparison and Procurement.

Architecture and Configuration Audit

etailed Information Gathering: D (User and Application Profiling)

Project Handover and Sustenance

Architecture Finalisation: (On

perceptible delay in image rendering.

They also care about the response time or latency of the system they are using. They expect their desktop to provide nearly instantaneous responses for any query regardless of the type of information being retrieved--just like a laptop.

Host rendering and client rendering can both provide users with quality experience and reasonable response times for most environments.

The difference lies in which can provide the best experience for the changing network conditions. This will help to determine which approach is more suitable for your environment.

2. Making your organisation secur and compliant Many corporations have made security and compliance their top requirements when deploying a server hosted virtual desktop environment.

The need for better security has been demonstrated numerous times with theft of laptops containing customer account information and other mission critical data.

The risk of corporate confidential

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Technical Support to the Operations Team

information getting into the wrong hands has never been higher.

3. Making your organisation secure and compliant Managing operating system updates, application updates, firmware changes and more at the end user’s desktop is a full time job for most IT administrators.

In an environment that relies on full laptop and desktop support, organisations can spend $2,000 or more per year on maintaining each device. The IT organisation typically has to have someone assigned to be physically onsite in case one of the users has an issue. Centralised management is an option only for a wellmanaged PC environment and the restrictions that this implies are not practical for most organisations. The inefficiencies and escalating costs of managing PCs at the endpoint are well documented.

Most CIOs agree that zero management at the client is the most efficient, easiest, the lowest cost-wise and the most secure implementation for virtualising desktops.

4. Gaining Freedom from Application and Video Format Dependence Desktop virtualisation doesn’t tie the user to a specific version of an application or a specific video format. It frees the user and the IT organisation from specific hardware and operating system requirements and concerns that impact application versions.

In this type of environment, future applications just work since specific hardware is not needed at the client.

Host side rendering allows desktop virtualisation to accomplish.

For client-side rendering, this flexibility is lost because client side rendering requires specific CODECs at the endpoint for video. Future video formats are not guaranteed to work with client side rendering without IT intervention and upgrade at the endpoint.

Host-side rendering is completely application and video format independent, which provides a virtualised environment with no dependence on any additional software or hardware.

Client side rendered environments struggle to keep up with the latest application user interfaces.

To future-proof one’s investment and have a low maintenance solution, a solid, host-rendered environment makes for an excellent investment choice.

5.Optimising network bandwidth consumption Network bandwidth is at a premium during peak hours in most organisations. Network administrators need devices accessing the network to use the available bandwidth wisely.

Peak hours don’t happen 100 per cent of the time and, in fact, account for less than half of daily operations.

During non-peak hours, administrators desire network devices to use bandwidth optimally while still providing the best user experience.

The real goal of an IT organisation is to use network bandwidth and resources intelligently, i.e., during peak hours use less and exhibit a “fair share” policy, and during non-peak hours, use as much bandwidth as needed and expand to provide the best possible end user experience.

art of virtualising desktop | cover story

BYOD and VDI: Harmoniously Aligned IT managers concur that VDI has become the primary enabler of BYOD due to its core ability to stream data to mobile devices in an encrypted and containerised manner Most industry players, vendors and senior IT managers agree that desktop virtualisation and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) complement each other as the former is imperative to provide a robust and effective framework and foundation for BYOD adoption.

Anoop Handa, EVP & CIO, Fullerton India, who has deployed desktop virtualisation, though, believes that desktop virtualisation technology is

necessary to enable BYOD adoption.

He argues that they are two distinct initiatives, which need to be dealt with exclusively. Handa says, “While the initial phase of implementation looks similar, the extent of investments and the IT infrastructure deployment at the backend differ from one to the other.”

In the case of Essar, Jayantha Prabhu Chief Technology Officer, Essar Services India says, “In our case, desktop virtualisation has become one of the primary enablers of BYOD due to its core ability to stream data to mobile devices in an encrypted and containerised manner.”

Due to containerisation, the existing applications continue to run without modification due to their decoupling from the Local OS of the mobile device.

Prabhu says that the ability to restrict the data flow from the VDI to the local device also means that malware protection resides on the server rather than on individual devices, making device security in a BYOD environment far easier to maintain.

Another advantage that BYOD would see, as per Ashish Khanna, AVP-IT, EIH Ltd, is that with the latest virtualisation technologies, it is very imperative that organisations devise their BYOD strategy along with desktop virtualisation as both these technologies provide benefit to the mobile user force for connecting their devices with the enterprise systems while they are on the move.

Sachin Jain, CIO, Evalueserve, looks at desktop virtualisation as an infrastructure layer which is needed

“It is critical to create separate environment for corporate applications and data and this can be completely isolated, secured

and customised by the enterprise IT admin”

Ramesh Vantipalli Head EUC India & South-Systems Engineering & Technology, VMware

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cover story | art of virtualising desktop to build a secure and successful BYOD strategy. “Our objective is to give people complete desktop experience anywhere and on any device. which helps them maintain their efficiency level,” he says.

“Desktop virtualisation helps in extending a restricted shell on a user’s personal device which does not require a two-way communication between the user PC and virtual desktop,” says Jain.

Virtualisation Vendors’ Take on BYOD Desktop virtualisation vendors are keen to know what IT managers are trying to do and the outcome of their task when the primary challenge is security.

Srikanth Karnakota, Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft, lists out three key challenges for IT managers with regard to aligning VDI with BYOD. According to Karnakota, it is critical to find how IT managers are providing secure access to devices which are not necessarily IT enabled or IT managed.

The second problem, according to him, is deployment and provisioning of different kind of apps running within the firewall of the enterprise. The third challenge is management: getting the corporate data managed, as IT managers don’t want any remote swip and putting in place a concrete policy.

To address these challenges, a vendor like Microsoft puts forth its system centre (management tool) and windows server together. “The technology we have built around the second challenge is appstore which has provisioning capability and is built on top of the windows server. There are certain apps which you can mark out, like corporate apps that can be marked out outside the firewall. They could be consumed on the go,” he says.

Nilesh Goradia, Head Pre-Sales, India Subcontinent-Citrix, relates an instance of how its customer faced the challenge of dissemination on iPad. “We enabled the user to deploy the application on the desktop virtualisation tool to enable seamless access of information on iPad.” Goradia says that the communication between devices and servers that host OS and apps pave the way for effective control. Ramesh Vantipalli (Head EUC

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“It is imperative that organisations devise their

BYOD strategy along with desktop virtualisation as these technologies benefit the mobile user force” Ashish Khanna, AVP-IT, EIH Ltd India & South--Systems Engineering & Technology), VMware believes that a majority of workers bringing in so many of their personal devices, (and apps) into organisations has ushered in trends such as “bring your own device” (BYOD) and “corporate-owned, personally enabled” (COPE), which have become mainstay essentials to delivering IT scale and end-user choice. Vantipalli explains that the VMware Horizon Suite’s solutions enable users to access all their files and applications at any time, across devices.” “It is critical to create a separate environment for corporate applications and data and this can be completely isolated, secured and customised by

the enterprise IT admin; it can prevent corporate data leakage and preserve the privacy of employees’ personal information,” he says. Vikram K, director, ISS, HP India, considers it a big deal for CIOs as they try to transform their IT departments from asset management outfits to service delivery organisations.

“An agile, scalable, and cost-effective desktop virtualisation infrastructure helps CIOs achieve this metamorphosis and provides measurable ROI,” he avers. They need to align their client’s virtualisation strategy to deliver both VDI and BYOD, as today’s IT infrastructure helps IT heads to achieve this seamlessly from a single infrastructure.

art of virtualising desktop | cover story

DaaS is Taking Baby Steps Desktop as a Service is on the anvil, as most IT managers are optimistic about its uptake with new platforms like Android and Mac fuelling the growth While the industry may not find many instances or use cases around Desktop as a Service to enable cloud model around this technology, there have been a lot of positive trends towards this.

It is critical to discuss under what circumstances DaaS can take off and

what factors can fuel this to the maturity curve.

Anoop Handa, EVP & CIO, Fullerton India, is confident that DaaS (Desktop as a Service) is very much on the anvil and its adoption will increase over time.

“As we centralise end-user computing environment in data centres and make it accessible to endusers over a private cloud, we are actually paving the way for adoption of desktop as a service to end users,” emphasises Handa.

Handa reiterates the fact that several IT services organisations are focusing

on this domain of provisioning and supporting Desktop as a Service by assuring Application Delivery as a Service (AdaaS) model on a variety of end-user devices.

IT teams today need to move from application deployment to application delivery and from monitoring managing devices to delivering enduser performance.

“ADaaS deploys this approach to break IT silos and deliver lowered costs, greater productivity and IT efficiency to businesses and that’s what we have gone ahead within our organisation,” says Handa.

Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar

“The future is very bright.

Last year, we saw many customers demanding DaaS, as desktop hosting

has come a long way”

Nilesh Goradia Head Pre-Sales, India Subcontinent-Citrix

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“The penetration of Android and MAC into the environment will see DaaS progressing more quickly”

Jayantha Prabhu CTO, Essar Services India Limited

Services India Limited, avers that it will take some time to mature due to the over dependency on Microsoft as the primary solution provider.

“However, the penetration of Android and MAC into the environment will see DaaS progressing more quickly. Future

desktop architectures have a variety of attributes in common--for example, the ability to separate the system image (OS, apps etc.) from the underlying hardware, the ability to implement disaster recovery, high availability, mobility,” Prabhu adds.

Case Study 1

EIH Ltd (Oberoi Group)

Enabled Offline Mode for Users on Travel With Desktop Virtualisation, EIH has experienced flexibility, improved IT agility to enable a new user and ensure data always remained secure and safe within a data centre, says Ashish Khanna, AVP-IT, EIH Ltd (Oberoi Group). As a best practice, EIH Ltd has enabled users who travel to work on their machines in offline mode and to sync automatically with the server data as soon as they plug back into the network.

“This approach has given a huge edge to users of virtualisation; even in the event of a disaster or a machine crash, they are provided with a new machine to work

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without any disruption to the data and virtually no downtime, resulting in higher productivity,” says Khanna. EIH started to implement desktop virtualisation way back in 2009 when its flagship hotel, The Oberoi Gurgaon opened. After meeting with success in terms of accruing higher productivity of its team and functions, the IT team followed the same strategy and deployed virtualisation tools across all new hotels, which opened afterwards; these included Trident Hyderabad and Oberoi Dubai. The organisation has virtualised 150 desktops spread across three locations.

When delivered over the cloud, desktops will combine capabilities like mobility, ubiquitous access and platform independence and will allow emerging, lightweight ARM-based tablets to access powerhouse x86 applications and vice-versa.

Phased Approach “As the on-boarding or acquisition cost of the desktop virtualisation technology was very high, we decided to deploy desktop virtualisation in the event of a new property or where a large refresh of desktops/laptops was required,” says Khanna. Khanna and team went in for a PDCA (Plan, do, check and act) strategy with regard to VDI and looked at specific needs of laying thrust on the right profiling of users and the right sizing of these profiles cutting across sales, marketing, front office etc. After evaluating several solutions, EIH deployed VMware’s Horizon Mirage to provide centralised image management for Windows desktops with enhanced levels of backup and OS migration capabilities. Mirage helped in categorisation of the data, so that the IT staff could perform more granular management of the endpoint.

art of virtualising desktop | cover story He sees MAC, Android, Linux or Windows virtual machines hosted on servers in the cloud made accessible to users over a wide area network.

DaaS and Cloud go Hand in Glove Most players argue that capex is the biggest challenge now as CIOs report to CFOs and cash outflow is a major concern.

Nilesh Goradia, Head Pre-Sales, India Subcontinent-Citrix, believes cost effectiveness to be one of the major factors why people are looking at DaaS and getting onto an opex kind of a model.

“The future is very bright. Last year, we saw many customers demanding DaaS, as desktop hosting has come a long way, enabling managed service providers to explore new opportunities to develop higher-value cloud-based offers,” says Goradia.

Virtualisation vendors argue that the explosion of mobile devices, mobile and web applications, and enhanced interest in the cloud is driving businesses to re-evaluate their desktop strategy.

VMware recently announced the acquisition of Desktone , in desktop-as-aservice (DaaS) with an advanced multitenant desktop virtualisation platform for delivering Windows desktops and applications as a cloud service.

According to Ramesh Vantipalli (Head EUC India & South –Systems Engineering & Technology), VMware, the combination of VMware and Desktone’s global partner network will allow customers in all regions to benefit from the economies of scale provided by DaaS. “The addition of the Desktone platform further extends the benefits of desktop virtualisation by offering an additional choice to organisations looking for predictable economics, flexibility of cloud deployment or simple deployment and management due to the lack of resources or in-house VDI expertise,” says Vantipalli.

The benefits of the DaaS platform, as Vantipalli explains, were purposebuilt for service providers to deliver windows applications and desktops as a cloud service with

Case Study 2

Evalueserve

Easy-to-Manage infrastructure for Desktop and Servers Evalueserve’s business model involved providing a variety of services to clients while delivering the highest possible levels of security and availability. With four data centres spread across India, catering to the growing demands of both employees and clients, and managing the data centres was a challenge. Consequently, Sachin Jain, CIO of Evalueserve, was given the task of finding a solution to address the manageability, scalability, and security of Evalueserve’s servers and desktops. To address their challenges, Sachin and his team evaluated a number of solutions. Multiple vendors were evaluated on a number of criteria to determine if they would be able to meet the exacting standards of a company that prides itself on the highest level of service to its clients.

After running a month-long proof of- concept from multiple vendors, VMware vSphere and VMware View were decided upon as the only viable choices. “Features such as vMotion, thin provisioning and high availability were tested extensively with each of Evalueserve’s critical applications,” says Jain. VMware View was also thoroughly tested in a number of scenarios to ensure that the IT team would have the best possible solution for their desktop environment.

VMware View was leveraged to deploy virtual desktops for employees throughout the organisation. The additional security and manageability of the virtual desktops has allowed the IT team to focus on what it does best--support the business. VMware View enabled Evalueserve to maintain the highest standards of compliance and security, and IT team to provide employees with flexi-seating.

unique capabilities, such as multitenancy, Self-Service and Grid-based architecture for elastic scalability.

Multi-tenancy – A must for cloud delivery. Each customer gets a separate virtual environment to ensure security while cloud providers are able to manage multiple customers under one platform.

Self-service of virtual desktops – Simple provisioning from the cloud enables self-service for IT of full VDI, shared session remote desktop service (RDS) desktops and applications without the need to procure hardware or software.

Grid-based architecture for elastic scalability – Advanced architecture enables unlimited scalability across multiple geographies and data centres.

Low cost of delivery – Open source based technology eliminates Microsoft licensing fees and thirdparty software management, resulting in cost savings over competitive desktop virtualisation offerings.

In short, DaaS gives enterprises the ability to manage costs, extend capacity on-demand and reduce the time required when desktop loads change.

While Srikanth Karnakota, Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft, does not see a significant uptake on DaaS, he does not rule out the possibility of SMBs and branch offices of large enterprises opting to host it on third party cloud.

In order to support DaaS, Microsoft has enabled Windows licensing for third party.

HP’s Vikram K, director, ISS, HP India, emphasises that the next stage of the desktop virtualisation is Desktop-asa-service (DaaS) which is easier to deploy, less expensive to manage and maintain and is more flexible.

“However, due to higher network bandwidth requirement for DaaS, this is still in the early stages. With application virtualisation and hosted applications, a few selected applications like Office365 are already being hosted on the Cloud,” he says.

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cover story | Art of virtualising desktop

What Can Justify the Licensing Cost in VDI? While licensing for desktop virtualisation is high, reduction in the cost of application rollout, provisioning, updates, maintenance and training can justify the investment IT heads are aware of the fact that the licensing cost on the deployment of desktop virtualisation is relatively high, given that it is still not ubiquitous. However, virtualisation vendors do formulate certain theories around how to perceive the licensing cost to make it more cost effective and justify the investment to drive RoI. Ramesh Vantipalli (Head EUC India & South –Systems Engineering & Technology), VMware, recommends IT managers to consider key aspects when it comes to desktop virtualisation software licensing: OS and software licensing needs to be strongly analysed, especially when making the move to a VDI structure Customers and organisations alike need to follow the solution providers’ licensing structure, and necessary controls need to be put in place to ensure access to confidential information for designated users within enterprises Misinformation is evil. Organisations and users alike need to take appropriate actions to ensure they have all the necessary information from the provider directly.

VMware allows organisations to choose named-user licensing or concurrent-

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user licensing for the product suite. “A benefit of concurrent-user licensing is that one can rotate in users and not have to pay for licenses for users not on the system. Concurrent-user licensing is especially suited to call centre environments with shift workers and to educational environments where not every individual is using the system at one time,” says Vantipalli. The benefit

of named-user licensing for the suite is that one named user can use as many devices as he wishes at once, on any or all of the products.

In a desktop virtualisation phenomenon, the licensing models existing are either per device, per user or per concurrent. The challenge, as Nilesh Goradia, Head Pre-Sales, India Subcontinent-Citrix, observes

Innovations D engineering - Virtual delivery of 3 3D professional graphics applications and workstations Support to hardware-based GPU sharing of OpenGL and DirectX Provisioning many users to share a GPU Hosted shared desktops (HSD) Thin Clients End-point devices and middleware to multiple device Active Directory integration for dynamic desktop sessions Enhanced security with support for two-factor authentication

itrix’s AppDNA Software C - Simplified overall installation, setup and user environment to accommodate a broader range of enterprises, the channel and global SIs. Enabling offline mode for select users Secured access of desktop/laptop of users on mobile platforms Thin provisioning of applications Printing with Universal Print Server Personalized VDI

“VDI does not reduce the licenses required.

Rather, it helps in reducing operational expenses by simplifying

desktops patching, OS and application updates” Vikram K Director, ISS, HP India

is not primarily from a desktop virtualisation perspective, it’s more of an affiliated licensing, an application licensing challenge.

“Most CIOs are unable to give clarity on how applications are going to work.

That could make the licensing even more complex,” says Goradia.

Many vendors’ licensing model revolves around per concurrent and per user modules, which is considered to be complex.

Srikanth Karnakota, Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft, says, “Moving away from the concurrent user base, we have introduced licenses based on a particular machine or device. It’s per device model. With this model, cost reduction is ensured.”

Microsoft sees the reduction in cost with the OS coming free along with the windows server; there is no additional cost, the cost is only around VDI. Vikram K, Director, ISS, HP India, observes, “Virtual Desktop infrastructure environment does not reduce the licenses required. Rather, it helps in reducing operational expenses

by simplifying desktops patching, OS and application updates and infrastructure cost.”

“IT heads can consider solutions like application virtualisation, session virtualisation or presentation virtualisation for better TCO,” he says.

Higher Cost, Higher Benefit?

Anoop Handa, EVP & CIO, Fullerton India, believes that not all licensing models have fully matured/aligned to the changing environment for end-user computing using desktop virtualisation. In addition, this area continues to be a challenge and has to be checked, verified and included in the business case.

Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Services India Limited, says that to accrue greater benefits from desktop virtualisation licenses, we need to be very clear with the licensing models of the Desktop VDI solutions providers and the Desktop OS vendor before we choose to implement VDI. “It is imperative that we have a detailed and joint discussion with the Desktop VDI solutions providers and the Desktop

OS vendor and have their sign off on the Licensing Understanding,” avers Prabhu. “Organisations that have Enterprise Agreements tend to benefit in this case as compared to those having Select Agreements for specific products only,” explains Prabhu.

Ashish Khanna, AVP-IT, EIH Ltd., agrees that currently the licensing of virtualisation is very costly and hence the on-boarding cost of desktop virtualisation is very high. If the number of users deployed is lesser, then the ROI for the investment comes after a long period, which doesn’t justify the initial high capex. In order to have more penetration in the market, this technology has to come at a lower cost.

Sachin Jain, CIO, Evalueserve, finds this not an easy puzzle to solve.

“Different virtualisation solutions will lead to different licensing models which are usually complicated and at times do not sound logical. “One has to examine the model, and find a best fit for the solution he/she settles for, based on other important factors such as ROI, recurring cost, support cost, etc,” he says.

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insight | Right approach, right Solution

Right Approach, Right Solution As big data goes bigger, IT managers are challenged with the task of identifying data that qualifies for big data and finding appropriate solutions to process it

very decade or every five years, the hype around one technological innovation or trend creates a buzz in the IT community. It was big cloud till the recent past. Not that people have stopped talking about it. But big data is the new hero. The purpose of big data is still multi-layered, multi-defined. Gartner’s 3Vs--Volume, Variety and Velocity--focused more on the overall management of data. Not all IT managers agree about 3Vs. It all depends on the organisational need and what kind of big data solutions they plan to implement. There is another V that IT managers like to add-- Value.

Why big data bothers?

Everyone has been pondering over the need of big data, but there is a tire kicking. The confusion among IT managers and CIOs is around the alignment of these 4Vs in the real need. It has been observed that the client may not have a need of big data solution as a traditional data warehouse solution is good enough to meet the requirement.

“But there is an end of life which we often overlook. It’s pertinent to review the policies as IT managers might need to redefine what part of data they should retain, delete and archive” Sunil Ranka BI Professional and Consultant

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ILUSTRATIO N: Anil t

E

by S un i l Ran k a

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easier to qualify a use case but convincing some IT managers about the adoption of a big data solution is a daunting task, especially if the organisation is coming from a pure play data warehousing background. To get to the right approach or solution, it is critical for them to understand the big data life cycle and take into account its inherent challenges, changes in approach to big data, taking cues from big players, understand potential issues with packaged solutions, besides the changes required in the IT thought leadership, and work out an effective implementation plan.

Big Data Life Cycle The data life cycle in big data environments has four stages â&#x20AC;&#x201C; acquire, organise, analyse and decide large amounts of data from both new data formats, as well as traditional formats, in real time.

Big data grows incredibly fast. Each day, we create 2.5 exabytes of data. Most big data is fleeting by nature as the data mined

from timely sources such as sensor data, social media and web logs, when used in real time, is outdated before one knows it.

So, in the big data life cycle, acquiring data from different sources and organising them, paving the way for intelligent analysis for better decision making is what defines the entire lifecycle of big data. As one scales the big data environment, it is important to ensure that life cycle requirements can be supported within your current constraints of storage capacity, bandwidth, processor and memory speeds and metadata depth which covers all the 3Vs. But there is an end of life which we often overlook. With the excitement around big data, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s normal practice not to foresee the ephemeral nature of data that no longer is necessary or to determine what should happen when that day comes.

Challenges in Approach A typical data warehousing project approaches a traditional waterfall methodology, where in requirements,

design, implementation, verifications and maintenance follows a serial approach.

In most of the cases, the only thing that comes out at the end of implementation is the solution. Due to the tight deadline and serialisation, there is always a rush to complete all the individual states before the final goal could be met, resulting in rejecting key change requests and delivering invaluable in the past and may not count towards key decision making in future.

Big Data projects have been a new kid on the block; right from the concept and project execution. A different mindset and methodologies are needed to drive this.

Hadoop and the Big Players The Apache Hadoop project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. It has been designed to scale across thousands of machines with fewer setups with reduced latency and high fault tolerance. Hadoop helps enable a computing solution that is scalable, cost effective, flexible, and fault tolerant.

Change in Approach

Look at Solution from Top Down rather than Bottom Up Traditionally, IT tackles data problems from the bottom up, as in after-thefact data analysis. But with big data, the solution approach needs to be top down, where in the power of the solution is more on pro-active or predictive analysis.

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insight | right approach, right solution What goes into big data implementation plan?

4-6 weeks

12-15 weeks

Discovery Analysis Interviewing Key Business Users Confirming Problem Statement Confirming Key Objective & Goal Defining Data Sources and Correlation Build a Sandbox

Discovery Analysis Project Kick Start Iteration (1…)

KPI and Attributes ETL/ MapReduce Data Pull Application User Interface Data Correlation Test Case

Iterative feedback Correlation Guided Navigation Attributes

Developing Test Case and Unit Testing Business Acceptance Testing

Defining Security Needs: User Roles, Security Groups, etc Defining Technical Architecture and Design Defining Release Plan

Build Solution for “Unknown Unknown” With limited storage space and shrinking budget, IT pulls in only that data which is the need of the hour. But with big data, the approach needs to be more on pulling in as much as data possible for better predictability and analysis.

Build Now and Show Now IT needs to build in big data application with “Build Now and Show Now” attitude.

System Integration Testing Implementing Security Production Readiness Go Live

of “Data Science.” It is a combination of mathematics, computer programming and computer science.

Newer Data Governance Policies With big data, governance policies need to be relaxed and should be more favourable for data access. A favourable and relaxed policy doesn’t mean “Access To All.” Rather, it means it needs to be relaxed compared to history.

A New Job Role: “Data Science”

Potential Issues with Packaged Solutions

Big data is the emergence of a new stream

Big data, being a newer technology,

top 10 vendors for big data solutions

28

Splunk

Turns machine data into valuable insights

Opera Solutions

Data-Science-as-a-Service

Mu Sigma

Data-Science-as-a-Service

Palantir

Big data software

Cloudera

Apache Hadoop-based software, services and training

Actian

Big data applications, analytics engine, and Ingres database

1010data

Cloud-based analytics

10gen

MongoDB (open-source, document database)

Alteryx

Big data analytics platform

Guavus

Big data analytics solutions

itnext | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3

Iterations

Designing & Developing

packaged solutions may not work as anticipated for the companies whose business model is unique. Having worked with cloudera and Hortonworks, these two packaged distribution of Apache Hadoop-based solution have provided immediate value to customers from the technology stack. With vendor locking, recurring support cost and vendor uncertainty becomes an issue.

The Key to Success for any Big Data project involves these: Data identification Ingesting and cleaning Hardware and platform selection Machine learning Data storage Sharing and acting

Desired Changes in IT Thought Leadership

Source : Forbes

It’s not all about huge infrastructure. Big data experts consistently report that 80 per cent of the effort involved in dealing with data is cleansing. Because of the high cost of data acquisition and cleansing, it’s worth considering what you actually need to source yourself.

Remember that big data is not a Nirvana. You can find patterns and clues in your data, but then what? Like any investment, a tangible goal for big data would always benefit.

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Simplifying IT to

Drive PureValue

S

ince its launch in India in April 2012, IBM PureSystems has been gaining momentum across all verticals and businesses. In India, IBM has more than 150 customers who have adopted PureSystems. The PureSystems family of offerings includes PureFlex, PureApplication and PureData.

Thermax, an organisation in the utility vertical, was among the early adopters of PureFlex systems.

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In August 2012, Thermax went live with PureSystems as it implemented a virtual desktop environment where it was looking at multiple systems and chose IBM PureFlex.

Kashish M Karnick, Product Manager, STG, IBM ISA, said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;IT managers look converged systems and PureSystems has the power to transform the IT life cycle. IBM PureSystems has the potential to radically simplify multiple aspects of the IT life cycle and it delivers significant business value.â&#x20AC;?

The reason behind the growth in adoption is that the systems

I LUSTRATIO N: anil t

IT managers leverage converged PureSystems to radically transform and simplify the IT life cycle so as to drive value by SU B HANK A R K UN D U

Simplifying IT to drive pure value | insight integration between servers, storage and networking as well as software, applications and middleware was made simple and easy through the use of a single management console.

IT Managers use Pure Systems in Multifaceted Environment In India, organisations of all sizes enlist the customer base of pure systems as they are looking to virtualise their IT, optimise their existing infrastructure, or want to adopt open standards and green IT initiatives.

Anil Nadkarni, CIO, Thermax, says, “It’s just not the hardware that transforms any work environment, a lot also depends on the application that runs on it as it decides the whole thing. The hardware costs come down due to the virtualisation. The flexibility is definitely the differentiator as it comes with 8-core machines. It gives me the flexibility to make it a 4-core machine or 2-core.”

Anil has an internal team of 30 members. IBM took the lead and deployed the infrastructure. The team was trained during the implementation. For Thermax, it has been not just the integration that IBM Pure Systems has been pitching around the offering but it is more about flexibility, enhancement, ability to connect with other devices and IBM know-how about the technology and support.

Thermax bought the machine for 1,000 users but it’s capable of handling 1,300 users which gives the organisation the scope to ramp up the systems.

Bank deploys PureSystems to address its Future Growth The recent win, Dombivili Nagarik Sahakari (DNS) Bank adopted PureSystems as a core component of its new IT strategy

to address its future needs and growth strategy.

The new IBM PureFlex System integrates the bank’s hardware, cloud capabilities, network management and virtualisation, allowing DNS Bank to expand its reach, gain new clients and reduce operational expenses by 10 per cent - without increasing its IT infrastructure footprint.

Milind Varerkar, DGM-IT, DNS Bank, says, “Implementing PureSystems has helped the bank to monitor its resources in much easier way than earlier rack based servers. DNS Bank is already benefiting from the simplicity and control IBM PureFlex provides and has reduced power consumption by 10 per cent.”

DNS found the system apt as it could expand its mobile services such as Internet, mobile and SMS banking. The new IBM PureFlex System integrates the bank’s hardware, cloud capabilities, network management and virtualization. Pure Flex has helped in reducing the manpower cost as it requires fewer trained staff for monitoring the systems.

Very little change was made in infrastructure and that helped in minimising deployment cost. Except for training the support staff, no major change was necessary.

The Indian banking industry is growing more than 23 per cent per year with its assets size poised to touch USD 28,500 billion by 2025. However, In India, dispersion of banking services is fairly low: about 61 per cent of population has access to a saving bank account, 19 per cent has debit cards and 1 per cent has credit cards.

Varerkar asserts, “To tap into this growing market opportunity and reach the tech-savvy younger generation, DNS Bank needed to revamp the heart of its IT infrastructure. IBM provided a solution built on PureFlex and including System x, storage and WebSphere.”

PureFlex provides the security, flexibility and integration capabilities the bank needed to leverage cloud technologies to rapidly and efficiently deliver these mobile services across cities and remote areas of Maharashtra, addressing completely new client segments.

Karnick said, “IBM PureFlex allowed DNS to simplify their experience, increase overall performance, and significantly reduce operational and management costs.”

“India has 150 clients compared to 6000+ in other markets.

So, India has the potential.

But we need to look at the size of the market in terms of its budget. I think other markets have a much bigger budget than India” Kashish M Karnick Product Manager, STG, IBM ISA

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“The flexibility is definitely the differentiator as it comes with 8-core machines. It gives me the flexibility to make it a 4-core machine or 2-core” Anil Nadkarni, CIO, Thermax

The reason Nadkarni cites as the biggest influencer was that PureSystems allowed them to put all sorts of CPUs in it.

He says, “The biggest advantage is that while virtualising a system, multiple process is available. PureFlex systems help us do it with ease. The monitoring tool it has makes life easier as it makes the configuration really flexible.”

Nadkarni adds, “IBM was the big contender and the brand definitely brings in certain value. I did not look at it purely from PureSystems; Rather, I looked at it from a project management angle--the execution of the project, the ability to deliver on time. When I was involved with this project, there was a case of I/O. IBM gave me a v3700 SSD. The CPUs are fast but the bottleneck is in storage. IBM offered me SSD which the competitor didn’t offer. This was definitely a differentiator. PureFlex met the hardware requirement and I didn’t have to look beyond it.”

So, is India One of the Larger Markets for PureSystems?

Karnick smiles, “I would like it to be but we have 150 clients compared to 6000+ in other markets. So, India has the potential. But we need to look at the size of the market in terms of its budget. I think other markets have a much bigger budget than India.”

Varerkar says, “The built-in softwares in PureSystems helps in automating mundane activities such as configuration, managing upgrades and backups. This reduces the time the IT management has to spend and frees them to focus on addressing business needs innovatively.”

Education is one vertical where adoption of PureSystems has been witnessed. Recently, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Bhopal, Karunya University – Coimbatore, and the Shiv Nadar University (SNU) have selected IBM PureSystems to help their high end research, improve processes and IT infrastructure.

Karunya University has selected IBM PureSystems solutions to improve online student services in processing applications, online enrolment, exam scheduling and virtual campus management.

Increased Footprint of PureSystems

“Implementing PureSystems has helped the bank monitor its resources in much easier way.

IBM PureFlex has reduced power consumption by 10 per cent” Milind Varerkar, DGM-IT, DNS Bank

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IBM has deep expertise and a strong partner community to help deliver PureSystems.

Karnick believes, “Business partners have a critical role in the growth of PureSystems in India. For IBM Business Partners, PureSystems generate an opportunity to help clients solve the complexity of enterprise IT, reduce costs and encourage innovation.”

More than 2.500 Business partners have received PureSystems certifications.

Resellers, distributors and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have been playing an important role in the growth of PureSystems. Tens of thousands of existing ISV applications across four operating environments including Windows,

Simplifying IT to drive pure value | insight

It can take up to

46

2/3

months

just to establish harware and software infrastructure**

adach e H

I

%

of IT professionals experience downtime, that can last from anywhere between minutes to over a week when performing an infrastructure upgrade**

of organizations fall behind schedule when deploying new IT capabilities***

es

T

55

Nearly

to

On average more than of IT budgets are spent on operations and maintenance*

70

%

IT professionals face unnecessary delays and costs as they deploy, maintain and update their capabilities Sources: * IDC Analyst Matt Eastwood, IDC Directions Presentation, 2011 ** A global survey of 500 IT Professionals conducted by Forrester Consulting in 2011 *** IBM Market Insights Study - 2011 Business Benchmarking Time-To-Value Study

Linux, AIX, and IBM operating system are run. Additionally, business partners have created more than 250 new solutions and applications that are optimised to run on PureSystems.

IBM PureSystems center provides access to PureSystems assets, delivering expertise from a broad ecosystem, spanning across 20 industries. It includes leading solutions from some of the world’s largest ISVs, including ERP systems and applications across verticals.

Karnick says, “To help address the new opportunity that PureSystems presents, IBM also provides training, marketing, certifications and technical validation support to its business partners.”

Innovations Galore IBM has been constantly releasing updates to pure system. Recently, a number of major additions to its Flex System portfolio was released which combine the latest server technology with new virtualisation, networking and management tools, allowing clients to consolidate existing IT infrastructure and reduce operating costs.

IBM claims this will help clients use smaller data center environments to quickly deploy, manage and secure increasingly larger clouds.

These additional Flex Systems products deliver the features that provide clients with the choices they need as they seek to reduce costs and invest in technologies that provide future scalability. The offerings consist of three

systems built on both IBM POWER7+ and a “double dense” x222 system built on x86 technology. Additionally, IBM has upgraded the Flex System Manager so that clients can monitor and manage up to 5,000 infrastructure end points and do so from any location utilising iOS, Android and Blackberry mobile devices.

Others in the block The concept wasn’t unique when PureSystems was launched. The idea of convergence in infrastructure has been there in the block for some time now. Major vendors in the data center infrastructure have been talking about bundling all necessary hardware and management software.

The coalition of EMC, VMware and Cisco brought its Virtual Compute Environment (VCE), Vblock.

But Karnick says there is a huge difference between PureSystems and its competitions. With PureSystems, the buyer can mix compute nodes — X86 and/or Power7 based — in the same enclosure and even run different operating systems — AIX, Linux, Windows — as needed.

Karnick asserts, “I don’t think any other system in the market can offer consolidation of this sort, we offer consolidation without migration and it has been designed to deal with multiple nodes in one box.”

IBM PureSystems is a way to leverage the products it already owns. Now, the industry has to keep an eye on how both exisitng and new customers react to it.

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interview | Hu Yoshida

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Hu Yoshida | interview

collaborate & strategize to stay ahead Hu Yoshida, Vice President and CTO, Hitachi Data Systems, emphasises the need for CIOs to work with vendors in strategising Hitachiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strength in storage and technologies. In Conversation with IT NEXT.

You have been forecasting the top IT industry trends for storage for Hitachi.

What then are the directions you want Hitachi to take?

Big data will continue to be the primary concern for the IT industry. For example, exabytes will enter into planning discussions and petabytes will be the new norm for large data stores. Much attention will be on secondary data generated for copies and backups.

The total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage will change as operational costs decrease and capital costs creep up.

IT professionals will have to tackle these challenges with budget and time constraints.

Simultaneously, they must extract business value from big data to support growth and development.

Hitachi should take into account the new trends and align customer strategy accordingly.

1.

Dramatic Changes in OPEX and CAPEX: Over the past 10 years, the total cost of storage has increased by about 7 per cent annually, mainly due to

operational costs (OPEX), while the cost of hardware (CAPEX) has been relatively flat.

2.

New Consumption Models: Instead of buying all their storage today and spreading CAPEX over the next 4 to 5 years, organisations will buy what they need when they need it. So, they must leverage technologies and capabilities like dynamic storage provisioning, virtualisation and nondisruptive data migration.

3.

Managing the Explosion of Data Replication: Replication multiplies data growth and backups are the biggest driver of data replication.

4. The Emergence of Enterprise Flash Controllers: The use of high-performance flash solid state drives (SSDs) has been slow due to their high price and limited durability compared to hard disk drives. 2013 will see the introduction of flash controllers with advanced processors built specifically for enterprise storage systems and increase durability, performance and capacity of flash memory.

5.

N ew Requirements for Entry Enterprise Storage Systems: The increasing use of hypervisors like VMware and applications such as VDI have changed the requirements for midrange storage systems. The gap between enterprise and midrange storage architectures is narrowing as the industry begins to demand entry enterprise storage systems.

6.

The need for object-based file systems: The growth of unstructured data will require larger, more scalable file systems; hence, object-based file systems.

7.

Accelerating use of content platforms for data archives and data sharing: This will accelerate as users try to correlate information from different applications.

8. Hardware Assist Controllers to Satisfy Increasingly Complex Workloads: Storage controllers will be equipped with advanced processors and hardware assist ASICs to address increasingly complex workloads and higher throughput.

n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 | itnext

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interview | Hu Yoshida 9.

C reating a Secure Platform for the Adoption of Mobile Devices: Adoption of mobile devices increases productivity and innovation, but also creates a nightmare for corporate data centres.

10. M ore Tightly Integrated Converged Solutions: Certified, pre-configured and pre-tested converged infrastructure solutions are gaining traction.

So, what initiatives have you planned for Hitachi?

Technology-wise, there is a sea change. We’re hearing a lot about about big data, Cloud is getting more real now. The next big thing would be machine-to-machine.

Some call it industrial internet.

Cisco is building Internet-ofEverything where machines talk to machines with intelligence at the endpoint. But the danger is that vendors will then deal more directly with end users than with IT, creating more silos.

For example, in health care, there is a standard around medical imaging. Fujitsu makes it for cardiology, Siemens for oncology… all the information gathered are in silos. So, the patient cannot get a holistic view. Hence, they are approaching IT/ITes as they realised the need of vendor neutral archives.

Hitachi is moving towards big data. We have the verticals, we have the IT. So, we are going to enable enterprises to offer solutions. We like to work with the GEs, the Siemens. If we don’t start doing it now, then we bypass IT. How will these trends impact the role of a CIO? In data centres, we hear of shadow IT: applications people bringing public cloud, the BYOD trend, etc...

But employees today need to be given that kind of flexibility and capability. However, it has to be done behind the firewalls. That’s one area CIOs must focus on.

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Another thrust area is enabling BYOD as a business trend and not controlling it. This will be driven

by CEOs because they are using Apple products (smiles)....So, mobility is the big trend.

A recent 2013 survey suggested that internet traffic in mobile devices has surpassed internet usage on desktops. Integration, access to the data anywhere has become the need. We have HCP Anywhere solution from Hitachi. It’s a fully integrated, on-premises solution for safe, secure file synchronisation and sharing. It’s built end-to-end to be enterprise-ready, and hardened for uncontrolled Internet; HCP Anywhere uses the Hitachi Content Platform object store to store, protect, secure and manage

“ It wouldn’t be wise to give less weight to CIOs. CIOs need to look at so much more technology.

But there are CIOs who keep vendors away.

They believe vendors bring a set of problems by offering a different set of solutions” data in the most efficient, easily scalable and highest-density object storage platform.

Against this backdrop, how is the role of CIOs changing?

It was thought that CIOs would get a seat at the corporate table as a technology person.

Now, his role is evolving as an implementer. In tough economic times, the CFO’s role is getting more crucial. The problem then is that the CFO does not look at the back end integration part, which the CIO is more responsible for.

Hu Yoshida | interview gigabytes; they have to have a lot of spares and a lot of processing.

With more powerful processors, I can put more RAMs in there. So, we came up with 1.6 TB. Now, we are at 3.2 TB and next year, it will be 6.4 TB. At Hitachi, we are able to build controllers as we are an engineering company.

It wouldn’t be wise to give less weight to CIOs. CIOs need to look at so much more technology. There’s server, storage, networking, BYOD, security, etc. In Mumbai, we work with a successful CIO, who initiates the conversation with us, collaborates in planning, strategising and throws challenges at us as we come up with solutions that suit his needs. He partners with all vendors and leverages their expertise.

But there are others who keep vendors away. They believe vendors bring a set of problems by offering different set of solutions. They call it ankle biting. CIOs need to manage vendor relationships by being open to them, by sharing their vision, get the right insights from them and complement their vision.

That’s the key. Vendors know the best technologies; they are subject experts as they have created the technologies.

Also, with lot of technologies coming to the front, CIOs must be at the forefront and in control.

What’s new in storage that could transform the work environment?

Find other interviews online on the website www.itnext. in/resources/ interviews

Flash has been extremely transformative. However, its widespread adoption as a mainstream storage option has been hampered by high costs, limited endurance and suboptimal write performance.

The SSDs were not designed for storage, but only for PCs or commodity devices. They optimise manufacturing cost, and were expensive, initially. They were very limited in processing power and multi capability, and had to be changed for enterprise storage purposes. Today’s flash technology is not only very durable with only 2000 to 3000 writes. Also, the writes are multiplied. With a hard disk, you write it just once. But with flash, you write it to a block and the block fills up and you must erase it. So, you must move this somewhere else. Also, electrons leak all the time. Over time, it must be refreshed. So, you need a large ECC to delay refreshing it.

We have quad core processing in controller of our flash. By adding more intelligence and building technologies of enterprise storage, we can increase the endurance and performance; and with quad core, we can do multi threading.

That’s why SSDs are 200 or 800

How do you see consumer behaviour patterns changing, from the storage perspective?

One change is eliminating the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach.

It takes three months to do that.

Today, with so many applications, you need to spin things up very quickly. So, in our Unified Compute Platform which is very different from VBlock or VCE as they are consortiums, we have our own blade server and storage, we OEM the Cisco brocade switch or now we also OEM the VMWare…the whole stack is there on one service call. Some people object to that, they call it vendor locking. But we do virtualised storage, we can use the existing storage behind it. We can support Cisco server, Cisco brocade switches. But the application user does not really care what’s underneath, all he cares is how to spin up his application and who can fix it quickly.

So, DIY doesn’t make sense. It’s time consuming, expensive and a management challenge.

What are the tangible and intangible benefits in this model that IT managers look at?

Cost reduction, greater agility where you can do things faster and lesser errors because it’s automated. For us, it’s easy as all our products— server, block, file etc. are managed by one set of tools. We just need to provide that interface to vCenter. vCenter manages everything. So, we are going to make it compatible to vCenter’s roadmap.

n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 | itnext

39

update

indulge

The hottest, the coolest and the funkiest next generation gadgets and devices for you

Here is a preview of the latest tech toys on the block to add to your arsenal.

Take your pick and then go splurging!

Razer Ouroboros

HOT

Cooler Master Notepal Ergostand Lite

It’s a continuation of CM’s Notepal U Laptop cooling stand legacy. The ergonomic cooling stand supports upto 15-inch laptop, sports an elegant mesh design for better airflow and 160 mm fan with adjustable position.

Price: ` 2000 INR

It was conceived as an ambidextrous mouse. It works well for both left- and right-handed users. Be it claw grip, palm grip or fingertip user, it caters to all grip styles.

Just adjust the arch on the palm rest, extend or retract the back, and add in the side rests accordingly.

Price: ` 10999 INR

Logitech UE Mobile Boombox ZOTAC ZBOX NANO ID65 Plus The tiny palm-sized PC is powered by high-performance 3rd Generation Intel Core processors with Intel HD Graphics 4000. The size and performance makes it perfect for everyday work and casual use.

It’s a neat little Bluetooth speaker.

The Mobile boombox can pair with up to 8 devices over Bluetooth, which is pretty great. It has two 1-inch full range speaker along with a top firing mini sub.

Price: ` 8995 INR

Price: ` 52,000 INR

NEW

Like something? Want to share your objects of desire? Send us your wish-list or feedback to editor@itnext.in

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15minute manager

training Education workplace compensation workforce trends skills development personal development

how to ensure a strong back Page 42

Strategy: Countering Botnets THIS page Tips: Improving Posture and Ergonomics pag e 42 Product Review - Blackberry 9720 Page 44 Botnet Count Page 43

By K J Latesh

B

otnet is the latest and exceptional security threat causing major concern among IT managers. The term bot is an acronym of “ROBOT.” It’s a depraved dispense wicked programs (also known as malware) that can turn your computer into a bot (also known as a zombie). When this happens, any computer will execute programmed (computerised) mission over the Internet, without the user knowing it.

i mage: photos .co m

What and Why of Botnets Botnets are groups of computers connected to the Internet that have been taken over by a hacker. The hacker controls all the computers and they behave like a “robot network” (a.k.a. “botnet”). Botnets contain anywhere from hundreds to thousands of computers. The botmaster (the hacker who controls the botnet) then uses these computers to send spam email, spread viruses, and attack other networks or any other variety of malicious activity.

The Bot types are mainly identified as IRC bots, Localised bots, P2P bots, HTTP bots and Spy Eye. A botnet operator sends out viruses or worms, infecting ordinary

Security

Countering BOTNETS Challenges for IT managers and Infrastructure manager include identifying bots across their network and defuse them from action n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 | itnext

41

15-MINUTE MANAGER

How do Botnets Occur?

In distributed denial-of-service attacks, multiple systems submit as many requests as possible to a single Internet computer or service, overloading it and preventing it from servicing legitimate requests. Adware advertises a commercial offering actively and without the user’s permission or awareness, for example, by replacing banner ads on web pages with those of another advertiser. Spyware is a software which sends information to its creators about a user’s activities-typically passwords, credit card numbers and other information that can be sold on the black market.

Compromised machines that are located within a corporate network can be worth more to the bot herder, as they can often gain access to confidential corporate information. Several targeted attacks on large corporations aimed to steal sensitive information, such as the Aurora botnet. Click fraud occurs when the user’s computer visits websites without the user’s awareness to create false web traffic for personal

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itnext | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3

healthy Tips

Ten Tips To ImprovE Posture and Ergonomics Strong Back Over time, poor posture may be caused by habits from everyday activities such as sitting in office chairs, looking at the computer, driving, standing for long periods of time, or even sleeping. The following guidelines suggest several ways to improve posture and ergonomics, especially for people who work sitting in an office chair for most of the day.

1. Know the warning signs of back pain caused by poor

As muscles tire, slouching, slumping, and other poor postures become more likely

ergonomics and posture.

2. Get up and move.

3. Keep the body in alignment while sitting in an office chair and while standing.

4. Use posture-friendly props and ergonomic office chairs when sitting.

5. Increase awareness of posture and ergonomics in everyday settings.

6. Use exercise to help prevent injury and promote good posture.

Regular exercise such as walking, swimming, or bicycling will help the body stay aerobically conditioned, 7. Wear supportive footwear when standing. Avoid regularly wearing high-heeled shoes.

8. Remember good posture and ergonomics when in motion.

9. Create ergonomic physical environments and workspaces 10. Avoid overprotecting posture.

Remember that it is important to maintain an overall relaxed posture to avoid restricting movements by clenching muscles and adopting an unnatural, stiff posture.

PHOTO /I LLUSTRATIO N/IMAG ING CRE DIT

users’ computers, whose payload is a malicious application—the bot. The bot on the infected PC logs into a particular C&C (Commands and Controller) server.

A spammer purchases the services of the botnet from the operator. The spammer provides the spam messages to the operator, who instructs the compromised machines via the control panel on the web server, causing them to send out spam messages. Botnets are exploited for various purposes, including denial-of-service attacks, creation or misuse of SMTP mail relays for spam (see Spambot), click fraud, mining bitcoins, spamdexing, and the theft of application serial numbers, login IDs, and financial information such as credit card numbers. The botnet controller community features a constant and continuous struggle over who has the most bots, the highest overall bandwidth, and the most “high-quality” infected machines, like university, corporate, and even government machines.

15-MINUTE MANAGER

Botnet Count

“Compromised machines that are located within a corporate network can be worth more to the bot herder”

Total number of suspected botnet IPs: 2109 Number of botnet IPs notified to network operators: 1977 Number of Spam blocked: 44243 Recipient count of spam blocked: 1102959 *

K J Latesh IT Security Professional and Research Scholar

or commercial gain. Fast flux is a DNS technique used by botnets to hide phishing and malware delivery sites behind an ever-changing network of compromised hosts acting as proxies.

Android BOTs: Security firm Kaspersky Lab has found that a Trojan malware spread on Android OS is being controlled by criminal groups.

Kaspersky Lab said that Obad.a, malware, which Android powered devices, was being distributed by botnets that exploited user behaviour and infecting

the computer to be part of the network.

The firm has revealed that from the total, 83 per cent of attempted infections were recorded in Russia indicating that the infections are likely to be limited to Eastern European countries for the time being. According to News24, the firm explained that the versions of Obad.a spread with Trojan-SMS .AndroidOS. Opfake.a, by sending malicious message to users, urging them to download it and if the link is clicked the file containing the malware is automatically downloaded on the Smart phone or tablet.

Lifecycle of Botnet Infection IRC Server(s)

Botnet Botnet

Botnet

4.Join Botnet

Botnet

install Bot

DNS Server 5.Botnet Commands 3.DNS Lookups

1. Find Exploitable Node Host W/Valnerability

The top 10 countries by number of suspected botnet IPs are: Rank Country # of suspected botnet IPs 1 Taiwan 826 2 China 763 3 United States

92 4 Russian Federation 33 5 Argentina 30 6 Brazil 28 7 Spain 25 8 Colombia 19 9 Peru 17 10 United Kingdom 17

The malware then sends messages to all the user’s contacts urging them to repeat the process. The firm said that the code was spreading especially to devices running older versions of Android. The report said that Kaspersky has informed Google and the vulnerability has been closed for versions of Android 4.3, but antivirus expert at the firm, Roman Unuchek said that only a small percentage of devices had the latest version of the OS. The potential exists for attacks like these to target Internet banking services that send mobile transaction authentication numbers via SMS. Many banks send authentication codes to your phone via SMS each time you do an online transaction. This means that just stealing a login password is no longer enough for criminals to raid your account, but malware on your phone, such as the Zeus-based Andr/ Zitmo (and similar versions targeting Blackberry) are capable of intercepting those SMS messages. Through the use of a malicious Android app that harvests SMS messages in real time and in concert with a social engineering attack, attackers open a brief window of

n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 | itnext

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15-MINUTE MANAGER

Product review

Blackberry 9720: The Old School charm

BlackBerry has been clarifying time and again that with BB10 around, the reports of OS 7’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. And the proof of the pudding lies in eating it, clearly. With the new 9720, BlackBerry is back to appealing to the “BlackBerry Boys” crowd.

Unlike previous BlackBerry OS 6/ 7/ 7.1 devices, the 9720 doesn’t identify its target segment with a prefix such as Bold or Curve. That’s probably because we’re unlikely to see any high-end (Bold) devices running legacy operating systems. Instead we’re likely to see only economy phones in the segment Just to prove what they were saying, the company launched the 9720 in the Indian market. Will it work? Maybe.

Build & Design: More of the old school charm The design cues have been taken from the previous generation of Curve phones, so much so that you will be hard pressed to actually identify any difference from afar. The only real difference is the straight-line keyboard with flatter keys, instead of the curves and angles of the previous gen. Below the screen sit the traditional bunch of keys - call connect/disconnect, the optical trackpad, Menu and Return. The trackpad is actually a bonus, because the touchscreen itself ensures you can take care of a few tasks. But unlike the BB10 phones the Q5 and the Q10, the OS 7.1 isn’t the slickest for an all-touch usage scenario, and the trackpad becomes more than a necessity.

The right side spine has the volume rocker, the play/pause key as well as the convenience key that can also be used for activating the camera and subsequently for shutter control.

The battery cover has a nice soft finish to it, which helps immensely with the grip. The white colour finish has a self-design, which feels good in the hand.

The BlackBerry 9720 is a decent hardware QWERTY keypad smartphone, but unlike its BlackBerry 10 siblings, but offers a primitive operating system compared to Android, BB10, iOS and Windows Phone based smartphones. source: thinkdigit.com

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opportunity to steal this token and use it before you can stop them.

Challenge for CISOs The key challenges for IT managers and Infrastructure managers is to identify these bots across their network and diffuse them from action, since these bots are not like EXE or COM programs which reside in the disk or somewhere in MBR so that they can be cleaned using end point protection. More than 95 per cent of all spam is via data/identity theft and distributing other malware, spyware/adware.

Is there any Protection against Botnets?

The geographic dispersal of botnets means that each recruit must be individually identified/corralled/ repaired and limits the benefits of filtering. Some botnets use free DNS hosting services such as DynDns.org, No-IP.com, and Afraid.org to point a sub domain towards an IRC server that harbors the bots. Some botnets implement custom versions of well-known protocols.

Vendors’ Take?

Security companies such as Afferent Security Labs, Symantec, MacAfee, Trend Micro, FireEye, Umbra Data and Damballa have announced offerings to counter botnets. Some newer botnets are almost entirely P2P, with commandand-control embedded into the botnet rather than relying on C&C servers, thus avoiding any single point of failure and evading many countermeasures.

Commanders can be identified just through secure keys and all data except the binary itself can be encrypted. For example, a spyware program may encrypt all suspected passwords with a public key hard coded or distributed with the bot software. Only with the private key (which is known only by the commander) can the data captured by the bot be read.

One major protection method for every organisation IT infrastructure is to empower protection measures like Application Security, System Security, LAN Security, Endpoint Security, Android Security Apps, UTM (Firewall).

update

Is SDN Different from Virtualisation and Cloud?

Amandeep Singh Dang Country ManagerNetworking, Dell As an industry trend, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is as potent, vital and impactful as virtualisation and cloud in IT space.

Virtualisation is a technology to splice physical IT assets into virtual need based assets. Cloud is commercial/non-commercial business process modelling using virtualisation as the technology, while SDN is the technology enabler that will allow virtualisation of networks or for cloud business modelling. All three are not the same; but they are interrelated and concurrent to the overall IT virtualisation wave that we are experiencing from a business process IT or technology standpoint.

Sajan Paul Director, Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks If IT managers are ready to jump aboard the SDN bandwagon, they might wonder where to begin. The answer is to start with virtualisation. Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) is a key part of a service provider’s broader SDN strategy. While NFV and SDN are often seen as separate technologies, the reality is that the two are highly complementary and it is in combination that they deliver the most value. NFV allows for the deployment of network components as software via virtual machines.

Virtualising network functions is the first step towards building an agile network and truly leveraging SDN.

Ashish Khanna Assistant Vice PresidentInformation Technology, EIH Limited SDN concept is still evolving, a lot of people are confused between SDN and network virtualisation, although in functionality, there is a thin line of difference between both technologies. The major difference is that network virtualisation focuses on combining a few hardware resources (from one vendor) and presenting them to the application and administrators as one common resource, while SDN abstracts the traditional networking hardware layers into software and hardware for efficient management of hardware and data flow.

Your views and opinion matter to us. Send us your feedback on stories and the magazine to the Editor at editor@itnext.in

book For you

The End of Leadership This book brings critical new insights to longstanding questions about the importance of leaders.

Author: Barbara Kellerman Publisher: Harper Business

This book comes from one of the pioneers in the field of leadership studies that does a stimulating check of how people lead in the digital age. In The End of Leadership, Barbara Kellerman enumerates the numerous contradictions, inconsistencies, and irrelevance of what passes for leadership thought and training today and reveals a new way of thinking about leadership and the followers in today’s world. Building off the strengths and insights of her work as a scholar and a teacher, Kellerman critically examines the most strongly-held assumptions about the role of leadership in driving success.

Revealing which of our beliefs have become obsolete due to social media culture, she also calls into question the value of the so-called “leadership industry” itself. Asking whether leadership can truly be taught, Kellerman forces us to think critically and expansively about how to thrive as leaders in a global information age.

IT NEXT Verdict It raises questions about leadership, comprehensive examination of how leadership has changed and how and why we lost faith in leaders.

Star Value:

PHOTO IMAGI NG : peterson pj

open Debate

A platform to air your views on the latest developments and issues that impact you

n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 | itnext

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cube chat | Feroz Shaikh

Love what you do “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work” Feroz Shaikh, Vice President – IT, Prime Focus Technologies, loves the Aristotelian quote as he puts the philosophy into action in each day at work.

By Subhank a r K u nd u

M Give your 100% to whatever role you are playing

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itnext | N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 3

onday mourning…oops, Monday mornings are something very few people look forward to.

Cribbing why-can’t-weekendsbe-a-little-longer tends to make things gloomy at the work bay. All that is required to run to work rather than drag oneself is the motivation to “do new, think new and create new.”

That’s how the day starts for Feroz Shaikh. Feroz, VP-IT, Prime Focus, starts every day with a splash of energy. When he wakes up, he starts with giving himself a dose of hope with positive thinking: “It’s not going to be a monotonous day for me, as something new must be waiting at work.”

He loves thinking of innovative ways to inspire his clients and embraces the challenge every day.

Prime Focus is very special to me. I have been with this company almost since its inception. The entire journey till now has been great.”

So, what drove Feroz to IT? Feroz has been passionate about riding the tide of ever-challenging technologies since the time he kicked off his career in IT. The constant uncertainty of every technology is what keeps him motivated, and the range of opportunities in information technology grabbed his attention in the initial phase of his career.

Feroz recollects, “My career has been much diversified as I started with the service industry and then moved to BPO/KPO, exploring market research and analytics.”

About 7 years back, he moved to Media and Entertainment which he believes is a major transition from Analog to Digital. He considers this move to be a strategic decision in his career, as content will play a very important role in the future.

At Prime Focus, he executes end-to-end deployment for every new client. His customer centric focus helps him understand client requirements in

cube chat

Fact File Full nam e Feroz S hai kh C urrent d esignatio n Vi ce Presi d ent C urrent role Head, Techni cal Operations Expertise S oluti on Archi tec t/ Infrastructure Work experi ence 17 years Favouri te quote You m ust be the change you wish to see in the world – Mahatm a Gand hi Favouri te book S even Habits of H ig h ly Effecti ve People

“Media is about working against stringent timelines. It demands solutions to optimise costs whether it’s content streaming for sports or workflow designing” detail, as his responsibility spans the entire IT backbone support operations including inception of new verticals and giving unparalleled support to clients.

His motivation is his team. He makes it a point to motivate his team in the work they do; which, in turn, encourages him to keep innovating and keep the wheel spinning.

The entertainment often has cost constraints. Feroz says, “Media is about working against stringent timelines with no options. It demands innovative solutions to optimise costs, whether it’s related to content streaming for sports or workflow designing.”

For the first time during IPL 2010, Feroz was involved with the exciting project of streaming real time content on the web.

With a last minute confirmation of the project implementation, he had little or no

Favouri te food Itali an Favouri te d esti natio n S cotl and Favouri te gad get fo r work Macbook Pro Favouri te gad get fo r personal use i Phone

time to execute it. It was indeed a challenge to set up the entire infrastructure, testing the workflow and ensuring a robust back up.

With pride, Feroz asserts, “In spite of so many challenges and time constraints, we successfully streamed the content.”

As for inspiration, he does not have to look far. He says, “My role model is my CEO Ramki Sankarnarayanan as I am always inspired by his desire, drive and discipline.”

His mantra for prosperity is staying fit.

And his list on how to stay fit is long: tennis, swimming and cycling. His interests include aquariums right from fishes in fresh water to reef tanks. An unfulfilled and exciting dream is “to do some heavy lifting.”

On the work front, he has a bunch of innovative ideas which he wants to implement and test in a live environment.

N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 3 | itnext

47

my log

Sangita thakur varma Managing Editor, India Now

The Unsung Leaders

I LLUSTRATIO N BY PHOTOS .CO M

Let’s look home nearer for true lessons of leadership

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a battle with fatal illness and looking at the prospect of his business being wiped out. Though the rats (read partners) abandoned the ship, the captain had held aloft and kept the flag flying.

It was a lesson in courage from two middle-aged gents, who abandoned their high-flying corporate careers, one in India and the other in Silicon Valley to chase their dreams. Today, with successful ventures under their belt they have become inspirational stories for other SME startups to follow. There was another gentleman who had nothing but his mechanical training in industrial sewing machines and Rs 1,500 in his bank account to fund his dreams. Today, his company employees 120 people and its turnover is Rs 50 crore.

His credo: “Your work is your respect.

The owners have to be honest punctual hard working… all these motivate your workers.” And so, he is the first to arrive in office and the last to leave. If the office has to remain open on a non-working day, he is there with his workers. Needless to say, his workers are a happy and devoted lot.

Unafraid of failure, these gentlemen have floated initiatives powered by unique ideas. From jazz-food enterprise in a largely Punjabi culture dominated north Indian set-up, to funding for innovative SME social enterprises, to genuine factory seconds to employee training, they are everywhere.

Time we looked at them for a few novel lessons in leadership.

3 Essential

Reads

INTERVIEW | HU YOSHIDA

HU YOSHIDA | INTERVIEW

COLLABORATE & STRATEGIZE TO STAY AHEAD Hu Yoshida, Vice President and CTO, Hitachi Data Systems, emphasises the need for CIOs to work with vendors in strategising Hitachi’s strength in storage and technologies. In Conversation with IT NEXT.

You have been forecasting the top IT industry trends for storage for Hitachi. What then are the directions you want Hitachi to take?

Big data will continue to be the primary concern for the IT industry. For example, exabytes will enter into planning discussions and petabytes will be the new norm for large data stores. Much attention will be on secondary data generated for copies and backups.

The total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage will change as operational costs decrease and capital costs creep up.

IT professionals will have to tackle these challenges with budget and time constraints.

Simultaneously, they must extract business value from big data to support growth and development.

Hitachi should take into account the new trends and align customer strategy accordingly.

1. Dramatic Changes in OPEX and CAPEX: Over the past 10 years, the total cost of storage has increased by about 7 per cent annually, mainly due to

36

operational costs (OPEX), while the cost of hardware (CAPEX) has been relatively flat.

2. New Consumption Models: Instead of buying all their storage today and spreading CAPEX over the next 4 to 5 years, organisations will buy what they need when they need it. So, they must leverage technologies and capabilities like dynamic storage provisioning, virtualisation and nondisruptive data migration.

3. Managing the Explosion of Data Replication: Replication multiplies data growth and backups are the biggest driver of data replication.

4. The Emergence of Enterprise Flash Controllers: The use of high-performance flash solid state drives (SSDs) has been slow due to their high price and limited durability compared to hard disk drives. 2013 will see the introduction of flash controllers with advanced processors built specifically for enterprise storage systems and increase durability, performance and capacity of flash memory.

ITNEXT | N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 3

5. New Requirements for Entry Enterprise Storage Systems: The increasing use of hypervisors like VMware and applications such as VDI have changed the requirements for midrange storage systems. The gap between enterprise and midrange storage architectures is narrowing as the industry begins to demand entry enterprise storage systems.

6. The need for object-based file systems: The growth of unstructured data will require larger, more scalable file systems; hence, object-based file systems.

7. Accelerating use of content platforms for data archives and data sharing: This will accelerate as users try to correlate information from different applications.

8. Hardware Assist Controllers to Satisfy Increasingly Complex Workloads: Storage controllers will be equipped with advanced processors and hardware assist ASICs to address increasingly complex workloads and higher

N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 3 | ITNEXT

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Hu Yoshida, VP and CTO, Hitachi Data Systems, emphasises on the need for CIOs to work with vendors Pg 36 SIMPLIFYING IT TO DRIVE PURE VALUE | INSIGHT integration between servers, storage and networking as well as software, applications and middleware was made simple and easy through the use of a single management console.

IT Managers use Pure Systems in Multifaceted Environment In India, organisations of all sizes enlist the customer base of pure systems as they are looking to virtualise their IT, optimise their existing infrastructure, or want to adopt open standards and green IT initiatives.

Anil Nadkarni, CIO, Thermax, says, “It’s just not the hardware that transforms any work environment, a lot also depends on the application that runs on it as it decides the whole thing. The hardware costs come down due to the virtualisation. The flexibility is definitely the differentiator as it comes with 8-core machines. It gives me the flexibility to make it a 4-core machine or 2-core.”

Anil has an internal team of 30 members. IBM took the lead and deployed the infrastructure. The team was trained during the implementation. For Thermax, it has been not just the integration that IBM Pure Systems has been pitching around the offering but it is more about flexibility, enhancement, ability to connect with other devices and IBM know-how about the technology and support.

Thermax bought the machine for 1,000 users but it’s capable of handling 1,300 users which gives the organisation the scope to ramp up the systems.

Simplifying IT to

Bank deploys PureSystems to address its Future Growth The recent win, Dombivili Nagarik Sahakari (DNS) Bank adopted PureSystems as a core component of its new IT strategy

Drive PureValue IT managers leverage converged PureSystems to radically transform and simplify the IT life cycle so as to drive value BY S U B H A N K A R K U N DU

S

ince its launch in India in April 2012, IBM PureSystems has been gaining momentum across all verticals and businesses. In India, IBM has more than 150 customers who have adopted PureSystems. The PureSystems family of offerings includes PureFlex, PureApplication and PureData.

Thermax, an organisation in the utility vertical, was among the early adopters of PureFlex systems.

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In August 2012, Thermax went live with PureSystems as it implemented a virtual desktop environment where it was looking at multiple systems and chose IBM PureFlex.

Kashish M Karnick, Product Manager, STG, IBM ISA, said, “IT managers look converged systems and PureSystems has the power to transform the IT life cycle. IBM PureSystems has the potential to radically simplify multiple aspects of the IT life cycle and it delivers significant business value.”

The reason behind the growth in adoption is that the systems

to address its future needs and growth strategy.

The new IBM PureFlex System integrates the bank’s hardware, cloud capabilities, network management and virtualisation, allowing DNS Bank to expand its reach, gain new clients and reduce operational expenses by 10 per cent - without increasing its IT infrastructure footprint.

Milind Varerkar, DGM-IT, DNS Bank, says, “Implementing PureSystems has helped the bank to monitor its resources in much easier way than earlier rack based servers. DNS Bank is already benefiting from the simplicity and control IBM PureFlex provides and has reduced power consumption by 10 per cent.”

DNS found the system apt as it could expand its mobile services such as Internet, mobile and SMS banking. The new IBM PureFlex System integrates the bank’s hardware, cloud capabilities, network management and virtualization. Pure Flex has helped in reducing the manpower cost as it requires fewer trained staff for monitoring the systems.

Very little change was made in infrastructure and that helped in minimising deployment cost. Except for training the support staff, no major change was necessary.

The Indian banking industry is growing more than 23 per cent per year with its assets size poised to touch USD 28,500 billion by 2025. However, In India, dispersion of banking services is fairly low: about 61 per cent of population has access to a saving bank account, 19 per cent has debit cards and 1 per cent has credit cards.

Varerkar asserts, “To tap into this growing market opportunity and reach the tech-savvy younger generation, DNS Bank needed to revamp the heart of its IT infrastructure. IBM provided a solution built on PureFlex and including System x, storage and WebSphere.”

PureFlex provides the security, flexibility and integration capabilities the bank needed to leverage cloud technologies to rapidly and efficiently deliver these mobile services across cities and remote areas of Maharashtra, addressing completely new client segments.

Karnick said, “IBM PureFlex allowed DNS to simplify their experience, increase overall performance, and significantly

“India has 150 clients compared to 6000+ in other markets.

So, India has the potential.

But we need to look at the size of the market in terms of its budget. I think other markets have a much bigger budget than India.”

ILU ST RAT IO N : AN I L T

I just wrapped up a story on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) for one of our custom publications. I call it my fortune to have interacted with an intersection of ‘leaders’ who normally remain unsung, unfortunately, due to the low profile nature of their sector. It is our want to look up at media savvy public figures, forgetting all the while that leadership is not exclusive to any particular category.

Coming back to the SME entrepreneurs, their life stories were lessons in leadership— they knew what they wanted; took initiative, were dauntless, leading from the front and ready to take risks.

They were not afraid to make mistakes rather found lessons in those mistakes, led their employees by example, were generous and were team players. Each one had a unique story to unfold. Some were middle aged, many young, and most were first generation entrepreneurs using their hard-earned savings to fund that dream.

After meeting them, I came away shamefaced. How often we crib over the smallest hurdle in our professional path.

We want our goals to be an unchallenged easy run. And here was a story of unending struggle spanning more than 30 years where the paraplegic protagonist while combating a progressive disease reinvented himself and his business, rising from the ashes like the proverbial phoenix again and again, never losing sight of his goal. He even had to struggle through a phase where he was fighting

Kashish M Karnick Product Manager, STG, IBM ISA

ITNEXT | N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 3

NOVEMBER

2 0 1 3 | ITNEXT

Simplifying IT to drive Pure Value with IBM Pure Systems Pg 32 CUBE CHAT | FEROZ SHAIKH

CUBE CHAT

Love what you do

FACT FILE FUL L N A M E FE R OZ S H A I K H C UR R E N T D ES I G N AT I ON VI C E P R ES I D E N T C UR R E N T R OL E H E A D, T EC H N I C A L OP E R AT I ON S EXP E RT I S E S OLUT I ON A R C H I T EC T / I N FR AST R UC T UR E WOR K EXP E R I E N C E 17 YE A R S FAVOUR I T E QUOT E YOU M UST B E T H E C H A N G E YOU WI S H TO S E E I N T H E WOR L D – M A H AT M A GA N D H I

“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work” Feroz Shaikh, Vice President – IT, Prime Focus Technologies, loves the Aristotelian quote as he puts the philosophy into action in each day at work.

FAVOUR I T E B OOK S E VE N H A B I TS OF H I G H LY E FFEC T I VE P EOP L E

“Media is about working against stringent timelines. It demands solutions to optimise costs whether it’s content streaming for sports or workflow designing”

BY S U B H A N K A R K U N DU

M Give your 100% to whatever role you are playing

46

ITNEXT | N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 3

onday mourning…oops, Monday mornings are something very few people look forward to.

Cribbing why-can’t-weekendsbe-a-little-longer tends to make things gloomy at the work bay. All that is required to run to work rather than drag oneself is the motivation to “do new, think new and create new.”

That’s how the day starts for Feroz Shaikh. Feroz, VP-IT, Prime Focus, starts every day with a splash of energy. When he wakes up, he starts with giving himself a dose of hope with positive thinking: “It’s not going to be a monotonous day for me, as something new must be waiting at work.”

He loves thinking of innovative ways to inspire his clients and embraces the challenge every day.

Prime Focus is very special to me. I have been with this company almost since its inception. The entire journey till now has been great.”

So, what drove Feroz to IT? Feroz has been passionate about riding the tide of ever-challenging technologies since the time he kicked off his career in IT. The constant uncertainty of every technology is what keeps him motivated, and the range of opportunities in information technology grabbed his attention in the initial phase of his career.

Feroz recollects, “My career has been much diversified as I started with the service industry and then moved to BPO/KPO, exploring market research and analytics.”

About 7 years back, he moved to Media and Entertainment which he believes is a major transition from Analog to Digital. He considers this move to be a strategic decision in his career, as content will play a very important role in the future.

At Prime Focus, he executes end-to-end deployment for every new client. His customer centric focus helps him understand client requirements in

detail, as his responsibility spans the entire IT backbone support operations including inception of new verticals and giving unparalleled support to clients.

His motivation is his team. He makes it a point to motivate his team in the work they do; which, in turn, encourages him to keep innovating and keep the wheel spinning.

The entertainment often has cost constraints. Feroz says, “Media is about working against stringent timelines with no options. It demands innovative solutions to optimise costs, whether it’s related to content streaming for sports or workflow designing.”

For the first time during IPL 2010, Feroz was involved with the exciting project of streaming real time content on the web.

With a last minute confirmation of the project implementation, he had little or no

FAVOUR I T E FOOD I TA L I A N FAVOUR I T E D EST I N AT I ON S C OT L A N D FAVOUR I T E GA D G E T FOR WOR K M AC B OOK P R O FAVOUR I T E GA D G E T FOR P E R S ON A L US E I P H ON E

time to execute it. It was indeed a challenge to set up the entire infrastructure, testing the workflow and ensuring a robust back up.

With pride, Feroz asserts, “In spite of so many challenges and time constraints, we successfully streamed the content.”

As for inspiration, he does not have to look far. He says, “My role model is my CEO Ramki Sankarnarayanan as I am always inspired by his desire, drive and discipline.”

His mantra for prosperity is staying fit.

And his list on how to stay fit is long: tennis, swimming and cycling. His interests include aquariums right from fishes in fresh water to reef tanks. An unfulfilled and exciting dream is “to do some heavy lifting.”

On the work front, he has a bunch of innovative ideas which he wants to implement and test in a live environment.

N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 3 | ITNEXT

47

Feroz Shaikh, VP-IT, Prime Focus emphasises on working with passion, constant learning and hunger to innovate Pg 46

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