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ISSUE 144 | MARCH 2011
contents COMMENT 04 A different beat NEWS UPDATE 06 Zain trials femtocells in Saudi 08 Server sales kept bouncing back in Q4 12 Juniper leapfrogs Cisco with QFabric
data centre
16
Femtocells deployments more than
double in 12 months
IN ACTION 18 Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority has set up a
centralized storage array at the main sites
as well as DR sire linked to a redundant
FC fabric.
24
EVENT REPORT 20 A brave new world – A roundup of Mobile
World Congress
COVER STORY
FEATURE 28 In the safety zone 30 Healthy attitude 32 Toward a Gigabit Wi-Fi nirvana
TEST
38
Microsoft beefs up System Center with
new module
State of the union: Reality check for unified communications
28
32
NEW PRODUCTS 40 A guide to some of the new products
in the market
LAYER 8 42 All the news that’s fit for nothing
Quick Finder Page 6-22 Zain, Alcatel-Lucent, Druva, EMC, Qualcomm, Global Knowledge, Etisalat, Juniper, Cisco, du, Ericsson, Riverbed, Alpha Data, Avaya, STME, DSOA, Ciena, HP Networking
Page 23-44 FVC, NEC, Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, Symantec, eHosting DataFort, BT Global Services, Brocade, Zebra Technologies, F5, Blue Coat, HP, Siemon, HTC
EDitorial Publisher Dominic De Sousa COO Nadeem Hood
A different beat
Commercial Director Richard Judd richard@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9126
LTE, more tablets,more apps. That pretty much sums up this year’s Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona. This bellwether event for the mobile industry is a good place to be in if you want to gauge the mood and get an insight into what’s in store. If the trends visible at this year’s event are anything to go by, 2011 is going to be a pivotal year in the history of mobile communications. LTE is already here, a bit earlier than expected, with many commercial deployments underway all over the world, including Etisalat in the UAE. Many operators in the region are already trialling the technology and making their networks LTE ready. However, I don’t expect any commercial roll outs to happen this year, as most regional operators are looking to maximise their 3G assets before moving to the next-generation. Besides, the eco-system around LTE in terms of devices is not available in the market yet. Spectrum issues could also throw a spanner in the works, delaying the deployment. But, what is for sure is that LTE is just a question of when, as it offers many compelling reasons for operators, and represents a complete paradigm shift – a huge shift in focus from voice to data. The portended data explosion is going to force many to re-evaluate their current business models, and come up with innovative marketing and billing strategies. With data tipped to overtake voice big time, many would be left with no choice but to move from the existing flat-fee structure to a volume-based billing model, not to mention other significant changes in the back-end as LTE is built completely around IP. Will that be the only change? I guess the most important change as move to the advanced mobile standard is something very fundamental – while network coverage makes the difference between winners and losers in the market now, tomorrow it is going to be all about who will provide more data at a lower cost. Are you ready for that?
CMO Kimon Alexandrou kimon@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9149 EDITORIAL Dave Reeder dave@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9106 Senior Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9109 ADVERTISING Group Sales Manager Rajashree R Kumar raj@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9131 CIO PROGRAMMES CIO Programmes and Events Lead Kavitha Rajasekhar kavitha@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9132 Strategic Marketing Services Lead Sreejith Nambiar sreejith@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9133 MARKETING AND CIRCULATION Database and Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9147 PRODUCTION AND DESIGN Production Manager James P Tharian james@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9146 Designer Froilan A. Cosgafa IV froilan@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9107 DIGITAL www.cpilive.net www.networkworldme.com www.cpidubai.com Webmaster Tristan Troy Maagma troy@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9141
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Published by www.networkworldm
e.com | Issue 144 | March 2011
SPECIAL FOCUS
IT TRENDS IN HEALTHCARE
PLUS:
4 Network World Middle East March 2011
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bits Zain trials femtocells in Saudi Alcatel-Lucent has been selected by Zain KSA for the first small cells trial in Saudi Arabia, which is expected to augment the mobile service experience. Through this project, the mobile operator can experience first-hand how small
cells effectively address its three main challenges: fill mobile coverage holes, increase the network’s capacity to deal with mounting mobile data traffic and create new, value-added services in a rapid, cost-effective way. “Zain is the first mobile operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to trial Femto-based small cells, which clearly positions us as an innovator in the mobile broadband space,” said Dr, Saad Al Barrak CEO and Managing Director of
Zain KSA, Zain. “Partnering with AlcatelLucent, we want to assess how small cells can help us provide 5-bar mobile coverage to our residential and business customers – even in circumstances where this has traditionally been a challenge, such as in in-building and rural environments.” Zain has been looking for ways to increase the coverage of its network without having to invest in expensive macro site deployments. Additionally, next to covering white zones, Zain wants to continuously improve its customers’
Qtel Group partners with Skype The Qtel Group announced a commercial agreement with Skype, whereby its
mobile broadband subsidiary wi-tribe, will promote Skype and its related products over wi-tribe’s networks in Jordan and the Philippines; two key markets for wi-tribe. Under the agreement, wi-tribe; a provider of wireless broadband Internet, will enable customers in the respective markets to easily download Skype software and connect with their family and friends. Dr. Nasser Marafih, Group CEO, Qtel, commented: “The Qtel Group’s strategy for innovation is driven by the needs of our customers, and enabled by partnerships
trUE Fact
Dr. Nasser Marafih, Group CEO, Qtel
with like-minded companies. We recognise the changes taking place in the market and the increasing customer demand for rich communications solutions, and so have decided to partner with Skype - one of the pioneers in the industry. This is a first-of-its-
706,000
quality of experience - offering them the best-on-the-market mobile data plans with the highest availability and fastest access speeds, as well as the latest and coolest services. “As part of this project, we are providing Zain with our proven small cells product portfolio which is being commercially deployed around the world,” said Adolfo Hernandez, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s activities in EMEA.. “Alcatel-Lucent’s small cells are plug-andplay and enable the creation and delivery of a new wide range of value-added services through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) - such as location, presence and security.
kind in our Middle East region and we look forward to working closely with Skype to deliver the best possible customer experience.” Skype had 145 million average monthly connected users for the three months ended 31 December 2010 and according to TeleGeography in January 2011, Skypeto-Skype calling minutes in 2010 were equivalent to approximately 20% of total global international PSTN and Skypeto-Skype calling minutes. With today’s partnership announcement, more users in the Middle-Eastern and Asian regions will enjoy easy accessibility to popular Skype features such as free Skype-to-Skype calls, instant messaging, low cost calls to landlines and mobiles as well as the recently launched Group Video Calling.
is the number of server units shipped out in the first quarter of 2010 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This represents an increase of 4.4 percent from the same period last year. Server revenue totalled $ 4.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, a growth of 10.4 percent from the same quarter last year. Source: Gartner
6 Network World Middle East March 2011
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bits Server sales kept bouncing back in Q4: Gartner
Worldwide server revenue and unit shipments continued a yearlong recovery in the fourth quarter of 2010, but growth is likely to slow this year, research company Gartner said. Revenue for all types of servers grew 16.4 percent from a year earlier, while the number of servers delivered grew 6.5 percent in the quarter, Gartner said. The company cited the replacement of x86 servers that companies had held on to through the global recession in 2009, as well as the introduction of the Nehalem family of processors from Intel and new Opteron chips from AMD late in 2009. Gartner believes the replacement of x86 servers following the economic downturn has
passed its peak and will slow this year. IBM led the industry in revenue for the quarter, with a US$5.2 billion in sales, or 35.5 percent of the market. Sales of System X and mainframe System Z platforms helped IBM during the quarter, with the System Z line showing a 68.3 percent increase in revenue, according to Gartner. HP came in behind IBM for revenue, with 30.4 percent of the market, but led in unit shipments for the quarter, delivering 767,026 servers or 32.2 percent of the total. Dell was the second-biggest vendor by shipments in the quarter, with 515,274 or 21.6 percent of the industry total. Dell was also the third-biggest company in revenue. Oracle suffered a 40.8 percent drop in shipments and a 16.2 percent decline in server revenue from last year’s fourth quarter, when its server business was still owned by Sun Microsystems. Cisco Systems, in its first full year of shipping servers after the introduction of its Unified Computing System in 2009, earned a market share in the low single digits, Gartner said.
Druva goes live with inSync Druva, a company that sells enterprise backup software, has announced Druva inSync 4.1 Enterprise, an application that the company claims to offer near-instantaneous automated backups of laptops. An additional tool, included with the 4.1 release, also allows iPads and iPhones to be backed up over a corporate network. The inSync application also offers one-click restores of any file or backup volume and uses block-level data deduplication for backups and restores, according to Borja Rosales, EMEA Director of Druva. Rosales said his company’s application can be installed by users in less than 20 minutes with a five-step procedure and its client-triggered
8 Network World Middle East March 2011
backup architecture enables high levels of scalability and security. The inSync application also incorporates “smart bandwidth” throttling through its Octopus WAN Optimisation Engine, which automatically prioritises networks and schedules backup bandwidth as a percentage of overall network bandwidth. The WAN optimiser chooses the optimal packet size and opens up as many as eight parallel connections at the same time. Druva inSync 4.1 runs on Windows or Linux commodity servers. The servers can be configured with solid-state drives (SSDs) to enable a “hyper cache” feature, which will increase backup performance as much as six-fold.
EMC releases free edition of Greenplum
EMC has introduced a free Community Edition of the its high-performance, massively parallel Greenplum Database for research and development projects. The company said that the new Greenplum Database CE offering includes free analytic algorithms and data mining tools. “This is a product designed to get people started developing on our products and on open source technology,” Luke Lonergan, CTO of EMC’s Data Computing Products Division. “It’s free for research and development. If they go production and want support, then they have to pay license fee, which is per terabyte or PC core.” The Greenplum Database CE business analytics tools allow users to view, modify and enhance included demo data files. The Community Edition can be downloaded as a pre-configured VMWare virtual appliance for use on laptops and desktops, or as a set of packages for deployment on user machines. All users are free to participate in new Greenplum Community Forums to get support, collaborate, post ideas, and test enhancements developed by various users independently, Lonergan said. Greenplum CE users can also take advantage of the product’s open-source analytic algorithm library, MADlib, to give them data mining and machinelearning methods for structured and unstructured data. www.networkworldme.com
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bits Qualcomm debuts quad-core Global Snapdragon for next-gen tablets Knowledge Qualcomm has announced its quad-core
Snapdragon chipset designed to meet the requirements of next generation tablets and computing devices. The new quadcore APQ8064 is the flagship chipset in the new family of Snapdragon chipsets and is based on the new micro-architecture code named “Krait.” With the purpose of being built for mobile devices, this 28nm microarchitecture will redefine performance, achieving speeds of up to 2.5GHz per core and minimizing power consumption and heat generation to enable new, thin and light form factors. The Snapdragon APQ8064 chip will be designed to enable the next generation of converged computing and entertainment devices. These devices will have significantly higher performance requirements, including support for larger screen sizes and resolutions, more complex operating systems, multitasking, multi-channel audio, HD gaming
and stereoscopic 3D (S3D) photo and video capture and playback, as well as output in full HD to 1080P flat panel displays over HDMI. While performance requirements have been increasing, battery technology and capacity have struggled to develop at the same pace. To meet this challenge, Qualcomm created its next generation architecture and integrated four new, low-power CPU cores and its advanced Adreno graphics into the APQ8064, enabling it to offer twelve times the available performance as well as 75 percent lower power than the first generation of Snapdragon processors. The combination of advanced processors and multimedia technology will provide tablets and mobile computing devices with unsurpassed performance, battery life, low thermal dissipation and the broadest set of connectivity options available in the industry.
Etisalat rolls out LTE network Etisalat has inked an agreement with Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE:
ALU) for a planned deployment of the Middle East’s first and widest Long Term Evolution (LTE) network in the UAE. Using Alcatel-Lucent’s end-to-end solution, Etisalat will deploy the first commercial LTE network in the Middle East within the first quarter of 2011. On the occasion, Mohammad Omran, Chairman of Etisalat commented: “As the region’s leading-edge telecom service provider, this is a significant milestone for our corporation and we are proud to be the Middle East’s first and widest LTE
10 Network World Middle East March 2011
network, thereby fulfilling our promise to continuously deliver superlative communication experiences to our customers every step of the way.” “Over the last year we’ve witnessed a 200% growth in data roaming traffic. Due to the smartphone boom in the UAE, as is globally, our customers continue to crave for higher speeds and better connectivity. There is an exploding demand for new
names new MD IT and business skills training provider
Global Knowledge has appointed Anders Norregaard as its Managing Director for UAE & Gulf. Anders joins Global Knowledge MEA from Global Knowledge Europe where he started his service with Global Knowledge in October 2008 as Managing Director for Denmark; During that time, Anders drove the Danish business to one of its most successful periods in recent times. Before joining Global Knowledge, he spent 5 years as a sales director for Arrow ECS in Denmark – The world’s largest value added IT distributor. Anders – who is 36 years old - has a total of 12 years experience in the IT industry mainly focused on Value added distribution.
technologies and large bandwidth to support and enable the surging data traffic”, said Marwan Zawaydeh, Etisalat. “We are confident that this advanced next-generation network from AlcatelLucent will meet our customers’ needs for innovative mobile broadband services.” LTE can accommodate multimedia applications such as video conferencing, high definition content transmission and high speed video downloads from social networks, giving Etisalat’s customers faster mobile broadband. Alcatel-Lucent will provide Etisalat with a complete end-to-end High Leverage Network solution – including LTE base stations (eNodeBs), all-IP wireless Evolved Packet Core (EPC), a converged endto-end network management solution and a range of professional services including project management, planning, installation, commissioning and integration.
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bits Juniper leapfrogs Cisco with QFabric data centre Juniper Networks has unveiled the results of $100 million in research and development: a new architecture for data centre infrastructure called QFabric, formerly code-named Project Stratus. The company says QFabric will boost data centre throughput 10-fold and be able to scale 12 times larger than conventional architectures while cutting costs for infrastructure and operations. Analysts and beta users say they are impressed. Four years in the making, QFabric promises to flatten data centre architecture from two or three layers to one, drastically reducing the number of devices needed to build a data-centre network. The new architecture creates what is logically a single data centre switch
Riverbed upgrades WAN optimisation platform Riverbed has added a level service dashboard designed to give business
executives a high-level view of how well applications are performing on the network. With its WAN optimisation analytics platform Cascade 9.0, executives can drill down see if there are performance problems that need immediate attention or build a historical view of their network to plan upgrades, the company says. At the same time, the Riverbed has upgraded the RiOS operating system for its Steelhead WAN optimisation appliances. RiOS 6.5 includes application-specific optimisation for Microsoft Outlook Anywhere and
12 Network World Middle East March 2011
overseen by a management platform that gives one view of the fabric. QFabric is supported by three devices – the director management platform, the interconnect switching fabric and the node, which handles ingress and egress ports. In making the announcement, the company showed three products to support QFabric – QF Director, QF Internconnect chassis and the QFX3500 node. The performance improvements that QFabric claims would put Juniper ahead of Cisco and HP for performance, says Rob Whiteley, an analyst with Forrester Research. Brocade comes the closest as a competitor for a data centre fabric, he says, and it remains to be seen how the two will stack up. There are no full-fabric deployments of either yet, he says.
SMB v2. The new version also includes optimization for SSL certificate traffic for client machines and for protocols used by satellites. The software makes it easier to configure QoS settings on Steelheads for customers who choose to use it rather than QoS on their routers. Customers rank their applications in importance, categorize each site by the bandwidth of their WAN connections and set minimum and maximum use for classes of activity. The QoS employs the hierarchical fair services curves algorithm. The devices now take latency into consideration when determining how to handle individual applications. For example, if imposing deduplication on traffic would introduce excessive latency that would actually increase the time it takes for traffic to arrive, the device would skip it.
Du partners with Ericsson As part of the new 5 year managed services agreement, Ericsson will augment
du’s IT applications and deliver application development and maintenance for du’s IT application landscape. Fahad Al Hassawi, Chief Human Resources and Shared Services Officer, du, says: “We have grown rapidly as a company ever since we launched operations. To maintain the momentum and build on it we have chosen Ericsson to partner us in the field of IT Application Development.” Under the terms of the contract, Ericsson will develop and maintain applications for about 35 platforms and technologies, including upgrading and consolidation of du’s software applications domains, transformation of operations and enterprise support systems and managed services.
Alpha Data goes platinum with Avaya The UAE-based SI Alpha Data has
been certified as a “Platinum Business Partner” with Avaya, a leading global provider of B2B communications networks and services. The ‘Platinum’ certification is the highest Avaya offers and is an industryrecognised designation indicating that Alpha has met the rigorous technicalcompetency criteria that ensure the delivery of best-in-class customer service and support. Alpha Data already provides Avaya communications systems and services to both government and private enterprises in the UAE with services that include design, implementation and technical support to the client business.
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25th April 2011 The Westin, Dubai
RECOGNISING THE MIDDLE EAST’S NETWORKING CHAMPIONS
SUBMIT YOUR NOMINATIONS www.networkworldme.com/nwmeawards2011
14 Network World Middle East March 2011
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bits bits GOOD
BAD
UGLY
E-commerce booms in Saudi
A new Arab Advisors Group survey of Saudi Arabia’s Internet users revealed that around 39% of the adult Internet users in the country buy products and pay for services online through e-commerce services. Electronics are the most popular products bought online, followed by software, while airline tickets booking and hotel reservations are the top services paid for online. A new major survey of the Internet users in Saudi Arabia was concluded by the Arab Advisors Group in January 2011. The survey revealed that around 39% of adult Internet users in Saudi Arabia buy products and pay for services online. The Arab Advisors Group conservatively estimates the number of these users to be around 3.1 million which is around 12% of the total population in Saudi Arabia. These e-commerce users have spent an estimated US$ 3 billion on buying products and paying for services through e-commerce transactions in 2010.
GOOD
Iranian cyber army strikes again
The pro-Iran hacktivist group that defaced the Baidu and Twitter Web sites a year ago has hit another target: the U.S. Government's Voice of America news site. Voice of America was knocked offline temporarily after hackers were able to change the organization's DNS (Domain Name System) settings, redirecting Web traffic hitting Voice of America sites to another site controlled by the hackers. Breaking into domain name registration accounts and redirecting Web sites is a favorite tactic of the Cyber Army, and it has pulled off this attack numerous times in recent years. The group posted similar messages in the Twitter and Baidu incidents.
BAD
Night Dragon stalks oil and gas
The recent news reports on the Stuxnet virus have helped highlight the importance of security in process industries like oil and gas. Recently, McAfee released a reportdescribing coordinated covert and targeted cyber-attacks on the oil and gas industry which they attribute to Chinese hackers. Unlike a Stuxnet type virus which threatens to disrupt processes, the McAfee report uncovered attempts to hack into commercially sensitive data for competitive intelligence - attempts which McAfee has named "Night Dragon". Security is a top priority for the oil and gas industry. In fact, security is often cited by oil and gas companies as a barrier to outsourcing or sending data outside of the company firewalls. Oil and gas companies hold data such as detailed well logs and production figures close, while being more willing to outsource management of other types of data. In this case, it is not exactly clear exactly what data was the target.
UGLY
16 Network World Middle East March 2011
Femtocells deployments more than double in 12 months
Informa Telecoms & Media has issued its latest femtocell market status report which revealed that deployments have more than doubled in the past 12 months. The report found that although residential services represent the overwhelming majority of femtocell deployments, the market has also started to see particularly strong growth in the enterprise sector. Almost a third of femtocell deployments now include enterprise offerings, contrasting strongly with the situation 12 months ago when there were no non-residential deployments. It also highlighted the importance of the the first urban and rural rollouts over this period. In total there are now 19 femtocell deployments globally compared with nine at Mobile World Congress 2010. These include six enterprise offerings, two urban deployments from Vodafone Qatar and Telefonica Spain as well as an outdoor rural service from SoftBank in Japan. These demonstrate that operator interest is not limited to residential services alone. Nonresidential femtocell services focus on the high-value enterprise market, public places such as metropolitan environments where they provide a capacity boost, and rural areas where network coverage has traditionally been uneconomical. Furthermore, the past quarter has also seen important progress in femtocell
technology. In addition to more powerful models that cover larger areas, new low power USB-connected femtocell designs promise to open up new service opportunities for operators. The second femtocell plugfest also took place, indicating that the industry is close to seeing widespread standardised femtocell deployments. “While residential femtocell deployments continue to grow we are seeing changes in the market as a whole with operators realising the technology can extend to the enterprise, rural and urban markets. Enterprise offerings are rapidly becoming a standard component of all femtocell deployments. Beyond this, operators have already started to embrace urban femtocells to overcome the coverage challenge, and outdoor designs for rural markets which could also revolutionise developing markets too,� said Dimitris Mavrakis, Senior Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media. Informa Telecoms & Media expects the femtocell market to experience significant growth over the next few years, reaching just under 49 million femtocell access points (FAP) in the market by 2014 with 114 million mobile users accessing mobile networks through femtocells during that year. Healthy growth is anticipated throughout the forecast period with femtocell unit sales reaching 25 million in 2014 alone. www.networkworldme.com
Powerful
and configure the product in Du entersDeploy FMC world du, the UAE’s integrated telecom service less than an hour with easy-to-use provider, has converged its fixed and mobile IP transport networks using the Cisco CRS templates and wizards. Carrier Routing System. This will enable FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) on du’s - ManageEngine OpManager network to meet the demand for highend broadband services and makes the company unique in its ability to rapidly deploy new high-bandwidth mobile applications and dataCustomer packages. Cisco and speaks: du have collaborated previously to develop “…In my opinion, it is the most beneficial tool we own. a portfolio of data and mobility services There is a greater ROI with OpManager than with the in the UAE. This newother phase more of network costly monitoring systems like Tivoli, development will allow du to improve the OpenView or SCCM’s Operations Manager. Not to the ease of installation and configuration as speed, flexibility andmention scalability of mobilecompared to OpenView or Tivoli." based services to its customers. This is one of the first regional FMC projects where all the fixed and mobile David Henry services run on the same IP network with Systems Administrator AOSmith Products Company. mobile (signaling and bearer), Electrical mobile data, residential internet, business internet, residential voice, enterprise voice, w 3w w . m a n a g e e n g i n e . c o international voice, layer 2 VPNs, layer VPNs and video running on a single IP/MPLS core powered by Cisco. This collaboration between Cisco and du also paves the way for future mobile applications and services to du’s customers in the UAE. By consolidating cores, du is able to offer its customers in the UAE a more scalable platform to deliver future services at a higher quality. The reduction in core equipment and moving to latest technology also reduces du’s energy www.manageengine.com/npm consumption and reduce carbon footprint.
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sales@manageengine.com March 2011 Network World Middle East 17
in action: Dsoa
MobilY DEPloYs 100G NEtWorK
S
L-R: Abdulsalam Bastaki, Vice-President of IT at Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority and Ahmed Galal, Sales & Marketing Director, STME
An array of capabilities Dubai Silicon Oasis has set up a centralised storage array at the Main Site as well as a disaster recovery (DR) site linked to a redundant Fiber Channel Fabric
B
y using Symantec Storage Foundation, solutions such as
high availability for critical servers with remote failover, archiving and enhanced backup were also offered. The new solutions has successfully eliminated a Single Point of Failure, simplified IT administration, reduced operational costs, and accelerated vital IT processes such as the recovery of files on Network-Attached Storage after userinitiated file deletions. Abdulsalam Bastaki, Vice-President of IT at Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority, said: “It is essential for us at Dubai Silicon Oasis to make sure that our systems are in line with all ICT developments, especially at a time when the technology sector is witnessing 18 Network World Middle East March 2011
an unprecedented evolution. We have chosen STME to implement and update our systems with the most efficient technology and solutions because of their sound understanding of the integrated free zone park.” The project was deployed by STME. “We have created a high-performance, high-throughput, scalable solution that delivers optimum value to the IT investments of DSO. Data security is paramount for DSO considering the nature of its business, which is why we have deployed a bestof-breed integrated solution for storage, backup, disaster recovery, and archiving of their email and file server,” added Ahmed Galal, Sales & Marketing Director, STME.
audi Arabian mobile operator Mobily, in partnership with Ciena, has activated what is said to be the first commercial 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) network in the Middle East. This regional first, deployed within the Riyadh metropolitan area, is an extension of Mobily’s nationwide network. Mobily, which owns more than 40 percent of Saudi Arabia’s mobile market, recently announced its selection of optical transport and switching platforms, Carrier Ethernet solutions, as well as management and maintenance services from Ciena – all aimed at supporting high-bandwidth services. The 100G coherent service delivered on Ciena’s ActivFlex 6500 PacketOptical Platform – the industry’s first commercially available system equipped with coherent 100G optics – is key to that architecture. Mobily’s new 100G capabilities give the operator the ability to quickly and easily add network capacity in the crucial metropolitan area of Riyadh. “This 100G deployment demonstrates our ongoing focus on innovation, aimed at bringing leading edge technology offering to our customers,” said Abdul Aziz Al Tamami, Chief Operations Officer, Mobily. “The demand for bandwidth coming from Saudi businesses is growing steadily, and applications like video, teleconferencing and cloud computing are fuelling a significant portion of this growth. By embracing Ciena’s 100G coherent technology, we are capable of fulfilling the needs of even the most demanding of our customers, while future-proofing our network for the years to come.” Ciena’s 100G coherent technology will allow for a total throughput of 8.8 Terabits of data per second on Mobily’s network, carried over 88 optical channels on a single strand of optical fiber. Ciena’s ActivFlex 6500 platform equipped with coherent 100G optics has been operating in live networks since Dec 2009 and provides a simple upgrade path from existing 10G and 40G networks – increasing the amount of bandwidth existing networks can carry by as much as tenfold – with minimal network changes and investment to cost-effectively maximise traffic transport.
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Why is CommVault positioned as a leader in the 2011 “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Disk-Based Backup /Recovery” Report?* The 13,500 customers worldwide who trust us to solve their data management challenges could answer this question for you 13,500 different ways. But if you don’t have time to poll them, get the full Gartner report and more at commvault.com/ITLeaders. Or, to set up a personal conversation about how we can help you, call our middle east office in Dubai at +971 4 3753491. Backup & Recovery > Archive > VM Protection > Deduplication > Snapshot Management > eDiscovery
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©1999-2011 CommVault Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. CommVault, the “CV” logo, Solving Forward, and Simpana are trademarks or registered trademarks of CommVault Systems, Inc. All other third party brands, products, service names, trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of and used to identify the products or services of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice. * The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2011 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. March 2011 Network World Middle East 19
event | mobile world congress
A brave new world Mobile broadband and LTE hogged the limelight at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona
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he industry seems to have learned its lessons from 3G, which was
beset with problems when it came out ten years ago, and is now focusing on robustness and quality of service in the 4G. Though these are early days for LTE, the mobile industry is bullish about the nextgeneration, which is all about data. At the show, mobile gear manufacturer Ericsson presented its vision of the world in 2020. Called Networked Society, it envisions a world with 50 billion devices with microprocessors connected to network, many of them wirelessly. Buoyed by a high demand for mobile broadband solutions, the Swedish giant is betting on a world where all microprocessors that not connected today will be connected, resulting in the number of connections in tens of billions. “We have deployed networks all over the world. Next 20 years will see those networks being used in ways never imagined, with a huge impact on people, enterprise organisation and society in general. We believe three components will make the difference in a networked society – mobility, broadband and cloud,” said Hans Vestberg, President and CEO. Ericsson’s vision is one of machine to machine (M2M) communication, which means we can actually start using
20 Network World Middle East March 2011
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machines in a way that they talk to each other and this is a major change relative to how we have been communicating in the past. The technology enablers for this universally connected world are broadband ubiquity and the declining cost of connected devices, he added. Vestberg’s talk on machine to machine networking ecosystems included descriptions and examples of smart networks, smart services and smart cities. Ericsson says 5.3 billion people are connected worldwide today, which is expected to reach 7-8 billion by 2015. “Broadband penetration has, of course, been the most important factor for operators around the world. Every 1000 new mobile broadband subscriptions generate 80 new jobs, which is why governments need to think about broadband infrastructure. We expect one billion people to have mobile broadband subscriptions this years, which can reach up to five billion by 2016; the data consumption will be 25 percent higher, with video accounting for the major chunk of traffic,” said Vestberg. Ericsson says 500 million smartphones are already on networks and by 2016 there will be as much data on smartphones as PCs, and more data capacity on networks than voice. To support M2M communications and hook up operators to cloud, Ericsson has launched Device Connection Platform at the show, which makes it possible to create tailored connectivity and price plans for M2M services. Ericsson provides a complete service that the operators can adjust to serve its enterprise customers’ needs, including a self-service interface, flexible billing, charging and connectivity plans for all devices connected to the network. Since machine to machine applications can communicate using any existing IP protocol they can be accessed and share data via internet. In addition, the operator’s customer will be able to manage their subscriptions and devices in real time. In tune with the shift from host-to-host
connections to a focus on connections from users to networks and vice versa, Ericsson is expanding its IP networking portfolio, with several new solutions to be rolled out during 2011. At the show, it has taken the wraps off its first solution in the portfolio – Smart Service Router, which the company says will form the basis of the new mobile core network needed in 4G/LTE networks. Though the show this year was all about LTE, which is expected to come early, Ericsson says HSPA will continue to evolve in parallel to LTE. The manufacturer has demonstrated multi-carrier HSPA with 168Mbps on the downlink and 24Mbps on the uplink using a prototype consumer device and commercial network equipment. This is said to be a world record for the highest HSPA speed achieved on commercial network equipment. To reach 168M bps, Ericsson used a number of radio tricks, including antenna technology MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) and sending data over several channels at the same time. MIMO uses multiple antennas in the base station and on the device to increase speeds. Besides HSPA at 168M bps, Ericsson has also demonstrated HSPA with 42M bps using a single channel and 84M bps using two channels. Operators already offer HSPA at 42M bps, but they have to use two channels. By only using one channel aided by MIMO, operators can “be much more efficient with their valuable radio spectrum”, Ericsson said.
Though the show this year was all about LTE, which is expected to come early, Ericsson says HSPA will continue to evolve in parallel to LTE.
Today, 79 commercial HSPA networks offer download speeds of 21M bps. Add to that 13 commercial HSPA networks that can offer up to 42M bps, and five operators that have committed to HSPA at 84M bps, according to the latest statistics from the Global mobile Suppliers Association. Another major area of push for Ericsson is manager services, which accounts for 10 percent of the net sales for the company. Its services organisation now boasts of 45000 professional and has won 54 managed services contract in 2010.
Ericsson airs smaller mobile base stations Ericsson has joined the move towards using smaller mobile base stations, launching Ericsson Air (antenna integrated radio), which aims to reduce power consumption while expanding coverage to more areas. For mobile subscribers, the Air base stations can open the door to coverage where there was none before, such as in street and indoor environments that are hard to reach with traditional base stations, according to Jan Häglund, vice president and deputy head of product area IP and broadband at Ericsson’s Networks unit. The Air base stations integrate the antenna unit into the radio unit. The first generation of the product will put the baseband unit, which handles the data and call processing, into a separate box. But in the future it will also be integrated into the main unit, according to Ericsson. The Air base stations can be used in 2G, 3G and LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks, and will come in different sizes. The smallest ones will be the size of a one-liter milk carton, and can cover an area with a cell radius of up to about 100 meters, according to Christian Hedelin, head of radio product marketing at Ericsson’s Networks unit.
March 2011 Network World Middle East 21
event | networking
Changing the rules We organised a CIO roundtable in Kuwait to discuss the changing paradigm in networking in the context of emerging technologies, which yielded some good advice on network transformation
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olstered by 3Com acquisition and a new go-to-market
moniker, HP Networking has set its sights on Cisco in networking battle. Against this backdrop, the company in association with Network World Middle East organised a roundtable discussion in Kuwait to debate the changing rules of networking and how HP Networking is enabling customers to build next-gen infrastructure. The current networking paradigm saps resources from IT innovation and perpetuates a siloed approach to IT. Networks are too complex, inflexible and costly. In addition, the boundaries between the network and data centre infrastructure limit IT agility and leave critical resources underutilized. “With the acquisition of 3Com, HP is bringing an end to this inefficient model, enabling convergence that accelerates business growth at a lower total cost of ownership. We have solutions that span from edge of the network to the heart of the data centre,”
22 Network World Middle East March 2011
said Khaled Ibrahim El Desouky, Pre Sales Technical Consultant, HP Networking. He said customers are looking for ways to break from business limitations imposed by the networking paradigm that has been dominated by a single vendor. “We are delivering a common platform, single operating system, and single pane of glass management. We are offering open industry standards and market-driven innovation, with security solutions and intelligence integrated into the secure network fabric.” Desouky also explained the reasons why HP Networking is emerging as a credible alternative in the networking market. “Customers are telling us that one of the reasons why the cost of managing and deploying networking infrastructure hadn’t changed over the years was because a competitor that held a majority position in the market just kept adding, adding, adding more features without lowering their cost, and many of these features were
features the customer never used. We will deploy for you exactly what you need, and then we’re going to translate that to you in business value that you won’t get anywhere else.” He claimed what differentiates HP networking from a technology standpoint is the intelligence that its brings to the table, which enable customers to deploy the network fabric and network architecture in much simpler ways, that will open up new opportunities for business growth. “We have got one management solution end to end. We’ve got Intelligent Resilient Framework technology, which allows you to do clustering performance and leading-edge bandwidth access.” This was followed by a presentation by Arun George, Technical Sales Manager, HP TippingPoint on the some of the burning issues around virtualisaiton security, where the threats are new and the traditional security tools don’t cut it anymore. “To address the unique requirements of the virtualised data center, we are offering TippingPoint Secure Virtualisation Framework (SVF), which is designed specifically for implementing best-of-breed threat protection for the virtualized infrastructure. We are extending our threat research capabilities, breadth of protection, ease-of-use, and automation capabilities to include virtual infrastructure.” HP TippingPoint is also offering active theat blocking, which filters and detect malicious traffic and stop it before it can compromise or damage the virtualised data centre infrastructure or its data assets. The roundtable was attended by Farhan Baboojee, Sr. Regional Manager – IT Ops, Agility; Imran Saleh, IT Special Consultant, PACE; Fahad Almenayes, Executive Management – Technical Support and System Operations, Al Ahli Bank of Kuwait; Ahmed Helal, ManagerIT, Al Muzaini Exchange; and Rehman Shaik, Senior Technical Support Engineer, Al Shaya. www.networkworldme.com
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March 2011 Network World Middle East 23
feature | unified communications
STATE of the UNION Realit y check for unified communications
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hile many businesses tightened their IT budgets
during the recent recession, a growing number of organisations are deploying unified communications solutions – integrated voice, data, messaging, conferencing and collaboration services over converged networks – as confidence creeps back and budgets expand. The driver? 24 Network World Middle East March 2011
Return on investment. For the uninitiated, UC solutions quickly increase an organisation’s productivity and reduce operating costs. UC not only provides more reliable and cross-functional communication, but also increases resilience against network disruptions. In addition, UC enhances the sense of belonging and affinity amongst remote
or mobile workers. However, getting to a UC platform takes careful thought and planning. Definitions of “unified communications” are as plentiful as the companies that provide the component technologies. As such, there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all. However, there are several broad ways to approach UC on a single platform. www.networkworldme.com
Many businesses are pursuing either rich media or telephony-centric approaches to implementation, while others are focusing on e-mail- or instant messaging-centric approaches. Admittedly, the array of available technologies, combined with their unique implications, make selecting a UC solution a complex undertaking. There are many things to consider when deciding what is right for your company, including the nature of your organisation’s work and its physical structure. “One of the most obvious concerns has to be bandwidth optimisation. Since UC involves real time voice and video, CIOs need to have a closer look at their bandwidth and their prioritisation in terms of services and traffic. The second is the local ISP infrastructure and regulations and what these cover. If the communications system covers several branches across the region, then the local WAN links and basic infrastructure needs to be set up to handle the traffic that these applications can (and will) generate,” says Dharmendra Parmar, GM Marketing, FVC. Frits Neyndorff, MD of NEC Unified Solutions, says in addition to the infrastructure concerns such as bandwidth, one of the key challenges for companies is changing user habits and processes among the staff and providing the right level of skills and training to ensure that they make the most optimal use of the solutions. Another common area of concern is how will it affect network security? “Some of the most common concerns companies have is security, reliability and user adoption. Network security in UC is not any different from having a voice or data infrastructure. Network security in UC is all about user
to it – this is where UC solutions can become needlessly complicated, leading to unanticipated costs. Identify the weakest link in the chain
If your network is not strong enough to handle an increase in traffic from UC, you will not get the results you are expecting. Review your current business and network environments,
Dharmendra Parmar, GM Marketing, FVC
If your network is not strong enough to handle an increase in traffic from UC, you will not get the results you are expecting. privileges and access,” says Mohammed Areff, MD – Gulf & Pakistan, Avaya. Many of the obstacles faced in UC implementations stem from at least one of the following: 1. Rushed discovery phase – it’s easier to address challenges prior to implementation, so this phase should carefully assess all potential applications and systems that link to the communications platform or may be affected by the change in traffic 2. Assumption that equipment/ applications can be transferred “as is” from existing systems – it is important to clarify this before investing. 3. Lack of stakeholder involvement in the process – since UC is not an IT-only decision, you’ll only capture the maximum benefit if you secure the users’ input during the discovery, planning, and implementation process. 4. Failure to establish a goal and stick
Frits Neyndorff, MD of NEC Unified Solutions
assess current and future needs, and incorporate them into a scope of work for design and implementation. For most companies, unifying communications is not a one-sizefits-all, packaged solution. It is a phased process, leading to an end goal that meets business/organisational communication goals. What is best for your company is a network and solution set that stays up and running when the weakest link is at or near maximum capacity. Finally, remember that training your associates on the maintenance and use of the UC components is essential. Begin preparing them for implementation during installation and configuration. Again, your goal is to launch a reliable operating system without disrupting business as usual. March 2011 Network World Middle East 25
feature | unified communications
Once viewed as a luxury that only large organisations with hefty IT budgets could afford, UC solutions are now within reach of organisations of all sizes, including many small and midsize businesses (SMBs). “At this stage of time and after few years of penetration in the enterprises, UC is within the reach of any organization. The level of UC penetration might differ as some organisations may focus on mobility, others on voice, video and web conferencing,” says Wael Abdulal, Collaboration Manager, Cisco UAE. Microsoft, which has recently launched its Lync server, says users will no longer need to invest in expensive hardware to adopt UC. “In fact, you don’t need to even own any hardware if you opt for the cloud based or partner hosted version of Microsoft’s UC solution. Owning hardware/IT infrastructure is one of the key blockers for small organizations while we offer a comprehensive enterprise solutions for some of our large customers. We have references to support UC for business from 5 seats to 100K seats,” says Yasir Khokhar,Information Worker Business Group lead, Microsoft Gulf. Parmar from FVC adds that as UC leverages voice, video, social media and other communications into a more converged platform, there is a wider range of solutions available to suit the budgets and needs of organisations, whatever the size. “Organisations can start with a simple solution using voice/text messaging, and scale all the way to conference room video conferencing solutions.” Payback time While the goals of UC are admirable, it
is not always easy to sell management on the idea of a revamped, 26 Network World Middle East March 2011
Mohammed Areff, MD – Gulf & Pakistan, Avaya
While the goals of UC are admirable, it is not always easy to sell management on the idea of a revamped, companywide communications system. companywide communications system. However, once management understands the benefits of UC, they may realise it is just the kind of enhancement they are looking for. “Well, it’s true that some of the benefits of UC are not very easy to measure. It also depends on the size and the extent of how the systems are used. Some of the clear, measurable areas are productivity, in terms of increased communication and collaboration, access to resources that would normally be out of reach, and time savings and costs in terms of travel especially at executive levels,” says Parmar. Areff from Avaya adds that enhanced productivity, employee retention, cost reductions from staff
Wael Abdulal, Collaboration Manager, Cisco UAE
travel are just some of the factors that CIOs could consider while cost justifying a UC system. Another option is to look at a hosted UC system, which offers incredible cost savings when compared to in-house, thanks in large part to eliminating the need for hardware, software and licenses. Alongside the reduced need for hardware and software, staffing costs can also be easily manager, as a hosted solution doesn’t require a large team of internal experts to deal with upgrades or maintenance. “This would depend on the needs of the organisation and where security can play a very key role in deciding what kind of systems to deploy. On-premise deployment does have the advantage of enhanced control, but hosted systems give these organisations the possibility of more flexibility,” says Neyndorff. While unified communications is a complicated field with many potential challenges, it can undoubtedly help transform an organisation, and result in attractive operating efficiencies. The facts speak for themselves – UC is on the rise as an innovative way to change the way your company does business. www.networkworldme.com
Under the patronage of H.E. Sultan Bin Saeed Al Mansoori, UAE Minister of Economy
The Middle East’s Leading Enterprise Communications Exhibition & Conference
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feature | disaster recovery
In the safety zone With the outages costing dearly, business continuity and disaster recovery are emerging as top priorities for regional businesses. Here is what you need to know to plan right
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usinesses are generally confident about the resilience of their IT
systems – until disaster strikes and disruptions ensue. Most f the businesses in the region have experiences significant network disruptions during the last 12 month, either in the form of political turmoil, power loss, hardware failures or a loss of telecom services to facilities. Most of these disruptions could have been reduced or avoided by implemented by implementing a more comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plan. To compensate for the unexpected and account for the unpreventable, prudent organisations utilize business continuity products and services plans to keep their enterprises up and running in emergencies, and implement disaster 28 Network World Middle East March 2011
recovery plans and programs against the possibility that a computer, server, office or entire building becomes unusable as a result of a catastrophe. Business continuity and disaster recovery technologies are becoming less expensive and easier to use, in part because they are being integrated into larger IT systems, and also because they’re increasingly taking advantage of aspects of cloud computing and virtualisation. There are many factors that driving this as a top technology priority for organisations in the Middle East. “Enterprises today are facing the perfect storm. Challenging economic times are compelling businesses to achieve even greater levels of cost savings and operational efficiency. Yet business-critical applications still require vital data to be protected and available to meet increasing service-level demands. The majority of businesses that fail to protect their critical
Anthony Harrison, Senior Principal Solution Specialist – Storage and Server Management, Symantec
applications don’t get a second chance, and those that fail to reduce their operational expenses may suffer the same fate. All these factors driving the prioritisation of business continuity and disaster recovery as top priority,” says Ahmed Hassan, Area Technical Manager, NetApp Middle East. Wouter Vancoppenol, Regional Sales Director of Double-Take (now part of Vision Solutions), adds another perspective: “Business continuity is an increasing concern for enterprises locally - they are following the same company growth and user demand curves that we have seen in other regions. This requirement for services to be available at all times is a pressing one, and means that companies www.networkworldme.com
but could be big enough to threaten my business? Disaster recovery has tended to be viewed as data replication, and business continuity extends that idea to include the servers, their configuration, the office space and equipment and indeed the complete business process,” says Anthony Harrison, Senior Principal Solution Specialist – Storage and Server Management, Symantec. He cites the example of a telco, for which DR could include the system that houses all of their call data records so they do not lose track of their primary revenue Mohamed Rizvi, Manager- Information Security and Advisory Services at eHosting DataFort
are looking at developing how their business can survive through a disaster through investing in high availability and / or disaster recovery planning and solutions. He points out at the industries in the region that have been successful especially banking and finance has seen a huge demand for business continuity as more services are rolled out via the internet to online users. “Internet banking requires that systems are available around the clock, which has made investment in continuity part of a wider company strategy. Other industries like has seen the same business driver - customers are more demanding, and they won’t accept downtime.” It is important for CIOs to make a distinction between business continuity and disaster recovery, which are often thought of as the same thing. Disaster recovery is about re-establishing IT services in the face of large-scale hardware failure or sabotage, facilities failure and/or regional natural disaster. Disaster-recovery capabilities are measured by the amount of time it takes to re-establish services and the amount of data loss. Business continuity is the ability to continue operations with little or no downtime in some of these scenarios. “These two different perspectives on the same core problem – how do I deal with an event that is unlikely to happen
Tareque Choudhury, Head of Security Practice and Professional Services MEA, BT Global Services
source, but business continuity would include the application to generate the bills at the end of that month, the printers to print the completed statements and the people to send them in the post to ensure that the company’s cash flow is not impacted. Mohamed Rizvi, Manager- Information Security and Advisory Services at eHosting DataFort, defines DR as an arrangement related to the preparation for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure, which is critical to an organisation during a disaster. “It is a sub-set of business continuity and focuses on IT systems that support business functions.” While many regional businesses believe they are prepared for an unplanned network disruption, many are not – and yet
the most common causes of IT outages are addressable by having a well-defined DR plan in place. What should companies keep in mind while formulating a plan? “The main requirement should be to determine the value of data and infrastructure you are trying to protect with DR. Understanding the value is key to determining the funding an organization would put forward for their DR strategy,” says Tareque Choudhury, Head of Security Practice and Professional Services MEA, BT Global Services Harrison from Symantec says that taking the simplistic view of “just copy the data offsite and we’ll worry about the rest later” represents a very high cost in terms of duplicated storage requirements (usually of the same model of high-end array), because there is no appreciation of the business value of the data. “We always advise a more granular approach to understand the business value both of the data and the applications that access it.” According to Vancoppenol, the first step is to understand what your critical applications are- that the business relies on in order to be profitable. These are the first that should be protected, either through deploying high availability or disaster recovery solutions. The second is to know what platforms you are running: even smaller organisations tend to have a mix of different server hardware in place, which makes planning how to protect the applications running on those servers potentially more difficult. Look at how to protect these multiple platforms with one tool, rather than having different products for each one. This is a more cost-effective approach, and secondly it makes it easier to spot any potential gaps in the DR plan, he adds. With the cost of downtime going up, sometimes even battening businesses down, the pressure on IT organisations is now more than ever to ensure their DR plan is ready to go and unfailingly reliable. Think you are ready about just about anything? Think again. March 2011 Network World Middle East 29
feature | healthcare
Healthy attitude Healthcare in Middle East is going digital, which brings both tremendous opportunities and security risks
H
ealthcare information technology is expected to play a major role
in meeting the demand for care, quality, and safety, while bridging the gap to affordability. Healthcare providers and players in the Middle East are faced with the challenge of making transformative changes to care delivery and business models to respond to the changing technology landscape , which is essential to achieve cost savings and efficiency goals. “The healthcare industry in general is conservative when it comes to technology - after all, patient care is at stake. However, in recent years healthcare has accelerated adoption of technology compared to other industries as a way to deliver high quality care while keeping costs in line,” says Ali Ahmar, Regional Sales Manager, Brocade Communications Today, there’s the widespread migration from paper- and film-based to electronic medical/ health records, adoption of wireless technologies for medical monitoring as well as bedside care delivery, increased use and capability of medical imaging (PACS, CT, MRI, etc.) technology, unified communications, and high availability/ disaster recovery solutions are the current technology trends, he adds. Perhaps, the biggest disruptive technology transformation in the industry 30 Network World Middle East March 2011
is the move towards electronic health records (EHRs). Electronic records not only allow general practitioners and specialists to document and easily share patient information; they also help support “evidence-based” medicine. That allows physicians to treat patients using best practices derived from the systematic, scientific study of standard treatments. Given the huge upfront costs involved, some industry experts believe a softwareas-a-service (SaaS) EHR model would be the most cost-effective and least complicated deployment for medical practices, clinics and hospitals unable to afford in-house IT equipment. Under a SaaS model, EHR applications such as physician-order-entry systems are hosted on servers in a vendor facility and hospitals would access those systems through a secure Internet portal or via a virtual private network. That way, the health care facility would not need to deploy hardware and software in its data centre or hire the IT staffers needed to support and maintain an EHR system. Health goes mobile Smartphones, tablet PCs and other
wireless devices are poised to play a greater role in health care as doctors and patients embrace the mobile Internet. Smartphones allow doctors to check e-mail, use mobile applications and surf
the Web, and also lead to collaboration between physicians and patients. In fact, a recent research report suggests that smartphone apps are set to become the killer health care product as a research report projects that some 500 million people will be using them within five years. According to the Global Mobile Health Market Report 2010-2015 compiled by research2guidance, more than a third of 1.4 billion smartphone users in 2015 will be running some kind of mobile healthcare application. Mobile health (mHealth) applications allow doctors to monitor patients, no www.networkworldme.com
Wael Hasan, Territory Manager – Middle East, Zebra Technologies
matter where they are, in real time. The emergence of consumer health electronics devices like portable ECG machines, blood pressure monitors and weight scales can help physicians seamlessly capture and transmit patient information from home, work or from the road. According to a report released by Accenture earlier this year, the rise of inexpensive Internet connectivity along with the development of smaller, cheaper and “smarter” health electronic devices should help health care workers deliver better, more efficient health care to patients. “Wireless technology, specifically
the adoption of 802.11n is one of the most transformational technologies in healthcare. With the proliferation of medical monitoring devices as well as the broad adoption of PDAs, tablet PCs and smart phones, wireless technology is enabling healthcare providers to monitor and deliver care whenever and wherever needed. Mobile devices free from wired terminals and combined with wireless access have become extremely important to healthcare providers giving them ready access to patient information and the ability to diagnose and treat patients more quickly, regardless of their physical location in the hospital complex: wards, clinics, special-care units and so on,” says Ahmar. RFID is also set to play a crucial role, according to Wael Hasan, Territory Manager – Middle East, Zebra Technologies. The use of RFID in healthcare is vital to minimizing errors in patient treatment and revising process that were previously very time consuming. When talking about solutions for the Middle East, integration is definitely a buzz word for the market. “The fact is that patient histories— especially those dating back to the
Ali Ahmar, Regional Sales Manager, Brocade Communications
pre-computer era—are incredibly time consuming to review if not recorded digitally. In areas like medication administration, additional time and costs are incurred as some facilities still rely on centralized networks which can only be accessed from the pharmacy floor or the back office. These bulky and immobile systems of the past are becoming exponentially more difficult to manage. From staff ID cards to mobile printers and patient wristbands, the combination of RFID technologies becoming available in the Middle East presents incredible opportunities for healthcare providers,” he adds. The rapidly changing technology landscape in the healthcare sector, especially the transition to EHRs, is stressing existing networks. Industry experts point out a medical-grade network that can guarantee continuous high performance is the need of the hour. “At the same time, high performance needs to be matched with high security. Confidential patient information is among the most sensitive data that exists, and, in most jurisdictions, is subject to a host of legislative and regulatory controls,” sums up Ahmar. March 2011 Network World Middle East 31
techupdate
Toward a Gigabit Wi-Fi nirvana Today’s existing state-of-the art wireless LAN can achieve 300 Mbps using 802.11n with two spatial streams. Future developments will deliver threeand four-stream speeds of up to 600 Mbps. But the 802.11 working group has set its sights on a more ambitious milestone: 1 Gbps throughput. 32 Network World Middle East March 2011
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fter considering several approaches for getting
to gigabit speeds, the 802.11 WG settled on two related approaches, and formed two task groups to produce future gigabit standards: 802.11ac and 802.11ad. While both groups share the same goal, the approaches taken are www.networkworldme.com
different because the groups have fundamentally different purposes. Fundamentally, all wireless LAN standards depend on access to radio spectrum. 802.11ac will be designed for use at frequencies under 6 GHz, which in practice refers to the existing radio spectrum available today in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands used by 802.11a/b/g/n. Therefore, an important component of the work in Task Group AC will be to design backward-compatibility mechanisms to peacefully coexist with existing networks. Higher data rates in 802.11ac are supported by a set of familiar techniques. Once again, the speed will be supported by well-understood OFDM techniques, another bump up in the size of radio channels, and MIMO. Advances in both chip manufacturing technology and processing power have also made it possible to use more sensitive coding techniques that depend on finer distinctions in the received signal as well as more aggressive error correction codes that use fewer check bits for the same amount of data. Wider radio channels support higher speeds. Just as 802.11n provided a leap in speed by doubling channel width from 20 MHz to 40 MHz, 802.11ac provides a bump in throughput with still-wider 80 MHz channels. At 80 MHz, channel layout once again becomes a challenge, even in the relatively expansive 5 GHz spectrum. Manufacturers will need to adapt automatic radio tuning capabilities to offer higher-bandwidth channels only where necessary to conserve spectrum. Increasing data rates through efficiency is an important goal of
every new 802.11 standard. One common measure of efficiency is the number of megabits transmitted per megahertz of spectrum (Mbps/MHz). 802.11 began life at 0.1 Mbps/MHz, and current 802.11n standards have pushed that figure to 7.5 Mbps/MHz. Several efficiency enhancements are on the drawing board for 802.11ac, and the most interesting of these is multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). MU-MIMO builds on the beamforming capabilities of 802.11n and enables the simultaneous transmission of different data frames to different clients. Correctly using MU-MIMO requires that vendors develop spatial awareness of clients and sophisticated queuing systems that can take advantage of opportunities to transmit to multiple clients when conditions are right. 802.11ad has the same gigabit goal, but is intended for use with new spectrum around 60 GHz to use. Range will be shorter, but the spectrum is “cleaner” because many fewer devices use it today. The open spectral band is large enough that the current 802.11ad draft supports nearly 7 Gbps throughput. The higher data rates of 802.11ac and 802.11ad will have far-reaching influences into other areas of the protocol. CCMP, the existing encryption protocol first
The higher data rates of 802.11ac and 802.11ad will have far-reaching influences into other areas of the protocol.
standardized in 802.11i, requires two AES encryption operations for every 16 bytes of data. To encrypt a 1,500-byte frame requires roughly 200 AES encryption operations. To make matters worse, CCMP is based on a “chained” mode of operation that requires in-order processing of the 16-byte chunks because chained cryptographic modes require the output of one stage to be used as the input to the next. Many engineers within the 802.11 working group expect that the high data rates of 802.11ac and 802.11ad will be too high for CCMP. Fortunately, a solution is readily available in the form of the Galois/ Counter Mode Protocol (GCMP), which has been incorporated into the 802.11ad draft. GCMP uses the same AES cryptographic engine, but embeds it into a more efficient framework. Compared with CCMP, GCMP requires only half the number of encryption operations, and, more importantly, is not chained so that GCMP cryptographic acceleration can be applied to an entire transmitted frame in parallel. The downside of the adoption of GCMP is that it is a new protocol and will only become available in new radio chips that support it, and an entire generation of centralized cryptographic equipment, such as the security processors in WLAN controllers, will become obsolete. As with every jump in speed that has occurred in Wi-Fi, 802.11ac and 802.11ad present challenges for the network administrator. The move to gigabit Wi-Fi is needed to keep up with demand for Wi-Fi network capacity and enable Wi-Fi to remain the technology of choice at the edge. March 2011 Network World Middle East 33
feature | VDI
Best practices for maximising VDI success Cost-saving technologies remain a priority for IT in 2011 and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), with its ability to streamline operations, is one of the technologies at the top of the list.
W
ith VDI, IT administrators can manage desktops and
applications from a centralized location, eliminating the need to physically touch and update every single desktop. This, in turn, enables faster provisioning and deployment - a framework that is especially attractive for rapidly expanding computing environments. End users also benefit, gaining the ability to seamlessly access critical applications from any location with a myriad of devices. So what’s the catch? Why do VDI pilots fail? As the computing landscape has changed, so have user expectations. With mobile and ubiquitous computing fast becoming the norm for most corporations, end users don’t tolerate availability or performance problems. In fact, end user satisfaction has been identified as the No.1 factor in determining success of any VDI pilot/proof of concept (POC). If the plan includes thousands of desktops, ensuring the first hundred users’ happiness is critical to satisfying the next hundred, and so on.
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The network is key to VDI satisfaction, being the conduit by which the virtual desktop continuously feeds the VDI client desktop activity. This video feed “paints” the monitor’s screen via a desktop presentation protocol, such as PCoIP, ICA or RDP. When the visual display depends
on network performance, understanding the difference between LAN, WAN and VPN activity is critical to project success. How VDI affects the network VDI pilots often stall when employees start accessing their desktops via WAN, VPN
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and other lower speed links. On the LAN, contention is usually a non-issue, so pilots that only involve LAN links can create a false sense of accomplishment. If the VDI team has not taken a baseline on WAN and VPN links to see what headroom is available for VDI traffic, there may not be enough resources for even a small pilot. When looking at bandwidth, be sure to account for peak utilization and not just average use. If there are legitimate spikes of activity expected across the links, there must be room for those peaks once VDI has been added, or non-VDI users will complain. Armed with this information, you can work with the VDI vendors to adjust protocol parameters to ensure performance within the available headroom. These parameters include things like screen resolution, audio quality, USB redirection, and other user experience settings. Once configured, it is important to monitor the infrastructure continuously for sudden bursts in network load that drown out VDI users across the WAN. Over the course of the VDI pilot deployment, these optimizations will provide a stable baseline from which to extrapolate full deployment feasibility. Real-time visibility is required The network, shared storage, connection
brokers, desktop hosts, application virtualizationservers, Active Directory servers, DHCP servers, security gateways, etc. must all work seamlessly for the successful delivery of a VDI desktop. The performance, availability and constraints of each infrastructure component impacts the quality of the end user experience. For example, when desktop logins are slow, it might be a connection broker problem due to a “login storm,” but it might also be a lengthy anti-virus update that needs to be scheduled to run after login. A sufficiently granular performance management solution is the only way to peer into these critical seconds.
Once configured, it is important to monitor the infrastructure continuously for sudden bursts in network load that drown out VDI users across the WAN. The many moving parts in a VDI ecosystem demand an accurate, timely and comprehensive picture, or reactive management will be the sad reality. Performance problems can’t be re-created from historical logs and/or disparate reports from a small subset of the virtual desktop infrastructure components. A real-time system allows you to navigate through the infrastructure and drill down to where the issue is happening even while it is occurring. Administrators should look for a single dashboard that covers all the components - whether physical or virtual - so that they are not blind-sided by the fluctuations common in complex IT systems. Response time, also known as latency, has a direct and immediate impact on end-user experience. Virtual desktop performance is highly sensitive to sudden shifts in storage latency as well as network latency across the WAN. If latency shifts aren’t measured in real-time, VDI administrators will have their phones ringing off the hook with user complaints while the lights in their virtualization management systems are still green. This puzzling situation occurs because most management solutions poll for data every 5 to 15 minutes, often averaging the data over large intervals as well. A 30-second latency hit is invisible on these intervals, but the user still complains or chalks it up to “poor IT support.” That is why it is essential to have a real-time system continuously analyzing the infrastructure and comparing
current performance against the historical response time thresholds. If anything changes, administrators will be immediately notified. If the storage latency for a key host serving up VDI desktops has jumped to 80 milliseconds, several minutes is far too long to wait. Traditional threshold crossing events should be bolstered by recordings or other contextual data so that VI administrators, network engineers, and storage administrators can collaborate on a common interface. Give power to the users When evaluating VDI management tools,
special consideration should be given to solutions that directly capture user experience. If users can trigger a DVR recording of their activity when problems occur, administrators can capture the real-time load on the infrastructure, for example CPU, memory, storage and the activity in and out of the desktop. This rich information eliminates the impossible task of trying to “re-create” the problem. Load balancers, dynamic cluster rebalancing algorithms, and on-demand resource schedulers ensure that this morning’s infrastructure configuration will be entirely different in the afternoon when they log back in. A recording like this gives users a simple and proactive way to immediately communicate with IT as soon as they encounter performance problems — instead of learning about them a day later during a status meeting. By giving users a “visual trouble ticket,” the service desk also benefits because it has immediate, actionable user information. With some analysts calling 2011 the year of VDI, it’s well worth taking the time to understand the new management criteria essential to succeeding with VDI. By ensuring that your infrastructure performance management system is up to the task for a VDI initiative, you can meet and exceed user expectations, increase overall business productivity and improve operational efficiencies. March 2011 Network World Middle East 35
36 Network World Middle East March 2011
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interview | F5
Gunning for data F centre control F5 CEO McAdam on battling Cisco, becoming arms dealer for public cloud
38 Network World Middle East March 2011
5 is described as an application delivery vendor, but that term is nebulous to some folks and it doesn’t really convey all of the things that you do. You cover everything from application acceleration, wide-area network (WAN) optimisation, security, policy and more. Can you crystallize F5’s mission and what sets it apart from other infrastructure companies? We see our products as occupying the
strategic control points within data centers. We see all the traffic that’s going between applications and between servers. Because of these strategic control points, we can www.networkworldme.com
do simple things like, historically, load balancing or encrypting the traffic. But then it gets much more sophisticated where we can basically provision applications and servers, we can look at the performance of specific applications. Our customers can use our products to change or add functionality without having to change thousands of pieces of software and different programs. We’ve got this opportunity because of the way data centers have been architected and are being architected, which is this whole concept of consolidated data centers, typically using virtualization technology without a product sitting in a data center effectively controlling traffic between the apps and between the servers and between the network. Talk about those control points. Did you identify them as an opportunity early on or is this a position in the infrastructure that you evolved to support? We started off with load balancing then we
added encryption. In 2004, we came out with full proxy architecture. The reason that’s important is that we can actually sit at the strategic control point and the application isn’t aware that we’re there, the user isn’t aware. That gets you a lot of power. Also, we can be very application fluent. We can understand what’s happening at a pretty granular level within the applications, whether it’s Microsoft SharePoint or Oracle apps. Over the last few years we’ve been building more application fluency into the product. Three years ago if you were using our products, you may have had to deal with a whitepaper that would say, ‘OK if you’re running SharePoint, this is what you do to improve the performance of SharePoint’. You read the whitepaper, you made some changes to our software. Now we have application templates for specific types of solutions, and we’ve got a significant number of those actually. These templates [are supported] within the operating system and you tweak the parameters to optimize [the applications], to make them more secure, to make them go faster.
We poll our customers on a quarterly basis and we typically see scores of 9.2 to 9.6 out of 10. That’s very high. I want to talk about how you compete against companies like Cisco. When you win, why do you win? And when you lose, why do you lose? I’ll do the ‘lose’ first because it’s an easy
one, it’s a very small proportion of the time we lose. We’ve actually been publishing our win rate against the competition. It’s typically in the low- to mid-90% win rate. Typically when we lose against Cisco it will be because of politics, to use the phrase used by our sales force. Cisco is a great company that’s got a lot of loyalty within the customer base, and some customers basically decide they want to do onestop shopping. When we win is when customers are looking at functionality and performance. For example, I’ve talked about application templates. Nobody else has got that capability. I mentioned the example of SharePoint. We have the capability of increasing the performance of that by as much as 10 times. The short answer is that we win at a technology level. We have faster technology and much more feature-rich technology. I mentioned the full proxy architecture, there’s nobody that’s really got anything comparable to that in the marketplace. Also, we’ve got a tremendous service organization. Our customer [satisfaction] levels are world class. We poll our customers on a quarterly basis and we typically see scores of 9.2 to 9.6 out of 10. That’s very high. We’ve developed a world-class sales distribution channel as well as service channel as well as having the technology leadership. So Cisco obviously is at a number of the same control points you are in the
network. What is it that you can do that a Cisco can’t? Well, in fact, they are not really at a
number of control points. I mentioned earlier about being application fluent. To be application fluent, you really need this full proxy architecture and it needs to be sitting very close to the application. Cisco actually doesn’t have that technical approach. They focus more on load balancing and just effectively managing the traffic. They do Layer 7 [switching], which means that they can open up the packets and make strategic decisions based on that. But it’s very limited. Also a lot of their thrust is to sell the Layer 4-7 solution on the switch or on the router. From their perspective that’s pretty good because it means they can add value to that [device], but it’s not the right place in the network. You really need to be after the firewall, just before the application is ready to take the data so that you can encrypt the data, so that you can massage it. They don’t really have what we would call strategic control. Switches and routers can be defined as strategic control points, but not at the application-fluent level. What’s changing in the competitive landscape today? There’s not been a significant change over
the last few years. If you go back three years ago, Cisco - in particular - was much more competitive against us. But we have gained significantly in market share. The best way, in my opinion, to look at the market is to look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant. That shows you all the competitors and the only sort of technology competitor we have is Citrix, from when they acquired the NetScaler solution. But we think from a feature point of view and from a performance point of view that we’ve really got them outclassed as well. We’ve enjoyed a situation over the last two or three years where we’ve had a big technology advantage and not much competition. Hence the 90+% win rate I was talking about. March 2011 Network World Middle East 39
test
Microsoft beefs up System Center with new module Service Manager delivers workflow and incident response, plus self-service help desk for end users
(CMDB) that receives input from Service Manager workflows, and, more importantly, from Ops Manager and Config Manager via ‘connectors’. The flow of data from Ops Manager and Config Manager is usually one-way; they generally update the CMDB, and register their state into Service Manager, not the reverse. Armed with configuration information and alerts from Ops Manager, Service Manager can trigger action items and workflow activities. When we triggered rudimentary alerts, like disk-full warnings, the alerts popped up almost instantly, as Ops Manager informed Service Manager that the disk was getting full. Ops Manager has triggers that fit MS Exchange, SQL Server, and other server-based applications, and also knows a lot about Active Directory data, along with server-based states. Configuration Manager manages software deployments and configuration details for WindowsServers, clients, and mobile devices. Its role for Service Manager is packaging, delivery, and application inventory/asset knowledge as a software and configuration fulfillment manager. The devil of details Service Manager takes configuration,
S
ervice Manager 2010 is the new workflow and incident response
module that’s been added to the Microsoft System Center suite of management applications. Conceptually, it’s a process control application with two faces: a management console for network managers to perform workflow operations, and a Web-based help desk Self Service Portal for end users. Service Manager 2010 needs to be purchased separately, but is heavily dependent on two other Microsoft System Center modules, Operations Manager (Formerly ‘MOM’) and Configuration
40 Network World Middle East March 2011
Manager. Without these two modules as input sources, Service Manager is a pretty handicapped component, which made us wonder why, as these three modules are so heavily intertwined, they’re sold separately. The upside, however, is that they work well together. They don’t mandate Microsoft infrastructure exclusively, although the joining of non-Microsoft apps, operating systems, and infrastructure is no easy task. What it does At the heart of Service Manager is an
MS SQL Server database, called the Configuration Management Database
operations and Active Directory data and stores it in the CMDB. When we installed Service Manager, we found the “connector” APIs were available immediately, and transferring already large stores of information from Config Manager and Ops Manager shouldn’t take long over local networks. The Configuration Manager and Operations Manager connectors are a oneway street, meaning that Service Manager doesn’t in turn, update these two module’s databases. Workflow in Service Manager spawns actions, which are in turn able to be marked as completed. If we made a software delivery from www.networkworldme.com
a simulated user request, we could make part of the action contingent on Configuration Manager having observed the installation on the user’s machine. The Service Manager help desk function allows Active Directory users to fill in Web forms for service, help or downloads. On the home Web page for the Service Manager Self Service Portal, administrators can place systems information notes, like servers known to be out or applications unavailable. Another part of the page allows users to search pre-selected knowledgebase articles on administratively-designated topics. Users can make requests for software on the Self-Service Portal, and be presented “automagically” with the desired product(s), or perhaps spawn an approval process that brings in Service Manager admins prior to the software package being delivered by Configuration Manager. On the console side, a library of applications can be selected for distribution, each with conditions placed on the workflow. These conditions can be a compatibility check, and perhaps a signal from Configuration Manager that all’s been delivered, or stipulation processes if the software can’t be installed for some reason within a set period of time. The action items remained open as processes until the details of that set were satisfied. It’s all very orderly. What happens as a side effect is that Service Manager becomes a “best practices” task master for network admins who respond to the tasks, and in that process, document what they’ve done for archiving or compliance purposes. The “best practice,” actually the implemented task procedure, is a function of a Service Map defined in Service Manager. The Service Map can have information manually entered, or be an imported ‘trigger’ from Ops Manager. The source of the trigger message might also be e-mail, Self-Service Portal, or a
systems message (like those found in TaskManager). Priorities can be assigned for events spawned by the trigger, so that urgent details are attended to first. The trigger can be prioritised as critical, warning, or informational. Once the trigger’s conditions are met, the network admin will see the alert inside of the Service Manager Console. Context for the alert (who, where and what from the CMDB regarding the alert) can be drilled down to provide an administrator information needed to deal with fixing the problem that spawned the alert. In practice, Ops Manager alerts typically took about a minute to reach the Systems Manager Console. Having the context of the alert available usually made short work of getting the information needed to fix the alert. However, while a full chain of information is available about the alert, admins unfamiliar with the context of the application may have difficulty assessing what steps might be necessary to fix a problem, and there can still be a lot of detective work needed to fix random problems. Upsides The systematic approach represented
by Service Manager was easy for us to configure; installing connecting pipes to Ops and Configuration Manager was equally simple. Service Manager uses IIS to host its Self Service Portal/SSP application, which was also simple to configure. User choices on the SSP are understandable, and software downloads available via the page were immediate or required approvals as we had configured them. Ops Manager alerts, while not instantaneous, arrived assuredly and the administrative steps that we mapped were dealt with as though in a script. The steps weren’t finger-snapping fast, but good enough. Another module, Data Protection Manager or its equivalent, is
Service Manager takes configuration, operations and Active Directory data and stores it in the CMDB. recommended because an outage of any of the components (console, CMDB, or other modules) represents a break in the chain that must be quickly be remade if help desk production is to continue. Downsides For most of this to work, one needs to
have employed a fully Windows based Active Directory network. While Ops Manager has connections and some monitoring for other operating systems, it’s not nearly as rich in management and alerting expertise as it is for Windows, especially Windows clients. Even one Mac or Linux box creates a significant amount of obstacle and exception handling, using Service Manager as a helpdesk remediation system. Microsoft shops won’t mind this, but any organisation with a reasonably heterogeneous domain will want to eschew the really rich feature set of controls offered by Service Manager as they’ll need a separate-but-equal set of applications to deal with non-Windows devices. Once an organization has wrapped their help/service capabilities around the Service Manager product, the work needed to add non-Windows products is a huge hurdle, excluding organizations from wanting to even think about adding other operating system components unless parallel functionality can be found in them. fOR MORE PRODUCT REVIEWS, LOG ON TO: www.networkworldme.com
March 2011 Network World Middle East 41
toolshed tools & gadgets
Blue coat enhances cacheflow
B
lue coat systems has rolled out a new software release for its Blue coat cacheFlow appliances. this update enables cacheFlow appliances to provide 50 percent bandwidth savings for general Web traffic and even greater bandwidth savings for dedicated large file and video caching. For mission-critical service provider deployments, this release delivers greater manageability, resiliency and scalability to support rapidly growing demand for new, rich media Web content. Utilizing next-generation caching technology, Blue coat cacheFlow appliances scale content delivery to meet burgeoning subscriber demands. cacheFlow appliances also provide a “shock absorber” to address traffic spikes that occur when Web sites and content become popular over a very short period of time, such as major news, sporting or political events. to provide specialized caching rules in a dynamic, automated fashion as Web content changes, the new software release provides tighter integration between cacheFlow appliances and the Blue coat cachePulse service, a cloud-based service that automatically delivers optimized caching rules and instructions to the appliances. the new, one-click software upgrade is immediately available for download by customers currently under an existing support contract. the dc power option for cacheFlow appliances is also now available through an add-on hardware upgrade kit that can be purchased separately.
HP TouchPad
t
he tablet landscape just got a bit more crowded: hP has taken the wraps off its touchPad. the specs for the touchPad are competitive, but only the processor--a dual-core 1.2-GhzQualcomm snapdragon--catches attention. Beyond that, the specs sound fairly familiar: a 9.7-inch 1024 by 768 pixel display (less than the android 3.0-based 1280 by 800 Motorola Xoom), 16GB or 32GB of storage, and a 1.3 megapixel webcam. the unit’s dimensions feel fairly standard, too--0.54-inches thick, which puts it about the same or a sliver thicker than the apple iPad and Motorola Xoom. It also weighs 1.6 pounds, same as Xoom, but 0.1-pounds more than the iPad. the touchPad is slated for release in summer, in a Wi-Fi version; 3G and 4G versions will come thereafter. Pricing was not announced today, which is to be expected given a release date that’s months out. But the question of how the pricing will align with market-leader apple’s iPad still remains.
42 Network World Middle East March 2011
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March 2011 Network World Middle East 43
HTc flyer
h
tc has released its first tablet, the htc Flyer. With a seven-inch display, 1.5Ghz processor and high-speed hsPa+ wireless capabilities, the htc Flyer combines natural touch and pen interaction. htc also announced htc Watch, a new connected video service that will debut on htc Flyer tablet, and will collaborate with Onlive, Inc. to launch the first cloud-based mobile gaming service on a tablet. touch interaction lights up the htc Flyer tablet experience, but it also offers a pen experience. With the new htc scribe technology on the htc Flyer tablet, people can rediscover the natural act of writing. htc scribe technology introduces a wave of integrated digital ink innovations that make it easy and natural to take notes, sign contracts, draw pictures, or even write on a web page or photo.
Siemon debuts 4-post rack system
s
iemon has introduced its VersaPOd 4-Post rack, a new, adjustable-depth, 4-post rack system. rapidly deployable, the VersaPOd 4-Post rack integrates with the same high density, space saving, Zero-U vertical patching and cable management as offered with siemon’s VersaPOd data centre cabinet. VersaPOd 4-Post rack can be assembled on site in less than 20 minutes to provide a stable platform for mounting extended depth active equipment and efficiently managing high-density cabling in both data centres and telecommunications rooms. the VersaPOd 4-Post rack’s headers, 45U vertical rails and depth adjustment brackets all feature symmetrical designs to eliminate orientation errors during assembly. this design also self-squares the rack, saving valuable installation time. VersaPOd 4-Post rack is compatible with siemon’s Zero U vertical patch panels (VPP) for support of copper and fibre patching, providing up to 24U of Zero-U vertical patching space between each set of bayed racks, or 16U along both sides of a single rack.
44 Network World Middle East March 2011
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AWARDS2011 on
10 th M May 2011 at
The Westin, Dubai SUBMIT YOUR NOMINATIONS NOW For more information please visit:
www.resellerme.com/awards2011
For sponsorship opportunities at the Reseller Middle East Awards 2011 please contact: Richard Judd Tel: +971 55 772 1519 Email: richard@cpidubai.com
Rajashree R Kumar Tel: +971 50 173 9987 Email: raj@cpidubai.com
Merle Carrasco Tel: +971 50 922 5866 Email: merle@cpidubai.com
For nomination enquiries please contact: Manda Banda Tel: +971 50 437 1354 Email: manda@cpidubai.com March 2011 Network World Middle East
45
layer 8 Internet crime high
T
he FBI’s 10th annual Internet crime report finds that complaints and money losses are at an almost all-time high with nondelivery of payment or merchandise, scams impersonating the FBI and identity theft leading to top 10 online complaint parade. The report, which is issued through the FBI’s partner, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) found that in 2010, IC3 received 303,809 complaints of Internet crime, the second-highest total in IC3’s 10-year history. IC3 also reached a major milestone this year when it received its two-millionth complaint. On average, the group receives and processes 25,000 complaints per month.
Is IT skills gap keeping companies from hiring?
T
here is a disconnect between students getting high tech degrees and what employers are looking for in those graduates. Employers agree that colleges and universities need to provide their students with the essential skills required to run IT departments, yet only eight percent of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as “well trained, ready to go,” according to a survey of 376 organizations that are members of the IBM user group Share and Database Trends and Applications subscribers. The study found nearly four out of 10 respondents report that their IT hires are not sufficiently preparedto perform jobs within their companies, and another 44% say, at a minimum, that there are noticeable gaps in their skills. This skills gap apparently doesn’t doesn’t stop organizations from hiring professionals with little, if any previous experience. The survey found that nearly half of companies responding to the survey hire new IT employees straight out of school. Twothirds of organizations do require at least some college intern experience among their hires, according to the study.
46 Network World Middle East March 2011
Want your own, sort of, personal submarine?
R
aonhaje Ego Semi Sub can help you explore undersea worlds without all that nasty diving. You can tell by the name it’s not exactly a real submarine. The Ego Compact Semi Submarine promises to offer you and a friend an unbelievable view of the undersea world but it’s not actually submerging and neither running silent nor deeplike real submarines of yore. Weighing in at about 7,700 lbs the two-person Raonhaje Ego pretty much looks a little like a catamaran boat with a glass (acrylic actually) cockpit hanging down in between the hulls. The 10-ft Ego is battery powered and can run for about eight hours at cruising speed, according to the company. Once down inside the submerged cockpit, an operator can direct the boat with a steering wheel and accelerator, like a car, whilst peering out into the vast murkiness.
X Prize $30 million private race to the moon is on
T
he master competition masters at X Prize Foundation are at it again. The group announced the 29 international teams that will compete for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, the competition to put a robot on the moon by 2015. To win the money, a privately-funded team must successfully place a robot on the Moon’s surface that explores at least 500 meters and transmits high definition video and images back to Earth. The first team to do so will claim a $20 million Grand Prize, while the second team will earn a $5 million. Teams are also eligible to win a $1 million award for stimulating diversity in the field of space exploration and as much as $4 million in bonus prizes for accomplishing additional technical tasks such as moving ten times as far, surviving the frigid lunar night, or visiting the site of a previous lunar mission, according to the X Prize folks.
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Each time you add an access point in a controller-based WLAN environment, you can become subject to the “controller tax” -- that extra charge you didn’t factor into adding more APs for coverage or mission-critical apps like voice. And one fateful day you’ll add one too many APs and you’ll have to foot the bill for a whole new controller – two, if you want redundancy. Kind of makes you nervous just thinking about it, really. WANT A BETTER WAY TO BUILD A WIRELESS NETWORK? ELIMINATE THE CONTROLLER. Aerohive’s controller-less WLAN architecture provides an innovative alternative to costly and complex controllerbased solutions. Aerohive access points organize themselves into groups, or “hives,” that cooperate to share
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