Editorial Cover story - 18
W
henever enhanced versions of a solution are available, the customer has to make a choice to make do with what he already has deployed or go in for a refresh. With IT legacy infrastructure, it has never been easy to decide to do a makeover. In several instances, you are locked in by proprietary systems. At most times, even budgetary constraints and ROI considerations will hold you back. Further, even enhanced versions may only be an interim measure when it looks apparent that solutions that completely offer a radical shift in performance benchmarks are to be unveiled sooner than later. Vendor locks-ins are a possibility even in the era of Virtualization and cloud services. It would not be rare to see that Point solutions continue to exist in physical IT infrastructures already deployed. And when customers are looking in for incremental virtualized deployments, rip and replace could be the last resort. The customer would ideally therefore want to keep both his physical infrastructure for running some critical applications and yet take advantage of cost and performance benefits possible through Virtualization. That may unfold a new scenario, of silos of IT infrastructure running in parallel, one physical and one virtual but this possibility cannot be dismissed. This may not even come to light until it is too late and the solutions are already deployed. For instance, it could be when you have to take backup of the date in physical and virtual infrastructure separately. It has never been more relevant as now to ensure that solution you deploy are industry standards based so that flexibility is always second nature to your IT infrastructure. That takes us back to the importance of the channel’s role as consultants.The channel needs to wisely counsel customer about the pros and cons of each additional deployments they would be going in for. The channel therefore continues to be the vital cog in making IT systems works seamlessly as Business enablers for customers.
Content
Making IT work seamlessly
The primacy of Data
Companies need to reassess Business Continuity plans in a changed landscape of heterogeneous environments
News in detail
Ethernet Fabrics and SDN High on Priority List of Enterprise IT Managers - 11 Tripp Lite focuses on driving data centre efficiency - 12
Feature
Driving down the SDN route - 14
HP travels down further ahead on its SDN roadmap with a series of data center switches
Brave New World - 22
By transforming into a 360 degree solutions provider, Dell is heralding in a new era for IT vendors
Techknow
True to life video - 16
Pradeep Angeveetil, Regional Manager - Middle East and Africa at LifeSize Communications - a division of Logitech, discusses market trends and solutions in this interview
Making inroads quietly - 24
Microsoft has been growing its share in the Virtualization market and is widely reckoned to be among the top two, behind market leader VMware.
Point2Point - 26
Crossing milestones
Jai Mulani, CEO at IBT discusses the company’s key priorities on the journey so far and the road ahead
Insight
IT Storage Revolution: Software-Defined Storage - 28 George DeBono, General Manager, Middle East, Turkey & Africa at Red Hat writes that enterprises are ripe for an alternative to the siloed approach to storage
BYOD – Do we trust it? - 30
BYOD security is a business trend that is only going to evolve and become more prominent writes John Spoor, Regional Manager, MEA, WatchGuard
Regulars
R. Narayan Consulting Editor
Founder & CEO: Vivek Sharma Consulting Editor: R. Narayan Assistant Editor: David Ndichu Art Director: Faiz Ahmed Sr. Sales Manager: R. Subramanyan Sales Coordinator: Smitha Jithesh
News Bytes Eyetech Stats & Trends
Published by: JNS Media International MFZE
P.O. Box: 121075, Montana Building 404, Zabeel Road, Near GPO, Karama, Dubai-UAE Tel: 04-3705022 Fax: 04-3706639
Disclaimer: While the publishers have made every attempt possible to get accurate information on published content in this handbook they cannot be held liable for any errors herein.
News Bytes
GBM bags two awards at IBM Partner Conference Gulf Business Machines (GBM) has won two awards at the IBM Business Partner Executive Conference (BPEC). During the ceremony, GBM was selected for the ‘Outstanding Overall Software Performance 2012’ and ‘Fast Start - Pure Systems’ categories where John Banks, Director Software Group, GBM and Miguel Khouri, Country General Manager, GBM Abu Dhabi, accepted the awards on behalf of GBM respectively. The annual BPEC event aims to update IBM’s business partners on the company’s growth plans, products and solutions, helping to foster business growth and market differentiation among the regional network. GBM is dedicated to supporting IBM solutions, which has helped to continually expand GBM’s offerings to meet market trends and in turn provide the best offerings to customers. This award from IBM highlights GBM’s expertise in providing the best software solutions in region. The ceremony was held in Dubai, and gathered partners from 11 different countries across the Middle East and Pakistan.
Khalid Abu Baker takes over as MD at Kaspersky Lab Kaspersky Lab has announced the appointment of Khalid Abu Baker as the new Managing Director of Kaspersky Lab Middle East.Khalid who was previously the Corporate Sales Director at Kaspersky Lab Middle East will continue to be based out of the company’s regional headquarters in Dubai, UAE and will report to Garry Kondakov, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Kaspersky Lab. In his new role, Abu Baker will continue to build on the company’s global strategy to raise awareness around its B2B portfolio of products, solutions and services while sustaining its leadership in the B2C market. Kaspersky Lab is ready to offer its corporate customers not only the new integrated Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business platform, but also a range of specialized services to protect against specific cyber threats. A focus to reinforce the company’s strength in the B2B segment would involve key investments in channel engagement and development, introducing partners to new sales models and revenue generation opportunities to help them boost their own business while actively expanding Kaspersky Lab’s customer base across the region. As part of this planned transition, Tarek Kuzbari, the current Managing Director who has been with Kaspersky Lab since 2008, will be moving to the United Kingdom to complete his MBA.
Westcon completes training and Certification for 18 Avaya Channel Partners
Westcon Group, a value-added distributor of category-leading unified communications, network infrastructure, data center and security solutions with a global network of specialty resellers, has advanced the enablement of its channel though the successful delivery of Avaya Professional Sales Specialist trainings and certifications to 18 of its reseller and system integrator (SI) partners. These trainings which have bolstered participating partners' knowledge and capabilities in Avaya SME-IP office and enterprise unified communications (UC) technologies were provided free of charge as a value-add by Westcon. The Avaya Professional Sales Specialist credentials are valid for one year and are reserved exclusively for Avaya channel partners and associates.
4 | August 2013
IT IS CHALLENGED BY A BYOD WORKPLACE Today’s workforce increasingly relies on personal devices, including smartphones and laptops, to get the job done. IT departments are called on to adopt and enforce a BYOD strategy to make corporate resources available and maintain security without being the Internet Police. Knowing that BYOD is here to stay, WatchGuard provides IT administrators with easy-to-use security services that businesses need in order to manage BYOD. WatchGuard enables you to: • Focus on policy to determine which devices are allowed to access the network and which devices you will support • Make sure employees understand the rules and the risks and that work life and personal life should be kept separate and IT should monitor activity. • Define acceptable use in accordance to standard security practices, as it is critical to know in advance what your security policy is with regards to access controls • Protect corporate data by limiting access using VPN • Application control strategies give more granular control, so it doesn't matter what device the user is on, or what ports the application uses
WatchGuard solutions allow you to protect, and enforce policy for, your BYOD devices, while they are in your network, and gives you control over how devices are used. Learn how to effectively secure your network and BYOD ecosystem with WatchGuard. Call us today at +971 55 882 9607 or email: mea@watchguard.com.
News Bytes
Condo Protego receives Symantec’s Partner Award Data storage channel partner Condo Protego was recognized by Symantec at its Symposium 2013 event with the “Opportunity Creation” award within the Partner Excellence category for the Middle East Gulf region. It is the fifth consecutive year Condo Protego received an accolade from Symantec. “Condo Protego stands out in the market with a unique approach, discussing issues and objectives with customers before coming up with a design-led solution and complementing it with the best post-implementation support around. We are proud to receive this award and will continue to invest heavily in supporting Symantec’s goals in the region,” said Savitha Bhaskar, General Manager, CondoProtego. Condo Protego has achieved Symantec Master Specialization in all four Availability specialization areas, namely Archiving and e-Discovery, Storage Management, Data Protection Plus and High Availability. It is the only partner in the UAE that has achieved Master Specialization.
6 | August 2013
Visionaire recognized by HP and Microsoft Visionaire has been chosen by HP and Microsoft as an Outstanding Partner for the Year 2013 for HP and Microsoft Frontline Partnership for Unified Communications & Collaboration. The award ceremonies were held at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference last month in Texas, USA. Visionaire is a Microsoft Gold OEM and Gold Application Development partner, and also holds Professional Networking Gold Specialist partnership with HP to provide Unified Communications & Collaborative solutions to its customers. The company has been working closely with both Microsoft and HP for many years now and has led several successful implementations using HP and Microsoft platforms. The worldwide HP and Microsoft Frontline Partnership (FLP) is a 20-year-old alliance that is unique in the industry. It ensures that Microsoft and HP products have been designed and engineered to work together and are supported by both companies. The FLP benefits small and medium-sized businesses through worldwide joint HP and Microsoft partner programs, also supported by both companies. Aneeta Gupta, CEO at Visionaire, stated: “We are extremely glad to be recognized for our efforts and contribution to the industry. The Microsoft and HP Frontline Partnership allows us to consistently deliver unparalleled ROI and best in class TCO that works for customers today and tomorrow,”
Riverbed adds new hardware appliance, upgrades Steelhead software Riverbed Technology has added a new hardware appliance and upgrades to its Steelhead software. Steelhead WAN optimization solutions can now accelerate a broader range of enterprise infrastructures while expanding IT control and ease of management, including smaller branch offices, cloud infrastructures, SAAS applications, and locations served by hybrid networks. These extensions make the Steelhead WAN optimization product family an even more critical part of delivering application performance across the entire business and extends the commitment from Riverbed to deliver acceleration everywhere. “IT organizations are facing demands from their end users for access and speed, regardless of device or location, yet must still manage the network efficiently and securely. With the broad set of application optimizations and deployment options, ease of installation and management, and now the ability to manage multiple access methods with path selection, Riverbed WAN optimization solutions allow businesses to manage these complex IT environments,” said Taj El-Khayat, GM, MENA at Riverbed.
News Bytes
Fluke Networks inks Partnership with Prologix Prologix Distribution has signed a partnership agreement with Fluke Networks, a world leader in innovative solutions for the testing, monitoring and analysis of enterprise and telecommunications networks, to deliver the company's range of network monitoring, analysis, troubleshooting and security solutions to enterprise customers and SMBs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Prologix will leverage Fluke Networks' OptiView, TruView and AirMagnet solutions to build highperformance networks that will see deployment in the telecom, banking, finance, contact centers, oil and gas, healthcare, hospitality and education sectors. Sarwan Singh, Director Sales and Operation, Prologix LLC said, "The ability to identify, analyse and troubleshoot network disruptions on-the-go is essential to ensuring service delivery that meets QoS expectations. Our partnership with Fluke Networks further strengthens Prologix's networking capabilities, allowing us to add yet another facet to our solutions portfolio.”
SAGE hosts partner and customer events to enhance product visibility
Sage Middle East, a leading provider of business management software to small and medium sized companies, recently held a series of events for their existing business partners and prospective customers in the UAE and KSA. The emphasis of these events was to showcase the power of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems – Sage 300 ERP (formerly known as Sage Accpac ERP), Sage ERPX3 and Customer Relationship Management software - Sage CRM. With over 500 attendees, KSA was by far the most successful leg of the events with over 350 attendees across Riyadh, Jeddah and Al Khobar. “The events provided us with a great platform to showcase the power of our products and capabilities to existing clients as well as prospective customers,” said Mr. Reggie Fernandes, Regional Director, Sage Middle East. “Our Integrated ERP/CRM offerings have become one of the key factors in helping our customers maximize business benefits, obtain faster ROI and align with their growing business requirements, thus ensuring a competitive edge. The advantages of the software were further reiterated by several Sage international speakers as well.” Some of the highlights of the event were high-level presentations on the various vertical solutions available including Manufacturing, Distribution and Services, allowing customers to leverage their existing investments in Sage ERP. The detailed presentations and personalized approach was well received by all the attendees including clients and prospective customers.
Vision Solutions partners with Metra to drive market growth Vision Solutions, a premier provider of replication, availability and disaster recovery software and services has announced a broad partnership with Metra, Middle East leading IT distributor that enhances Vision Solutions’ position in the industry, while significantly expanding Metra’s reach in UAE and other key, high-growth markets. Under the terms of the agreement, Metra will distribute and provide technical support to Vision Solutions’ Double-Take products in the Middle East.
8 | August 2013
News Bytes
VMware in 2013 Gartner’s Leaders Quadrant VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, has been placed in the Gartner’s Leaders Quadrant in its 2013 report, “Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure.” According to Gartner, “As of mid-2013, almost two-thirds of x86 architecture workloads have been virtualized on servers.” The report continues: “Virtualization is a fundamental enabler to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and will be used to establish private cloud services, public cloud services and interoperable hybrid cloud services. Effectively, all IaaS offerings will rely on VMs or container technology.” “VMware’s virtualization software empowers customers of all sizes to dramatically simplify IT while achieving increased levels of agility, control and efficiency,” said John Gilmartin, vice president, Cloud Infrastructure Products, VMware. “We believe being positioned as a leader in Gartner’s x86 Magic Quadrant for four consecutive years speaks to our vision, strategy and offerings, partnering with our customers to enable them to manage, secure, provision their data whether it is on premises or off premises.”
10 | August 2013
Comguard, EnGenius team up to train partners in UAE Comguard, a Dubai based leading value added distributor for IT products and part of the Spectrum group in association with gateprotect recently ran a series special training workshops for both channel partners and endusers on gateprotect Next Generation Firewalls across the region. These workshops were held in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman and UAE. And, these workshops were half day events attended by a large number of channel partners and corporates respectively. Key executives and technical experts from both Comguard and gateprotect were present at these workshops. Technical experts from both the companies made several technical presentations and provided hands-on training to partners and end-users on gateProtect Next Generation Firewalls. Sudarshan Avadhany, Sales Director at gateprotect for the MENA region, shared the roadmap of the company and highlighted the achievements of gateprotect in the region. While, Amarjot Dhanjal, Senior Business Development Manager at Comguard updated channel partners about the new changes incorporated in their channel program for the year 2013 and also introduced them to the benefits of partner portal. Amarjot Dhanjal, Senior Business Development Manager, Comguard said, “gateprotect comes with German quality assurance and the main aim for these workshops across the region was to interact closely with channel partners and endusers. These workshops also provided us a platform to share the market intelligence and knowledge to drive partners to increase their business and margins.”
FVC cements partnership with Polycom Polycom announced that FVC has been certified for the new Authorized Training Partner (ATP) program. The ATP program, an enhancement to the retired partner program that FVC previously had with Polycom, empowers select Polycom distributor partners, with a demonstrated expertise in Polycom RealPresence solutions and RealPresence Service specialisation, to offer classes and training to certify reseller partners on PolycomRealPresence solutions. Through this designation, FVC is able to rapidly expand its education and training offering for Polycom solutions. As an ATP, FVC can provide easy access to training and greater flexibility on scheduling and locations for resellers. These certifications are important for resellers looking to implement and support the Polycom solutions they sell. "We are pleased that FVC has renewed their certification within the new Authorized Training Partner program," said Daniel Schmierer, Area Sales Vice President, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, at Polycom. "We have designed the ATP program to deliver the training needed to achieve the sales and service objectives, to deliver high-value collaboration solutions to our joint customers, and give our partners effective tools to grow their video collaboration business."
News In-Detail
A '
third of global organizations experience multiple network failures each week', states a recently conducted study commissioned by Brocade. The networking vendor's survey of over 1750 IT decision-makers (ITDMs) revealed that while enterprises are keen to adopt the latest technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing, they are being held back by current IT infrastructures that are ill-equipped for even present demands.
direct or indirect negative financial impact.
Additional findings: • On average, enterprises are upgrading their data center networks every two years, but 24 percent wait over three years before investing in new technology • 79 percent of ITDMs acknowledge that departments within their businesses have deployed cloud-based services, with 13 percent admitting that these actions would
Ethernet Fabrics and SDN High on Priority List 91 percent of respondents claimed that in their current state, their networks are not prepared for the challenges of virtualization and the cloud. This is despite the fact that over three quarters of them are reported to have updated their IT environments in the last three years. SufianDweik, Regional Director, MEMA at Brocade Communications said, “We are seeing an unprecedented rise in the amount of traffic that is being handled by the datacenter. The inability of legacy data center networks to meet these growing demands is compromising business agility.” Decision makers are recognizing these challenges as 18 percent of businesses have already deployed fabric-based technology to drive scalability while a further 51% plan to adopt ethernet fabrics in order to support virtualization. Brocade sees this as an opportunity to grow its market share and recently unveiled its 'On-Demand' data center strategy which combines physical and virtual networking elements to deliver resources to customers as and when they need them. This will help not only scalability and flexibility but is also aimed at significantly increasing performance and reliability. Downtime, according to the survey, is still a major concern and as high as 16 percent of respondents complain of daily network failure. For 41 percent of businesses, downtime has resulted in
have happened with no guidance from IT • Three-quarters of enterprises have on-premise data centers; 19 percent outsource • SDN’s benefits are perceived to be increased productivity (42 percent), better access to real-time information (40 percent), improved uptime/availability (38 percent) and increased service delivery (30 percent) • The average percentage of servers being virtualized today is 46 percent; by 2015, the goal is 59 percent • Sixteen percent experience daily network outages; database applications (41 percent), communication tools (30 percent) and Microsoft Office programs (25 percent) cause the most problems • Outages last on average 20 minutes, with two percent having to endure outages of more than an hour • More than a third of workers stated that outages have caused SLAs to be missed, with customers not receiving goods/ services; 41 percent added that this has caused customers to seek recompense A large number of respondents perceive Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to be the much needed answer to their networking woes. These organizations expressed intent to deploy SDN by 2015, citing increasing productivity, delivering better real-time access to information and improving availability/service delivery as their reasons behind doing so. August 2013 | 11
News In-Detail
Tripp Lite focuses on driving data centre efficiency
M
anaging the massive influx of data has become one of the major challenges facing data storage companies today, which is why the latest uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems by Tripp Lite, a world-leading manufacturer of power protection equipment, are designed to respond to concerns affecting data centres across the GCC. Vipin Sharma, Tripp Lite’s Vice-President for Middle East and Africa (MEA), said data centre customers require 100 per cent availability and while most facilities do aim to provide efficient and reliable service, there is also a growing clamour in the industry to reduce cost and carbon footprint. “Big data offer considerable opportunities for the corporate
12 | August 2013
sector, but it also poses a challenge to data centres to manage capacity, ensure 24/7 availability, provide maximum data security and promote environmental consciousness while at the same time reducing power costs,” he said. Several surveys have recently underscored the green data centre debate. Datacenter Dynamics estimated that worldwide data centre energy consumption grew by 19 per cent in 2012 compared to the previous year, with average power per rack at 4.0 kilowatt (kW). Gartner also reported last year that energy-related costs account for almost 12 per cent of data storage companies’ overall expenditure and this is expected to rise further as more and more organisations demand greater computing
capacity and increased IT centralisation. “Many in the industry agree that integrating highefficiency UPS systems into the data centre infrastructure is essential in addressing these concerns. Our meticulously engineered UPS portfolio boasts up to 99 per cent line-mode efficiency and can significantly reduce a company’s carbon footprint by as much as 3,152 pounds, conserving around 2,352 kilowatt-hours of electricity,” Sharma said. In addition, Tripp Lite UPS systems feature remote management capability; Its network management system (NMS) the PowerAlert software enables data centre managers to integrate all power sources into a single console. The
systems’ smart technology also features an IP-based solution, helping managers to monitor the process via the Internet, saving time and effort. Furthermore it allows the user to switch between eco-friendly and normal modes as per the business’ demands; Automatic notifications are also deployed in case of exceptional conditions such as overloading, technical faults, high temperature and fire – all of these are critical, costeffective means to prevent damage or loss of data. To complement its UPS systems, Tripp Lite also produces intelligent power distribution units (PDU) that enable data centre managers to monitor and control energy flow across the entire infrastructure. “Most of Tripp Lite’s UPS, racks and PDUs are modular, which can be configured and re-configured depending on the current business demand. As a result, it runs close to capacity, which is what most companies prefer because a UPS system runs at highest efficiency when it is near its maximum capacity,” explains Sharma. He added that Tripp Lite remains confident about the GCC and the wider Middle East’s UPS market, which is anticipated to grow by over 9 per cent in 2014 to US$238 million (AED876 million), as data consumption here becomes one of the largest in the world.
Let's Create, Disrupt & Re-imagine together
GITEX WORLD
12 dedicated sectorbased industry platforms showcasing the world’s biggest technology brands
GITEX EDGE
GITEX TRENDS
9 re-imagined and new visitor features created to empower your GITEX experience
4 disruptive knowledge platforms covering Big Data, Cloud Computing, Digital Strategies and more
REGISTER NOW TO SAVE MORE AND FAST-TRACK ACCESS www.gitex.com/accesspass GET INVOLVED
GitexTechnologyWeek
GITEX TECHNOLOGY GROUP
@gitextechweek
GITEXTECHWEEK
GitexTechWeek
CONTACT INFORMATION For visitor and delegate enquiries, please contact the GITEX Team at: gitex@dwtc.com or visit www.gitex.com for more information about the event.
ORGANISED BY
STUDENT LAB IN ASSOCIATION WITH
CO-located events
Student Lab Lead Sponsor
MOBILE, APPS & CONTENT HEADLINE SPONSOR
OFFICIAL COUNTRY PARTNER
Content Hub Sponsor
GULFCOMMS ENDORSED AND SUPPORTED BY
SUPPORTED BY
Official Technology Car PARTNER
OFFICIAL PUBLISHER
OFFICIAL TRAVEL PARTNER
MAJLIS LOUNGE SPONSOR
OFFICIAL SCREEN & GITEX TV PARTNER
GITEX TRENDS SPONSORS AND PARTNERS Cloud Confex DIAMOND Sponsor
Cloud Confex PLATINUM Sponsor
DIGITAL STRATEGIES FORUM STRATEGIC SPONSOR
Big Data Platinum Sponsors
GITEX TRENDS Knowledge PARTNER
Feature | HP
P continues to extend its Converged Infrastructure portfolio which it says offers customers an open, standardsbased, heterogeneous approach and integrates servers, storage, networking and management software. As a result, clients can achieve the full potential of SDN (Software Defined Networks) technologies through the abstraction, programming and automation of their network to improve perfromance while simplifying the deployment of applications and services. The vendor made further advancements in its SDN strategy with the recent announcements of DataCentre switches that are OpenFlow enabled and therefore ready to be integrated into SDN environments. OpenFlow is a networking protocol that automates hardware configurations. The new HP FlexFabric 12900 for instance is an OpenFlow-enabled core switch capable of scaling to meet the demands of increasing virtualized workloads. With the recent extensions in its portfolio, HP believes it gainsa greater leverage with customers looking to deploy or upgrading to next generation cloud ready networks. The new HP FlexFabric Data Center strategy and vision is a key component of the HP FlexNetwork architecturethat in turn is a crucial element of HP’s Virtual Application Networks vision. HP claims that its Virtual Application Networks Framework is a complete, end-to-end SDN solution that enables businesses to create a scalable, agile, and secure network. HP technologies today includes all layers for an end to end SDN environment and this includes an SDN controller, and SDN applications, services and solutions that further strengthen HP’s Virtual Application Networks strategy. Virtual Application Networks SDN solutions are delivered through HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC) enable policybased automation and orchestration for traditional networks.HP claims that the IMC SDN Manager is the industry's first complete configuration, monitoring and
14 | August 2013
Gautham Raj, Networking Sales Director, HP ME
H
Driving down the SDN route Organizations also are struggling with the complexity of current data center network fabric designs, which require manual device-by-device configurations and limit the performance of bandwidth-intensive applications. HP is addressing these challenges with a series of software-defined network (SDN) data center switches that deliver advanced automation capabilities and industry-leading scalability for bandwidth-intensive applications
an infrastructure policy management The manual configuration of networks through point of view, application software we have enabled spanning campus, command-line interface (CLI) coding has proven to be OpenFlow on our branch and data error prone... In HP’s vision, the objective is to remove switches and even center networks. the decision making aspects from the physical switch/ released the data Gautham router/access point to a central control software. centre switches Raj, Networking featuring OpenFlow Sales Director, that reaffirms our HP Middle East commitment to says, “This gives enables dynamic and rapid deployment customers. Many networking vendors are us greater leverage in the market with of cloud applications, automation of talking about SDN but some of them are a comprehensive suite of offerings. We network provisioning while eliminating going about SDN strategies in a proprietary are there in servers as a leader and in configuration errors and increased IT manner.On the software side, some the discussions with customers, we can efficiency with services orchestration. And vendors are still trying to retain proprietary position our switches, routers and the if all the hardware deployed are built to elements and on the application side as software and large consulting services open standards specifications, although well.There are pure play vendors as well in as well. We have 29 switches (edge and from different vendors, they would be still campus) in our portfolio that are OpenFlow be interoperable and manageable with the controllers.All this provide customers more choice butHP is promoting open standards enabled and more are rolling out. The data central software in an ideal SDN network. that gives the customer more choice.” centre core switches that we now rolled HP claims that it provides such a scenario HP believes that partners will be able out are OpenFlow enabled and capable with Intelligent Management Center to provide differentiators and there is a of being used in an SDN environment. (IMC) Enterprise Software Platform, a lot in the game for them. HP is increasing They come with the ability to both switch standalone, comprehensive management its breadth of partners who take their and route in virtual as well as physical solution that delivers integrated, modular networking solutions to market. environments which helps bridges virtual network management capabilities to Gautam says, “ We have an increasing and physical environments.” efficiently meet the needs of advanced, number of Gold partners for storage and HP has a steadily rising portfolio of heterogeneous enterprise networks. servers who have moved on to attain switches that are open flow enabled to Gautam adds, “Servers and storage networking certifications. We have also meet the changing needs of the market. have moved a long way forward but the had some of the partners from competitors The transition towards SDN will be gradual network hasn’t moved much away much come around to us. and in phases. from dominance by proprietary features He adds, “From purely Installing, Gautam says, “Customers are in solutions from several vendors. This configuring, maintaining SDN, there will not going to rip and replace legacy is where the gap is. Today you are able be constant learning for partners. We have infrastructure. Our advise to customers is to provision storage the click of a button a single OS across our portfolio, which that as they refresh their networks, they but in network, you still have to write makes it less complex as well for partners could make sure that the new switches command line interfaces to program your that are looking to develop applications bring deployed are OpenFlow enabled so campus or datacenter network elements. for rolling out in specific customer that they are ready for the scenario when The manual configuration of networks environments. That will be a revenue they want to install the controllers for SDN through command-line interface (CLI) opportunity.” deployment.” coding has proven to be error prone, as HP believes that in the BYOD era, there In an SDN approach, the underlying well as time and resource intensive. In will be a growing need to manage mixed network intelligence can be abstracted HP’s vision, the objective is to remove the environments – both wired and wireless. from the physical hardware. Enabling decision making aspects from the physical Customers will insist more on their need SDN is the OpenFlow protocol, which can switch/router/access point to a central not to deploy proprietary protocols on run across networking infrastructure from control software.” networks so that they can have options multiple vendors, including HP. In order HP claims that while there are several which means a growing demand to deploy to control an SDN network, a controller vendors unveiling their SDN strategies, products that are scalable into a future is required. All routers, switches, access their commitment to open standards and SDN environment. So while SDN will point etc are managed by this central that the fact they offer a comprehensive not reduce the requirements for actual SDN controller software which simplifies suite of solutions helps them stand out. networking hardware,it will change the management of SDN and traditional Gautam says, “An SDN vision includes network infrastructure operations. This Hardware, software and applications. From way networking works.
August 2013 | 15
TechKnow | LifeSize
Pradeep Angeveetil, Regional Manager,MEA, LifeSize
as a service is seeing increasing demand? Elaborate on your solutions for the same We currently get requests from the SMB sector for these and we have LifeSize Connections to address these requirements. The SMB sector has constraints on ROI if they invest ininfrastructure and hence their need to have those features as a Service. LifeSize Connections provides the Multipoint Bridging Capabilities and Firewall Traversal as aservice. The service is available on End Points as well as PCs and Macs. We do definitely anticipate this trend catching upwithin a couple of years in our region. You offer the multipoint solutions as an answer to needs emerging in the BYOD era. Please elaborate. The proliferation of Smart Phones and tablets has created a demand for Video on these devices irrespective of one's location or travel. It is business as usual and you do notmiss any scheduled meetings with your team. We have the UVC LifeSizeClearSea solution which is supported by over 54 Smart Phone and tablets that support iOS or Androidin addition to PCs and Macs. A user
True to life video LifeSize, acquired by Logitech in 2009, is a pioneer and world leader in highdefinition video collaboration. LifeSize professes to makingvideo conferencing truly universal and offers video conferencing systems and software applications as well as a full line of video infrastructure, available on premise or in the cloud. Pradeep Angeveetil, Regional Manager - Middle East and Africa at LifeSize Communications - a division of Logitech, discusses market trends and solutions in this interview with consulting Editor R. Narayan Please comment on trends seen in terms of demand for video conferencing solutions in some key verticals in the region? Large Corporates, Education, Heathcare and Public Sector are verticals that are investing in Video Conferencing deployments. The Efficiency factor that video conferencing deployments can bring in is the common
16  |  August 2013
driving factor here across all verticals when it comes to investments in these solutions. Video conferencing is a habit that is hard to shake off once you get used to it and we are witnessing incremental sales in all our existing customer accounts apart from the new business that is coming in. Discuss if demand for video conferencing
is able to use his own internal credentials to log in and join the Video Conference. The UVC ClearSea is also versatile in terms of escalatingthe call to a Multipoint call. Users will be able to send and receive content and also drive efficiency. Please elaborate on other key deployment models as part of your UVC platform. Which are most in demand in the region? The biggest advantage of UVC is that this can be deployed on Virtualised Platforms like VMWare and HyperV in case the Client has these already in place. We alsooffer the option of delivering these as a device based on the preference of the customer. LifeSize
UVC Multipoint, LifeSize UVC Video Center for Streaming and Recording,LifeSize UVC ClearSea for Mobility ,LifeSize UVC Transit for Firewall Traversal and LifeSize UVC Access for Gatekeeper functionality are the key components of the UVCPlatform . We see a great demand from the Education Sector for our Streaming and Recording Solution and for UVC ClearSea among Corporates .The UVC Multipoint goes as a part ofevery deal for bridging capabilities. The biggest advantage that the customer gets is that he will be able to try out all these solutions before he buys in his own Network environment. This eliminates cause for disappointment on quality after the deployment. In fact we firmly believe that every end user must try these on Site in their ownenvironment rather than go to a Vendor Demo Center as the realitycould be quite different. You also offer deployments for users of small to large size – distributed workforce, mobile workforce etc. Which have been the key segments for Lifesize in the region? We have installations ranging from a SMB branch office to setups in large Universities in the region. Multinationals, Educational Institutions, Defence , Government , Retail Chains and Hospitals have deployed LifeSize solutions in the region. Who are your value add distributors in the region? We have Redington Gulf,
Taxan Gulf and Westcon ME addressing the region. We also have Mantrac as our in country Distributor in Egypt. Are your installation services offered in tandem with your distributors and channel? Our direct professional Services are only offered in case the End Customer insists on the same. We do get the orders process through the Channel. However we doemphasize the need for our System Integrators and Distributors to be fully trained on our Infrastructure and prefer that all installations are carried out by them and that they are self-sufficient. This enables and enhances their profitability as well. UVC implementations are sold and deployed only through partners who have the capabilities and skill sets to do thesame. What are the partnerships with Alcatel and Microsoft about? We have a Global Partnership with Alcatel and they resell our products as part of their Comprehensive UC Solution. With regard to Microsoft, we ensure that ourproducts are qualified to interoperate with Microsoft Lync and closely work with them to ensure that the Customer gets a good VC Experience in the Conference Rooms. All our Solutions work seamlessly with Cisco, Avaya, Siemens and Shoretel Solutions as well and we do demonstrate the same to the customer prior to a Sale. All in all, we adda great Value in a UC deal with our quality, range of offerings and price Performance.
LifeSize takes Smart Video Mobile LifeSize simplified the video collaboration experience by recently introducing LifeSize UVC ClearSea - its mobile and desktop video conferencing solution. With LifeSize UVC ClearSea, the intuitive, feature-rich user experience of Smart Video is now available on nearly every desktop and mobile device, enabling better connected relationships with customers, suppliers and employees. LifeSize UVC ClearSea offers the broadest support of smartphones, tablets and desktops in the industry. It’s currently optimized for more than 50 devices and all mobile clients are included as standard. Unlike other solutions in the market, only LifeSize UVC ClearSea offers unlimited user accounts — giving desktop and mobile access to everyone: customers, vendors, partners and stakeholders. Organizations have the flexibility to choose how they deploy video infrastructure as well as how much capacity is needed because LifeSize UVC ClearSea is part of the LifeSize UVC Platform and offered as hardware or as virtualized software. As a result, organizations can quickly extend HD video calling to every worker, in every location, on every device – with the ultimate goal of increased collaboration and maximum productivity. The Smart Video experience enabled by LifeSize UVC ClearSea ensures unmatched simplicity and powerful collaboration capabilities for mobile and desktop video calling through: • Invite-a-guest: extend video capabilities to those without existing video solutions in place • Ring all: reach any user on multiple devices simultaneously (smartphone, tablet, laptop and room system), ensuring important calls are never missed • Unmatched BYOD support: choose Mac, PC or more than 50 iOS and Android™ devices with optimized clients • Unified directory: enable all LifeSize UVC ClearSea users to view one unified directory, regardless of device, so you can reach anyone, anywhere, from any device • Multiparty call escalation: seamlessly invite new participants to your call by clicking on a contact name (enabled with LifeSize UVC Multipoint) • Call transfer: keep the call going even when you have to leave your office by transferring an existing call from your desktop to your mobile device • Advanced call routing: create simplified dialing plans and custom routing rules to control how calls are handled August 2013 | 17
Cover Feature | Disaster recovery and backup
The primacy of Data
Companies need to reassess Business Continuity plans in a changing landscape of heterogeneous physical and virtual environments as this feature finds out - By R. Narayan
B
usiness continuity and Disaster Recovery(DR) plans are an inevitable concern for Businesses today. The capacity to recover data and applications in realtime in the unforeseeable event of a disaster and ensuring business continuity and service availability has to be in the foreground as an ongoing Business strategy. Considerable changes in the Technology landscape such as the increasing adoption of Virtualization technologies over the past few years requires companies now to review what suits them best as Business continuity and DR plan. Further, While companies largely rely on their own disaster recovery sites on premises, there is also a growth in adoption of cloud based DR solutions that will suit the budgetary concerns of SMB customers. However, there has been a constant issue of DR preparedness lagging behind in the region among Businesses and perhaps
18 | August 2013
more so in the SMB segment. Since, disasters strike without announcement, inadequate DR measures only make the task more difficult when dealing with downtime. When it comes to disaster recovery preparedness, Business uptime is at risk asprotracted hours of downtime can prove to be fatal for the Business. Martin Mackay, CEO, The Neverfail Group says, “Broadly there is awareness of the need to have robust DR and backup strategies and plans in place; the challenge comes when the budget is actually due to be assigned and this is not limited to the MEA region. There is a tendency to believe that “this will not happen to us” or “what we have in place is good enough”. Typically DR plans are not tested; they are out of date and there is a significant risk of critical IT systems downtime.” According to Amer Chebaro, Technical Sales & Services Manager, Gulf Region, Symantec MENA, DR plans in place at many Businesses still leave room
for considerable reliance on manual interventions rather than further automation. This increases the associated risks with the strategy. He says, “Many businesses equate DR with replication, and think that simply having another copy of data off-site is good enough. They try to fill in any functional gaps with manual effort or scripting, both of which only serve to increase the dependence on people to help recover from a disaster. Disasters are going to occur at inconvenient times, so if you need your experienced administrators in the middle of the night or the middle of the summer and they are not immediately available, you risk having your systems down for extended periods. The more that your business can automate, the lower your reliance on having IT experts on site will be.” While the region is trailing developed markets in terms of awareness, analysts are currently predicting 50% growth per
vendor. With over 600 customers in Middle East ranging from the largest bank in the UAE to the largest University in the UAE to the largest hospital in Saudi Arabia, Veeam’s claims seem to have great credence. Gregg Petersen, Regional Sales Manager, Middle East, Veeam Software says, “There is definitely an awareness for both DR and backup across the majority of SMB and enterprise customers in the region for traditional environments. What we at Veeam are seeing as virtualization grows, is that customers tend to think that traditional tools used in the physical world will be sufficient in meeting their needs. The problem here is that traditional or legacy tools are not meeting the end user’s needs and are not meeting their SLA requirements. There are some customers who do realize this and we get a lot of interest as a Modern Data Protection company, specialized in virtualization.” Virtualisation allows companies to deploy and redeploy applications or updates more swiftly. Business continuity plans in a Virtual environment therefore has to be more dynamic and real time because of the possibility of this almost instantaneous deployments of additional applications. He adds, “The challenge we face is to get IT teams to understand that physical and virtual server environments are totally separated and offer very different functionality. The reason why customers move to virtualization is to increase business agility, improve service levels and reduce costs. If you can’t achieve this using your existing tools then you are missing the virtualization trick.” One of the other issues with some of the current DR strategies in vogue is copy data management. Copy data is replication of production data and there might be individual data protection and recovery applications, each independently copying, storing and moving redundant data and Amer Chebaro restoring overlapping information. Technology Sales & Services Manager, Gulf Region This consumes excessive storage Symantec
year in areas such as Disaster-Recoveryas-a-Service in the Middle East and Africa. Amer adds “On a scale of 1 to 10, regional awareness of the need for DR is around 6 or 7, but actual levels of competence and maturity are still around 3 or 4. This can be attributed to the fact that there is a lot of turnover in terms of staff and job roles, and too many people see DR as a medium to long-term job that they do not want to invest their time and effort in as they will have moved on by the time any program is properly implemented.” One of the challenges is that traditional tools aren’t enough for DR in virtualized environments. As more customers in SMB and enterprise segments deploy a mix of physical and virtual IT infrastructures, there will be a need for tools that can work with both environments. Veeam Software on the other hand has specialized in solutions for virtualized environments and claims existing customers are more than happy with this approach as what they do get from Veeam in functionality, they cannot get from any other
Martin Mackay CEO Neverfail Group
and according to IDC, most companies are already spending over 5 times more on the hardware to support copy data and the total cost of supporting copy data is expected to surpass that of supporting the production data. Ash Ashutosh, Founder & CEO, Actifio, a company focuses on copy data management says, “DR and backup strategies are equally important for companies of all sizes. The awareness and the challenges have grown as the industry had introduced more and more point solutions resulting in an excess of data copies being created for the various business requirements. Today companies are finding themselves managing a huge complexity with growing costs and data load.”
Disparate approaches to data management DR solutions are available as on premise software, hosted services and as appliance based. There are also separate solutions for virtualized environments as well as solutions that are appliance based. Symantec has several storage August 2013 | 19
Cover Feature | Disaster recovery and backup
solutions to help businesses in the region backup, recover, archive and discover their business critical information. It also offers solutions that are closely integrated with virtualized environments. Amer says, “Symantec offers flexibility and provides its customers a freedom of choice in the way they purchase and deploy the market-leading backup software. They can choose between an appliance form-factor, the traditional on premise solution or a Software as a Service, or cloud delivery. The appliance form-factorprovides customers with a plug-and-play approach that combines hardware and software appliances on one bundle. It allows a company to implement a new backup environment quickly and reduce the impact of data growth.” The NetBackup 7.5 increases backup speeds up to 100 times, improves the ability to recover and simplifies the search and recovery of files for legal holds. Backup Exec 2012 has
Ash Ashutosh Founder & CEO Actifio
20 | August 2013
enhanced its management console with a new intuitive design, reduced complexity across physical and virtual environments, and highly comprehensive disaster recovery. NetBackup 5220 and Backup Exec 3600 appliances are integrated hardware and software solution in one. They help companies drive down costs through ease of management, requiring a single skill set; provide 100x faster backups and 4 percent reduction in operating costs. In addition, Symantec offers the Enterprise Vault, an archive platform that allows organizations to centrally store, manage, and discover information from Exchange, Domino, SharePoint, file servers and other sources across the data center. Enterprise Vault can be deployed on-premise, hosted, or as a managed service. The Enterprise Vault.cloud is a cloud-based archiving service that helps organizations better store, manage, and discover business-critical information. The Clearwell eDiscovery Platform is a unified solution for managing ESI through the eDiscovery lifecycle. With the Veritas Storage FoundationStorage Foundation, organizations can implement any changes to their storage infrastructure, including operating system or array migrations, without impacting application availability. Actifio, a fast growing company focuses on copy data management by essentially virtualizing disparate protection and availability storage applications into a single data management appliance that lets you recover anything instantly, for up to 90% less. Ashutosh says, “Actifio pioneered the industry’s first storage system optimized for managing copies of production data, eliminating redundant silos of IT infrastructure and data management applications. By introducing virtualization into data management, Actifio delivers a simple application-centric, SLAdriven solution that decouples the management of production data from storage, network and server infrastructure. Actifio enables
IT organizations and service providers likewise to realize dramatic cost savings and solve their challenges associated with exploding data growth.” Veaam focuses on data protection for virtual environments. It is a market leader in Modern Data Protection and Management solutions for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.the vendor also claims that their products offer functionalities that are not found in other Data Management products for virtual environments. Gregg says, “We believe today’s IT requirements have changed and that “3C” legacy backup problems — high costs, increased complexity and missing capabilities — are no longer acceptable for any organization. Veeam provides powerful, easy-to-use and affordable solutions that are Built for Virtualization and the Cloud — a perfect fit for the modern data center.” Gregg further says customers facing major challenges every day when using legacy or traditional backup and restore tools. In the case of physical backups and restores it takes customers hours to perform both backup and restore and when using these same vendors for virtual backup and restore, they can only achieve the very same SLA’s with the exact same risks such as corrupt backups for example. He adds further, “All Veeam customers see a massive reduction in backup windows and will definitely see a reduction in restore times from hours to less than a few minutes. More importantly like no other vendor, Veeam guarantees recoverability of all virtual machines. 99.9% of our customers run a dual vendor backup strategy as they see and feel a huge benefit in doing so. It’s the same concept as running 2 server environments such as physical and virtual or Windows and Linux.” One of the issues with heterogeneous environments is how to plan DR for a mix of increasing virtualized server loads as well as physical servers that have critical applications running. The cost
and complexity of business continuity is bound to rise when you have to maintain two DR strategies- one for your legacy physical infrastructure of servers and the other for the virtual infrastructure. Neverfail overcomes the challenge for instance by providing a Management plugin for VMware’s vSphere that allows administrators to manage the failover of physical servers directly from within the vSphere Client. Neverfail’s Martin says, “Our current product – Neverfail Heartbeat – provides near-real time recovery time and recovery point objectives. It operates across both physical and virtual environments and is differentiated by being application aware: that is we detect both application and infrastructure outages and can seamlessly failover to the secondary or tertiary infrastructure to ensure the end user suffers no downtime. He adds, “Our new product, Neverfail IT Continuity Architect, is an IT operations management solution that bridges the gap between deployed IT infrastructure and business services to who you what you have, what is at risk and what you need to do to always assure continuity.”
only solution and also hardware agnostic, it provides huge flexibility for VCP partners to easily transition their customers from in- house backup to a BaaS customer. The ease and speed of deployment makes this a very attractive offer. Veeam’s VCP program also provides our customers with a very easy monthly payment program allowing for ease of billing to their end users.” Implementation of recovery and backup as a service in organizations is expected to increase in order to ensure business continuity and to minimize future investments on IT infrastructure. More vendors could get into the fray offering DR as a service. Actifio does offer backup as a service through dedicated service partners while Neverfail offers Recovery as a Service through Managed Service partners for their customers.
Gregg Petersen Regional Sales Manager, ME Veeam Software
class support its end user customers in the region, besides ensuring decent margins The need for a competent channel to to all its channel partners. meet customer’s requirements for an Neverfail rides onthe strength of appropriate DR solution was never more an extensive partner network with so than in the present landscape. As Redington as its primary distributor and a vendor who focuses on both DR and an extensive network of leading DR backup, all of Veeam’s partners are system integrators and resellers delivering focused on DR and backup. Gregg adds solutions to clients. the challenge is to get partners and end Backup as a service Symantec has had a large partner users to also understand the significance DR as a Service Market is Poised to ecosystem and community for many years of also managing, monitoring and Grow at CAGR of 55.2% & to Reach now across the Middle East and the focus reporting properly on backups and virtual $5.7 Billion by 2018 according to a continues to be on delivering the right infrastructures. report by MarketsandMarkets. DR as a disaster recovery and backup solutions to Actifio maintains a focused network Service Market is expected to replace IT meet the needs of organizations – both of partners that is limited to couple of infrastructure burden with cost effective small and large – throughout the region. resellers in each country in this region. and reliable solutions. There are also In the age of Big Data, there is Ashutosh comments that the objective hybrid-cloud solutions that manage both pronounced pressure on companies is to have committed, dedicated and cloud-based and traditional on-premises to ensure data backups are performed proactive network of resellers that is well data. efficiently. Companies that are weighing trained and certified to provide world Veeam runs a successful VCP (Veeam their data protection strategy well and are Cloud Provider) consulted wisely program worldwide by their channel The cost and complexity of business continuity and has signed partners will be upwith customers better prepared is bound to rise when you have to maintain in the Middle East to adopt the two DR strategies- one for your legacy physical for offering them right options in infrastructure of servers and the other for the BaaS. DR and Business virtual infrastructure. Gregg says, continuity “Being a software deployments.
Channel in the mix
August 2013 | 21
Feature | Dell
T
Florian Malecki, EMEA Product & Solutions, Director, Dell
he transformation of Dell from a hardware vendor to a services and solutions company seems almost complete. Formed in 2012, Dell Software unifies recent software acquisitions by Dell that include the KACE, Quest and SonicWALL. The idea, saysFlorian Malecki, EMEA Product and Solutions Director at Dell, is to offer customers end-to-end solution from the device to the infrastructure, to security, to applications to make sure that a customer can speak to one contact person for all their technology needs. “We can really help customers identify problems they may have and then help them on what they need to do to solve those problems. There’svirtually no requirement that a customer may have that we cannot fulfil within our portfolio. So I think this is a very powerful proposition,” said Florian. In BYOD scenarios, Dell will provide the tablets, laptops plus secure the network and provide firewall. KACE mobile data management will help track who is accessing what-and only allow access to specific users and applications with the use of IM, VDI, etc. “Ourproduct portfolio is an end-to-end proposition.
Brave New World By transforming into a 360 degree solutions provider, Dell is heralding in a new era for IT vendors. - By David Ndichu Areseller has the ability toidentify the requirements of the customer and then start taking different propositions from our portfolio tosolve those requirements. As these requirements evolve over the years, these solutions can be updated for the customer to fulfil his on-going requirements.The partner program makes it possible to bring all the disparate resale partners to provide a complete solution,” said Florian. Dell has also gone against industry norms which dictate that new
22 | August 2013
acquisitions are quickly absorbed into, and their identity lost to, the acquiring vendor.At Dell however, all these new brands continue to operate as distinct brands albeit within the larger Dell family. According to Florian, this is because all these products came from companies that were already best of breed products and services in their segments. SonicWALL is a regular at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for UTMs, Quest is a leader in access management while
KACE has beenpositioned severally in the Visionary Quadrant for endpoint management. Force 10 is also one of the top performers in the networking software space. “This means that for an end user, it will make their lives easier as they have one point of contact and that they have all these product specialists and leaders in every single area,” said Florian, adding, “So a customer knows they when they talk to Dell,they can rely on a team of well experienced people and solutions to cater to all their
Threats and requirements, techniques remain whether it’s BYOD, "Legacy firewalls were designed for how the same, Florian mobility, UTMs, people used internet say five years ago. Today conceded. Majority data centres, of threats even networking or thesefirewalls just don't have the features required today come services.” to protect organizations today.” from phishing, Dell Software malware etc. What has its work cut makes it more out. The rise firewalling to also block threats coming difficult is that there are more of these of BYOD brings a lot of benefits to from the inside which entailsanalysing attacks insheer volumes as well as more organizations due more mobility and the internal traffic,” Florian added. From sophistication due to the involvement of more productivity: However, there are a within organizations, risks emanate from organized groups and state actors. The lot of security risks to be associated with employee themselves. Dell SonicWALL NGFW,with its content these devices; they can be lost or stolen, Other threats are more basic as filtering, email security, and dedicated be the source of malware or hackers use people use their devices to connect solutions, gives enterprisecustomers these same devicesas a digital Trojan outside their offices and then theability to consolidate key services horse to penetrate corporate networks. in one or two devices, Florian says. “We are using more and more mobile inadvertently download a spyware that is then brought into the corporate network This would be a good approach devices and that is where more threats through BYOD. That is why organizations to complement existing security will be coming from based on the sheer needinternalsecuritypolicies as well infrastructure. According to Florian, there number of gadgets in use. Near Field because it's not just threats coming a lot ofprojects where the perimeter Communications (NFC), a booming field, from outside. Another issue is allowing firewall may not from SonicWALL but will accelerate these threats as devices guests access the network using the because of the next-generation features are used to transmit corporate data from company’s network but without no that Dell offers, the Dell SonicWALL NGFW one machine to another,” said Florian. control over these alien devices. Florian is put behind existing security solution The very nature we use the internet advices organizations to make sure their to perform some of the next generation today is exposing us to threats that respective organisations areprotected firewall functions. did not even exist a few years ago, against these security risks associated And with technology comes value says Florian. Corporates and individuals with guests’devices, also known as clean for customers and resale partners alike, usingweb-based applications and wireless. according to Florian. “We’ve upgraded social media are the rule rather than Dell Software also offers access the cores, achieved higher levels of the exception. There are new threats wireless points as well as SSL VPN-a performance matched with higher levels associated with these applications and device that allows customersencrypt of security. While the performance the way these applications are hosted in communication from the device back increased by 20-30% of from the the cloud. to the network after which they can previous generation, the price remained “This means that from a security do endpoint control. This gives the pretty flat. For our reseller partners, this point of view, legacy firewall cannot IT manager the ability to check the is great news especially here in the UAE protect todays’ organizations based on security level of a device for instance, where we have a great resale channel what they want to do,” said Florian. whether it has an anti-virus installed, community,” Florian said. “Legacy firewalls were designed for how whether it is updated, etc. And thenhe For resellers this means a nextpeople used internet say five years ago. can authenticate the user and based on generation firewall to target all market Today thesefirewalls just don't have the that they can allow/disallow access to segmentsfrom mid-sized firms tolarge features required to protect organizations the network. “We have the ability to enterprises, public or private. “The today.” secure the internal network, the so-called SuperMassive9000 delivers solutions Many corporations are worried about inverted network,” Florian said. “So for data centres, telcos, ISPs and large perimeter firewall to protect against with BYOD, we consider users as if they organizations. So Dell SonicWALL has threats coming from outside. However, coming from outside the organization and one of the widest NGFW product range equally devastating risks could be make sure they are not bringing threats from SMBs, mid-sized businesses to the lurking from inside, Florian says. “So we from inside. Customers are embracing enterprise to data centres, telcos and ISP see a lot of requests for our solutions that within the BYOD Scenario.” kind of clients,” Florian explained. like the new NSA 6 seriesthat do core
August 2013 | 23
TechKnow | Microsoft
Goksel Topbas, Sever & Tools Business Group, Lead Microsoft Gulf
and without the need for new hardware or configure components – providing a significant amount of cost benefits as well as simpler disaster recovery and compliance. It also allows a company to manage their software, applications and data centrally, providing universal access for employees through the data center. Are Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 and Azure the major pillars of Microsoft’s Virtualisation strategy? Please elaborate. Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 are the central pillars of Microsoft’s virtualization offerings. Hyper-V is an integral part of Windows Server and provides a foundational virtualization platform that supports up to 64 virtual processors and 1TB of memory, as well as having a VHDX virtual hard disk format with capacity up to 64 TB. This means that the virtualization infrastructure can support the configuration of large, high-performance virtual machines and is flexible in terms of its ability to scale up or down. Windows Server 2012 was designed
Making inroads quietly Microsoft has been growing its share in the Virtualization market and is widely reckoned to be among the top two, behind market leader VMware. Microsoft is committed to continuing to providing customers and partners in the region to allow them to reduce costs and enhance agility through Cloud and virtualization solutions. Goksel Topbas - Sever & Tools Business Group, Lead Microsoft Gulf shares some insight in this conversation with The Integrator.
What are the core benefits of Microsoft’s Virtualisation strategy? Do your solutions help manage different environments from physical to virtual and the cloud and run applications seamlessly accross different environments? Microsoft’s virtualization essentially allows users to create integrated,
24 | August 2013
consolidated platforms to virtualize, build a private cloud or scale services through a public cloud – in fact, you can mix all three solutions if you choose. Virtualization allows employees to access their applications and data safely over a network and minimizes the risk of data loss. It also allows companies to upgrade software capabilities much more easily
with the modern work environment at its very core, where people rely heavily on their technology to communication, collaborate and plan their daily activities both in work and in a personal capacity. Windows Server 2012 therefore empowers IT professionals to provide users with flexible access to data and applications anywhere and on a range of popular devices. It also enhances desktop virtualization solutions with Remote Desktop Services, which has been enhanced to ensure a much richer user experience, lower costs of operations for the organization and a much simpler Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to deploy and manage.
Channel partners selling cloud solutions experiencing faster growth Azure provides an open and flexible cloud platform that enables users to develop and test applications quickly, at a reduced cost and with the ability to deploy in the cloud or on-premises. Azure can be integrated within an existing IT environment and is easily scalable to suit application size and requirements. The Azure platform provides reliable cloud data storage, back-up and recovery solutions. Have recent launches focused on enhanced performance benefits like higher reliability, higher availability etc? As Microsoft enhances existing products or develops new solutions, performance is at the heart of everything we do. Windows 8 was a key example of this, with a strong focus on mobility and touch to ensure its design provided a rich user experience across a wide range of devices, whether for work or play, to connect or create. The way in which people utilize their technology has evolved at a rapid rate over the past few years, and Windows 8 was indicative of the way in which Microsoft ensures its products are enhanced in parallel with its users requirements. Are customers in the region open to multi-hypervisor options as suit them best? There are now a number of options open to those looking to initiate virtualization and management of multihypervisors has been something Microsoft has
worked to develop an efficient solution for. Those working within multihypervisor environments are looking for a clear and efficient way to manage this, leveraging their existing infrastructure. Within Systems Center 2012, users can manage multi-hypervisor environments through a common console, providing consistency in the way VMs and applications are deployed, as well as the option to utilize a mix of hypervisors for business critical apps, branch offices, or test and development environments. The fabric in System Center 2012 is made up of hosts, host groups and library servers, as well as networking and storage configuration. These hosts can include Hyper-V hosts as well as non-Hyper-V hosts, including VMware ESX/ESXi hosts and Citrix XenServer hosts. Discuss key trends in the region vis-à-vis adoption of Virtualisation services across SMB to enterprise customers? Virtualization is a fastbecoming a key toop for the SMB market as it provides significant flexibility and access to key, and upto-date business tools. Employing the right IT strategy can also provide significant cost efficiency, as SMBs can often find un-necessary cost outlay related to under-utilization of servers, IT maintenance and data protection.
P
artners with more than 50 percent of their revenue related to the cloud have been benefiting from higher gross profit, more new customers, increased revenue per employee and faster overall business growth, according to a new IDC study, sponsored by Microsoft released at the company’s annual partner conference in July. The study underscored the transformation taking place in the business world as more organizations of all sizes move their technology infrastructures to the cloud. In fact, according to the findings, cloud-oriented partners, defined as those that generate more than 50 percent of their revenue from the cloud, grow at double the rate, accrue new customers more than two times faster and generate 30 percent more revenue per employee compared with non-cloud-oriented partners. “Cloud alone hasn't caused these impressive numbers, though that is absolutely part of it; top-performing partners were visionaries that took on cloud technologies before their peers,” said Darren Bibby, program vice president of Channels and Alliances Research, IDC. “We’re at the point in the industry’s overall cloud transition where partners that don’t move some of their business to the cloud likely won’t survive. And some partners that are getting ready to sell their business or retire may be OK with that. Most won't be.” IDC research also revealed customer buying preferences that highlight the importance of a comprehensive cloud vendor and the ability to offer various deployment options: • Sixty-three percent of customers expect to have a single cloud service provider to meet their needs. • Sixty-seven percent expect to purchase a wide variety of cloud services from a single vendor. • Seventy-four percent expect their cloud service provider to be able to move a cloud offering back on-premises if needed. “IDC’s data reveals that businesses prefer to buy end-to-end IT solutions from a single cloud vendor and want to work with a company they have an established relationship with. With Office 365 now on a $1 billion annual revenue run rate and more than 250,000 customers using Windows Azure, with thousands more added every week, our partners are in a prime position to support this,” said Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft. “This research validates our belief that the most successful partners are the ones that offer a hybrid approach to IT. Microsoft is the only vendor equipped to help partners offer their customers a suite of on-premises and cloud solutions in both public and private cloud environments. By offering a hybrid approach, it better addresses customer needs and, in turn, helps our partners make more money
August 2013 | 25
Point2Point | IBT
Crossing milestones IBT is one of the fast growing multi-disciplined system integrators in the U.A.E. Founded in 2008, IBT have grown from 2 employees to an 80-strong workforce and prides itself on its capabilities to build and deliver ICT infrastructure solutions across extensive to an ever growing clientele in the region.Jai
Jai Mulani CEO IBT
Mulani, CEO at IBT discusses the company’s key priorities on the journey so far and the road ahead While IBT is relatively a young company a few years old, what do you reckon have been some major achievements? Has growth been as anticipated? We are of course a younger company compared to other IT Giants but the age of the company is immaterial in achieving successful growth. What actually matters is Vision, Planning, Team Work and Passion. The team at IBT is very Passionate about our work and about our commitments and is the reason for our success so far. The company has grown every year almost double in terms of Revenue and Employee Strength. Our
26 | August 2013
services and values have been appreciated by our customers and vendors all the way. We have received several recognitions and awards from the Media and vendors over the years, which is more evidence of the fact that we are heading the right way. Apart from focusing on the GCC, we have also expanded our operations into the Indian sub-continent with an office in Mumbai. This augurs well for our further growth and we will continue to look at expansion possibilities. Discuss domains that you focus on? We primarily focus of Cloud Computing, Virtualization,
Managed Services and BPO. We do other solutions as well but are more focused on the aforementioned solutions. We have 2 Business Divisions in IBT. The Enterprise IT Solutions division providesend to end IT Solutions like Networking, IP PBX, Unified Communications, Data Center Solutions, & Disaster Recovery. Our Professional Services unit is responsible for Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Business Process Outsourcing and SLA. Which verticals have been the strongest performing for you? We haven’t focused on specific verticals as the fact
is that we have a good customer base across several segments.These include Hotels, Governments, Banks, Retail and Manufacturing sectors. What are the growth opportunities for your company? In this challenging market, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Cloud Computing and Virtualization are the most effective and most growing business areas for us. All the three areas help drive down costs for the customers. In the BPO Business, customers hire a company to run and manage their IT Department so that they don't incur any admin costs on having their own IT
requirements on a Department and the "While we are partners with almost all leading priority basis complete end to vendors, we are not Vendor oriented Company. We end management Do you collaborate of IT is done by the are a pure Service Oriented company in which Vendor with other BPO companies like involvement is very less and the focus is on meeting integrators? us, allowing the customer requirements on a priority basis" Very much so. customer to entirely We have a Team focus on their core called Infrastructure business. This is Solutions which caters all across the GCC? have already migrated and an area we are making good end to end IT & Telecom We have a fair number of a fair number of companies progress. Infrastructure solutions. We customers in Qatar and in are planning to migrate their Virtualization and cloud never do sub-contracting. KSA. We have an office in Data Centers into the Virtual computing are the two Whatever we do, we do Qatar which takes care of Environment. associated areas where our own to make sure the Qatar Market. For Customers we are focusing as well. delivery of service is as per our in KSA we offer only Remote In the BPO Business, are In Virtualization, customers standards. Infrastructure Management you are looking to primarily can have more number Services which we oversee provide IT support services of servers and services in What is the support from our Dubai Office. to SMB sector clients or is it less number of Physical infrastructure in place? the enterprise that you are Servers. So management Our Head Office is on Sheikh How many Technical focusing on? and administration costs Zayed Road, Dubai. We also resources do you have? BPO is part of the Professional decrease by at least 20% have a 24 x 7 x 365 running call Is ongoing training and Services Division in IBT. And in to 30%. And finally in Cloud center in Karama for customers certification of these Professional Services Division Computing, customers can who are under our SLA and so engineers a priority? we have SMB and Enterprise possibly have zero costs on we support them round the As of today, we are force of 80 as Sub Divisions. So we are their IT Management with clock. We have an office in Abu Employees in IBT out of which targeting SMB and Enterprise almost no need for IT support Dhabi to provide quick support we have approximately 60 both segments for Outsourcing staff in their local office. Their for our customers in Abu Dhabi, Employees in Technical Team very aggressively. required IT applications are Mussafah etc.We have delivery including all our offices. Rest 20 The SMB companies are web-hosted by companies like center of Outsourcing and Cloud are in Sales, HR and Finance. moving much faster towards us on subscription basis and Computing back in Mumbai, We should be growing our BPO than the enterprise we manage their IT networks India and a Data Center in team to a size of 100 by end segment because today market and application availability on a the UK where we host our of this year if we continue the is really challenging for all regular basis. customers Infrastructure on same pace of growth. the industries. And especially cloud. SMB customers want to focus What are the trends that Who are the lead vendors on their core business and are driving growth in the Comment on some key that you work with towards activities. So we have seen a Datacenter market? objectives looking ahead? fulfilling your deployments? good number of companies Virtualization is one of the We are now moving ahead While we are partners with in the SMB verticals migrating strong trends seen in the very strongly to achieve our almost all leading vendors, to BPO. As discussed earlier, Datacentre. It helps customers goals for 2013 and setting up we are not Vendor oriented there are several advantages to have multiple advantages more strong Goals for 2014. Company. We are a pure realized by opting for BPO including reduced Infrastructure One of the key plans for the Service Oriented company in services and the cost being one Costs, flexibility, scalability, next year includes a possible which Vendor involvement of the standout advantages. redundancy, reliability, server entry into the US by the first is very less and the focus consolidation as well as less quarter of 2014. is on meeting customer Do you have customers complexity. Many data centers
August 2013  |  27
InSight | WatchGuard
It seems that there is little to complain about when BYOD is concerned – which begs the question, why are businesses reluctant to welcome the trend? At most work places there is a team behind the scene working on securing the network against the threat of cyber-attacks. The introduction of BYOD bring with it new opportunities for hackers to infiltrate and gain access to sensitive data. People don’t (as a general rule) protect their personal devices because in many cases the dangers are not apparent to them. Businesses need to be aware of the possible threats, which are becoming a seemingly John Spoor Regional Manager, MEA WatchGuard
Public Wi-Fi is often unsecure, allowing malware and hackers to infect devices. This can be transferred onto a network, and can result in the corruption of office software and data. More recently there have been reports of malware on apps such as the Google Play Store for Android. This malware transpires outside of the ‘app’ confines and can infiltrate all areas of a device, including its connection to sensitive data. To further cement the issues surrounding mobile security, the recent hacking of Sky News apps, reported by Reuters, have been said to be done through personal devices. Additionally, these attacks are
BYOD Do we trust it? Bring your own device (BYOD) is a trend that is here to stay as the use of personal devices also used for business continues to grow as the market and demand for smartphones, tablets and other devices rises. BYOD security should be at the forefront of business security, as it is a business trend that is only going to evolve and become more prominent writes John Spoor, Regional Manager, MEA, WatchGuard
P
eople love convenience, accessibility and connectivity. It feels like there is a new smartphone or tablet released every day, and with such a high demand technology companies are battling to gain the attention of consumers. The choices available are vast and varied, and their functionalities exciting. As the world has evolved, so has the importance of technology in people’s
28 | August 2013
professional and private lives. Between work and play, the BYOD trend has become popular, in large part due to the convenience for employees and, let’s faces it, also for employers. Who wouldn’t want their employees to be connected to work and accessible at all times! This also allows the same amount of access regardless of geographical location, meaning productivity is not just limited to the office confines.
regular occurrence. IT departments are now forced to consider how to secure personal devices, with employees insisting on using them in the work place. Making sure these devices are used safely when connected to the network ensures that people aren’t bringing nasty malware or helping hackers gain information. How do these devices become infected in the first place? Where do we begin!
being carried out by groups of people with specific skills, such as the Syrian Electronic Army. While it may seem that apps are only part of a business, these issues are often part of a blended attack where a business is targeted on many fronts as hackers are just looking for the easiest way to gain entry. The opportunity of threat is only going to continue to rise, as while technology companies develop new products and
software, hackers are only a few steps behind creating ways to infiltrate these systems. BYOD security should be at the forefront of business security, as it is a business trend that is only going to evolve and become more prominent. Regardless of the type of information being shared, all business data can be, and should be, classified as sensitive. Traditional security solutions won’t protect enterprises; however there
so regularly, data encryption helps to secure content while it travels. The level of security is at the discretion of each business and based on assessment of risks. Data breaches can impact a business’ credibility, productivity and profitability, and BYOD increases the risks. However, by taking a proactive stance and implementing effective safety precautions, businesses can enjoy the benefits of BYOD without the added stress.
IT departments are now forced to consider how to secure personal devices, with employees insisting on using them in the work place. Making sure these devices are used safely when connected to the network ensures that people aren’t bringing nasty malware or helping hackers gain information. are new products that support cloud and BYOD usage. They work by alerting the network management of impending issues before they become a serious threat.Thankfully there are ways for businesses to protect themselves with solutions that are solely dedicated to virtual networks
or as part of a UTM system. An effective security solution allows businesses to select which individuals can access sensitive data, implements multi-layer fireware and two-factor authentication for access to data. Besides this, with data moving between individuals
WatchGuard’s UTM Solution obtain high performance ratings
W
atchGuard Technologies was awarded a “Performance Verified Certification” by independent test lab, Miercom, for performing nearly 3.5 times faster than competing unified threat management (UTM) solutions with standard UTM features enabled.1 The award gives both small and mid-sized enterprises assurance that WatchGuard UTM solutions can deliver the security and performance they need, while allowing them to benefit from the cost savings of UTM compared to stand alone solutions. According to Gartner, “savings of half of the total cost for network security can be achieved for small or midsize businesses (SMBs) using UTM.” 2 Miercom conducted throughput tests on WatchGuard’s XTM 850 solution against similarly priced competing appliances from Fortinet, SonicWALL and Sophos. The test explored the impact on throughput speed with standard UTM features switched on, including not only
basic firewall packet filtering, but also deep packet inspection and/or proxies, intrusion prevention and anti-virus, which is critical in catching modern malware’s multi-vectored threats. “These tests validate the reason why customers from both small and mid-sized enterprise customers around the world are choosing WatchGuard’s UTM solution,” said Roger Klorese, director of product management at WatchGuard. “UTM, once viewed to be a SMB solution, has moved from the trough of disillusionment in August 2011 to the slope of enlightenment in July 2012 within the Gartner Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection as mid-sized customers gain confidence that they can benefit from the security cost savings of UTM, and know that the performance they need is there to support their performance service level agreements.” “Since re-architecting our business three years ago, WatchGuard’s relentless focus on delivering high-end UTM
performance means we can boost our customers’ network security, connectivity and reliability, providing the highest level of network protection available in the market,” stated John Spoor, Regional Manager, MENA, WatchGuard. “The new XTM models also feature dynamic routing, wide area network (WAN) failover, server load balancing, and link aggregation. The included security services use best-in-class technology from industry leaders like Websense, AVG, and Broadweb to provide in-depth defense against modern malware and blended security threats,” Spoor added. Such industry recognitions further reiterate how WatchGuard is the preferred security partner for SMEs. This year, while WatchGuard saw a YoY increase in sales across customers of all sizes, Q1 results showed that product and attached service billings for midsized companies showed 24% growth when compared to the first quarter of 2012. August 2013 | 29
InSight | Red Hat
As forward-looking enterprises consider the future of their IT architectures, the key question emerging is not public versus private cloud, but rather how the enterprise will ensure consistency across an environment that includes both.George DeBono, General Manager, Middle East, Turkey & Africa at Red Hat writes that enterprises are ripe for an alternative to the siloed approach to storage offered by traditional NAS and SAN George DeBono General Manager, META Red Hat
IT Storage Revolution: Software-Defined Storage Y
esterday’s highly centralized approaches to storage pose significant challenges to organizations operating hybrid environments. The hybrid cloud demands a converged data platform, able to unify disparate clouds and allow data to be deployed to and accessed from anywhere. It is abundantly clear that a revolution in data storage is now both imminent and completely necessary. Yet organizations in the Middle East remain clueless when it comes to addressing new storage needs. In its report on the
30 | August 2013
MEA IT infrastructure market, research firm Gartner said, “The storage hardware market is still underpenetrated overall, with many organizations not having the insight or education required to assess the correct storage infrastructure for their application and service requirements.” Assessing the right storage infrastructure requires that CIOs first understand the factors driving data growth and the unique challenges they raise.
The Need for a Storage Revolution Cloud computing and big data,
two of the most significant trends in modern IT, each pose significant challenges to traditional storage. Cloud calls for a storage platform that can be easily deployed in both public and private environments, provides built-in reliability and robustness in any cloud, and can easily scale up or down on demand. Big data demands a storage platform with tremendous capacity-to the petabyte level and beyond in some cases, is affordable at scale, and can deliver the performance required to support high-throughput applications. Individually, cloud
and big data each serve to obsolete traditional, scaleup approaches to storage. Together they sound its death knell. Even without the necessity imposed by cloud and big data, enterprises are ripe for an alternative to the siloed approach to storage offered by traditional NAS and SAN. In order to maintain agility and contain operating costs as data volumes skyrocket and data types proliferate, the enterprise must radically simplify its management of information. It needs a unified platform that allows it to support a wide
variety of storage requirements using standard technologies and existing skillsets. With data creation and collection increasingly decentralized, enterprises need a storage platform able to break down and bridge the disparate storage silos created by legacy storage technologies. To support modern, datadriven social, mobile and web applications, the enterprise demands a storage platform able to provide service-oriented access to stored data as objects easily consumed by highly distributed applications. Yet for more traditional applications, and for simplified maintenance across all applications, support for traditional file protocols is required. Likewise, in
the face of an increasingly fragmented deployment environment, enterprises need a storage platform able to span these infrastructure options – including physical, virtual and cloud - to create a single, unified environment for persistent data. From a business perspective, what the CIO ultimately needs is a storage platform that allows the enterprise to fully tap into the power of its data, enabling enterprise transformation, rapid innovation and stronger business growth through the application of emerging technologies such as mobile, social and big data.
The Software-Defined
Storage Solution Today’s enterprise is rapidly adopting a wide variety of “software-defined” technologies better able to meet the changing needs of modern business than their traditional IT counterparts. In no area of the data center is this approach more needed than in storage. The cost of traditional storage on a per-terabyte basis is simply too high to support large data volumes. To address new challenges, enterprises must turn towards cloud-inspired scale-out storage systems based on industrystandard commodity servers running on trusted open-source software. Software-defined storage virtualizes the enterprise data
store, allowing it to remain independent of applicationand infrastructure-layer factors such as the choice of access protocols and infrastructure deployment options. By pooling cloud, virtual and on-premise infrastructure under a single unified storage platform, software-defined storage leverages an enterprise’s existing resources and skillsets to establish the foundation for agile, flexible, cloud-compatible storage. In doing so, this software-centric approach to storage will help organizations solve a wide variety of modern data management challenges, including managing the explosion of unstructured data and harnessing this data for competitive advantage.
Red Hat expands partner ecosystems for storage
R
ed Hat is collaborating with leading IT providers to deliver new capabilities for storing and managing enterprise environments with extremely heavy data workloads. Red Hat now provides synergistic reference architectures based on its open software-defined storage platform with CommVault, HP, Intel, and Supermicro). Customers can now quickly and confidently deploy a storage solution that leverages existing storage functionality while easily accommodating future features. The capabilities created by Red Hat and its partners are designed to accelerate and simplify the implementation of data back-up, content clouds, big data storage, and a range of industry-specific storage solutions designed to handle massive amounts of unstructured data. Enterprise data management solutions built on
CommVault’sSimpanaOnePass feature and Red Hat Storage simplify data management and significantly reduce back-up windows over legacy storage solutions. This combination provides a converged process for backup, archive and reporting with an open software-defined storage platform that enterprises can scale-out to support petabytes of data and can be deployed on on-premise hardware or in the cloud. HP and Red Hat have designed a purpose-built scale-out storage solution to meet the datacenter challenges to save space, energy, and time when deploying large data workloads. Red Hat Storage open software-defined storage platform and the HP ProLiant SL4500 server line enable enterprises to efficiently and cost-effectively store and manage big data growth. Unstructured data is the fastest growing type of data in the enterprise today, fueled to a large extent by the
growth in rich media content. Content clouds are emerging to provide a range of IT and consumer services for rich media consumption and distribution, requiring unprecedented amounts of data to be continually stored and managed. To meet this growing demand cost-effectively, companies have turned to standard Intel Xeon processor-based servers. Red Hat and Intel have created a content cloud storage reference design using Intel Xeon processor-based storage servers and Red Hat’s software-defined storage platform to speed organizations’ ability to rapidly implement content clouds. Red Hat and Supermicro have collaborated to develop several industry-specific solution blueprints designed to maximize the value of enterprise storage investments. The companies have outlined solutions using Red Hat Storage and Supermicro servers and storage hardware. August 2013 | 31
eyetech
Polycom CX5500 and CX5100 Unified Conference Stations
Overview Polycom has unveiled the industry’s first 360-degree, panoramic 1080p HD video collaboration solutions custom-built for Microsoft Lync 2013. The new Polycom CX5500 and CX5100 Unified Conference Stations are designed to deliver a groundbreaking around-the-table experience for all participants, whether they’re in the room or thousands of miles away. The new Polycom CX5500 delivers enterprise-grade video and audio collaboration capabilities in an easyto-use system that can be plugged into a USB port on a laptop, and it also doubles as a SIP audio conference phone providing the industry’s best audio quality. The new additions to Polycom’s CX series of Lync-optimized solutions are successors to the Polycom CX5000 HD Unified Conference Station. The solution retains the unique around-the-table, 360-degree, panoramic experience and delivers more than twice the HD video image quality, double the frame rate for life-like motion handling, and Polycom’s HD Voice for the highest quality audio while adding a new interface and design and a privacy cap
Key features: • Since the Polycom CX5500 or CX5100 is placed in the center of a meeting room table, it enables a natural conversation that addresses the need to collaborate and engage simultaneously with those in the room (around the table) and other participants who are remote. • Both systems deliver 1080p active speaker video that automatically tracks the flow of conversations at a fluid 30 frames per second, while offering a 360-degree panoramic view of the room. Conversations remain crystal clear with high-fidelity Polycom HD Voice. • An all-new user interface and system design makes it easy to launch or join a call directly from the Lync user environment – users simply connect the CX5500 and CX5100 via USB to a computer that is running Lync.
32 | August 2013
HP EliteOne series Overview: HP’s EliteOne along with EliteDesk 800 series are HP’s most powerful business AiO and desktop PCs with the broadest range of distinctively designed form factors to fit the way businesses work today. HP Elite 800 series desktops are powered by the latest 4th generation Intel Core processors for maximum performance and crisp graphics, as well as optional new caching options and solid state drives that provide faster access to data and apps. These AiO and desktop PCs also feature HP Elite enterprise-class security and client manageability solutions to protect and manage business-critical data, devices and identities with Intel vPro support. The new HP Elite line of business desktops and AiO platforms features the use of low halogen, while several of the platforms are also available with optional power supplies featuring up to 94 percent power efficiencies.
Key features: • • • •
The HP EliteOne 800 G1 is HP’s most powerful, multimedia-rich AiO PC, featuring a stylish, 23 percent thinner design and a full Windows 8 capacitive touch option that features edge-to-edge glass for a dynamic, interactive experience. This AiO also includes DTS Studio Sound with an HD webcam for rich audio and video that brings work to life. Users will enjoy the flexibility of the 23-inch (58.4cm) diagonal display with a height-adjustable and reclining stand option that rotates between portrait and landscape orientations, DisplayPort with multistream for up to four additional digital monitors, and VESA mounting options for the ultimate in space savings. The HP EliteOne 800 enables users to quickly charge mobile devices with the fast- charging USB port, as well as share their internet connection with up to five additional devices with the included HP Wireless Hotspot application.
APC NetShelter SV
Seagate Enterprise Performance 10K HDD v7
Overview: Schneider Electric has introduced the APC NetShelter SV, an affordable rack solution with industry proven design and seamless integration of essential rack accessories. The NetShelter SV is offered in multiple heights, widths and depths to meet the challenges that businesses face in their IT environments. The APC NetShelter SV is optimized for basic enclosure applications such as small and medium business IT needs and co-location cage environments. The NetShelter SV maintains a strong focus on cooling, power distribution, and cable management to provide a reliable rack-mounting environment for mission-critical equipment but with optional features such as side panels, casters, and rear cable channel that reduces the cost of the base enclosure. The NetShelter SV joins the complete family of racks and enclosures available from Schneider Electric.
Overview Seagate announced the next-gen version of its Enterprise Performance 10K HDD— the Seagate Enterprise Performance 10K HDD v7. A 2.5-inch 10K-RPM enterprise hard disk drive, the new Enterprise Performance 10K HDD v7 delivers high-capacity in a mission critical drive enabling storage professionals to build optimum data storage solutions with consistently high performance and reliability in a low power envelope.
Key features: • • • • •
The Enterprise Performance 10K HDD v7 is equipped with 1.2TB of data storage providing data centers with both the performance needed for the most write- intensive applications and the scalability to meet storage growth and business objectives. Ideal for mission critical server and storage solutions, the drive is engineered for highperformance computing and high random and sequential workloads including database transaction processing and high workload servers that process mission critical data in power and space constrained data centers. Extremely energy-efficient, the Enterprise Performance 10K HDD v7 delivers one of the highest GB/Watt power optimization and cooling costs in a 2.5-inch enterprise 10K HDD available. The drive also incorporates Seagate’s PowerChoice technology which enables IT organizations to tailor systems for enhanced power consumption during idle periods. It is equipped with a 6Gb/s SAS interface for dependable ultra-fast storage.
Key features: • • • •
Seamless integration with rack PDU and cable management systems including tool-less installation of vertical rack PDUs and cable management in the rear of the cabinet, which does not take up any of the costly U-space. Vertical mounting rails are fully adjustable, making the cabinet adaptable to multiple IT applications. Compatibility guaranteed with vendor neutral rear accessory mounting brackets, which are compatible with all EIA-310 compliant 19 inch equipment. Availablein various widths and depths to meet any specific equipment requirements. Design includescable access roof, detachable side panels and pre-installed leveling feet and casters.
August 2013 | 33
Stats & Trends
Future networks will be 80% wireless and 20% wired
D
isruptive technology trends such as enterprise mobility, cloud computing and ICT outsourcing are changing the way organisations deliver and consume ICT services. Consequently, the architecture of the communications network as we know it will need to undergo a facelift to accommodate these changes. And while it will be a necessary and radical adjustment, it won’t happen overnight. This is one of the trends highlighted in the 2013 Network Barometer Report, which was released by Dimension Data. First published in 2009, the report draws on data from Dimension Data’s proprietary Technology Lifecycle Management Assessment completed for over 1,200 organisations of all sizes from all industry sectors, and across all geographies over the past five years. Raoul Tecala, Dimension Data’s Business Development Director for Network Integration, says, “Most campus networks consist of approximately 80% wired ports serving individual users, and 20% wireless LAN (WLAN) ports supporting multiple users. However, today, users don’t want to be tethered to their desks, and as a result, are putting pressure on organisations to facilitate enterprise mobility. “In addition to this pressure from end-users, networks that are 80% wireless will cost far less to roll out than traditional, predominantly wired networks. And the good news is they will also create a strong foundation for lower operational costs, because they’ll be easier to manage, provide unified access, and require less power and cooling. We predict that, the combination of these factors will eventually turn the 80:20 ratio on its head so
that future networks will be 80% wireless and 20% wired,” he explains.
Other key findings of the 2013 Network Barometer Report include: • For the third year in a row, the percentage of devices past end-of-sale (EoS) has increased to the highest levels since 2009 when Dimension Data published the first the Network Barometer Report. Organisations are also ‘selectively sweating’ more of these devices to reach riskier, ‘older’ lifecycle stages. • For the third year in a row, the most common PSIRT was 109444. It was present in 66% of all devices in 2010, dropped to 47% in 2011, and rose again to 62% in 2012.
Stagnant External Storage Market, poised for future surge
T
he external storage market in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew only 2% in the first quarter of 2013, according to the latest data from International Data Corporation (IDC), the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecom, and consumer technology markets. Referencing its EMEA Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, the research firm announced that external storage revenue in MEA expanded slightly year on year in 1Q13 to total $233 million, with terabyte capacity rising some 32% over the same period. ''The modest growth can be attributed to consistent business typical of the first quarter of the year in MEA," says Senior Research Analyst SwapnaSubramani with IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. "In the coming quarters, however, strong uptake of external storage systems in MEA is expected
34 | August 2013
owing to large-scale deployments and projects across verticals." The Gulf Cooperation Council countries excluding the UAE and Saudi Arabia posted growth of 83% in the external storage market in the first quarter of the year, with Bahrain and Qatar registering triple-digit growth, bolstered by projects in the government and finance vertical markets, respectively. Saudi Arabia's storage market expanded 32% year on year in 1Q13. The external storage market in the UAE recorded 17% growth in revenue compared with 2011, with increased demand evident across various sectors. From a protocol perspective, ESCON/FICON posted tremendous year-on-year growth, driven by IBM projects in the government sector. Telecom industry investments continued to drive growth for the NAS protocol, while Fibre Channel protocol retained its leading position with the same market share as 1Q12.
SECURING AND SAFE GUARDING HOSPITALITY with D-Link IP Surveillance
On guard? The complete IP Surveillance hospitality solution from D-Link helps deliver patron employee health and safety while protecting your cash holdings.
It’s ideal for hospitality environments, so whether you’re running a restaurant, hotel, club, bar or café, with D-Link, you’ll enjoy greater peace of mind. Manage your building and perimeter security • Meet your OH&S and food hygiene needs • Keep patrons, employees and cash safe
DCS-6010L
DCS-7010L
DCS-7513
Wireless N HD 360
Outdoor HD Day/Night
Full HD WDR Day & Night
Degree Fisheye Camera
Mini Bullet Network Camera
Outdoor Network Camera
DCS-6113
DNR-322L with 3TB/6TB HDD
Full HD Day & Night
9-Channel 2-Bay
Dome Network Camera
mydlink NVR
AUTHORIZED DISTRIBUTOR
www.dlinkmea.com
Ap te c - a n I n g ra m M i c ro Co m p a ny P. O. Box 33550 Dubai Internet City, Dubai, UAE E-Mail: sdawda@aptecme.com
Tel.: (+971 4) 3697 111 Fax: (+971 4) 3697 110 www.apteconline.com