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Sophos Middle East | Office 205-EIB 5 | Alpha Building PO Box 500469 | Dubai Internet City | Dubai | UAE Email: salesmea@sophos.com | Tel: +971 4375 4332
Editorial Cover Story - 18 The next leg of the journey is to port mission critical workloads to virtualized infrastructure.
News in Detail - 11
The Integrator Awards applauds the champions Feature - 12
A
dopting a vendor agnostic approach is a key requirement for systems integrators in scripting their longer term success. While they choose to partner with leading vendors in different segments, a vendor-agnostic approach means they are able to leverage technologies from the leading hardware and software vendors to deliver integrated, multi-vendor solutions that benefit the customers more. Their success will be more determined by their rapport with their customers and the skill sets they possess in helping achieve the project deliverables within the specified timeline.A consultative approach that helps them scope out the requirements of their clients and accordingly set out to configure the solution set is the key. The channel can help pace their customer’s adoption of new Technologies and migration as it suits the best interests of the customer. They need to possess the technical skillsets to deploy and support their customers in as many domains as they choose to be present in. so as long as they are able to minimize the support that they would need from vendors in deploying a solution, the greater will be their sphere of influence with their customer and their credibility as a true solutions provider rather than as a product reseller. This calls for greater investments in training and certifications for their staff. Systems integrators who have stolen a march over their competitors in creating competences in some of the emerging Technologies will be able to take the lead when those opportunities open up and open up they surely will, sooner than later. For instance, the channel has a vital role in helping customers integrate cloud resources with current infrastructure and given the complexity of cloud architectures, this calls for sure competence. The typical channel partner needs to therefore understand precisely the changing expectations he needs to live up to as a trusted technology advisor for his clients. Against this backdrop, the suspicion that the role of the channel is diminished in the era of the cloud now lies discredited.
R. Narayan Managing Editor
Founder & CEO: Vivek Sharma Managing Editor: R. Narayan Editor: David Ndichu Art Director: Faiz Ahmed Sr. Sales Manager: R. Subramanyan Sales Coordinator: Smitha Jithesh
Content
Meeting great expectations
Virtualization’s next phase
A Flashy outlook
Flash continues to gain traction throughout the storage landscape as the technology removes several bottlenecks of commonly I/O performance
Point2Point - 27
The orchestrator
Kishor Chitale, CEO, Local Business Services, India & Middle East at Cap Gemini speaks about the company’s focus
TechKnow
Getting to the Third Platform - 16
Habib Mahakian, Regional General Manager, Gulf and Pakistan, EMC discusses the third platform of IT
Battle lines drawn - 22
AndreySokurenko, Business Development Director at InfoWatch Group discusses the set of technologies the company has in its arsenal in this crucial fight.
Eyeing partner led growth - 24
ShailendraSainani, Sales Director, Enterprise Business Group, Huawei Technologies ME discusses the vendor’s commitment to partner enablement and profitability.
Changing realities - 26
Toni El Inati, Regional Sales Manager - Middle East & Africa at Barracuda Networks speaks about the changing realities of network security and Barracuda’s consolidated approaches
Insight
The Case for “Chief Everything Officer” - 28 The CIO’s role is changing from cost-cutter-in-chief to cloud broker and chief innovator writes Konstantin Ebert, Director of Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa, NetApp
Redefining networks - 30
Ken Cheng, Brocade CTO and VP of Corporate Development and Emerging Business at Brocade discusses how Enterprises can turn the Network into a Platform for Innovation
Regulars
News Bytes Eyetech Stats & Trends
Published by: JNS Media International MFZE
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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
StorIT and Huawei hold Event on Data Management StorIT announced that their joint event in Dubai with Huawei titled ‘Data Management Opportunities’ for their channel partners was a success with a significant number of resellers attending the inaugural event. Senior executives from Huawei and StorIT were present at the event. “These events are platforms where our partners from across the GCC get to know first-hand about Huawei’s latest innovations in enterprise-level storage technology, meet personally with senior executives of the company, understand their plans and channel programs for this region and become a part of Huawei’s reseller network,” says Manju Mathew, Marketing Manager, StorIT Distribution. “One of the key pillars of our 2014 channel strategy is to provide the right training and support network in order that our partners can be empowered to offer our technologies and solutions to enterprises across the region. These events give us the perfect opportunity to reach out to regional channel partners through StorIT’s network,” said Peng ZhiFang, Regional Channel Director, Huawei Enterprise, Middle East.
4 | July 2014
Veeam Cloud Connect unveiled Veeam Software announced Veeam Cloud Connect, part of the new Veeam Availability Suite v8, which will be generally available in Q3, 2014. The new functionality gives service providers a direct pipeline to benefit from the Veeam ecosystem, which includes over 100,000 customers. Veeam customers get a fully integrated, secure and efficient means to move backups to an offsite backup repository managed by the service provider of their choice, but without the upfront capital investment of an offsite infrastructure. “To ensure complete data center availability in the event of any disaster, Veeam recommends that IT follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of data on two different kinds of media, one of which is offsite,” said RatmirTimashev, President and CEO of Veeam. “Veeam Cloud Connect enables IT to fulfill the offsite requirement without having to invest in offsite infrastructure or management, and presents new opportunities for service providers and Veeam resellers to build recurring revenue, offer additional services and establish relationships with new customers.” Both current Veeam Cloud Providers (VCPs) and new Veeam service providers can leverage Veeam Cloud Connect to grow their customer base and recurring revenue streams. Setup only requires a single server and takes less than 10 minutes, providing all the infrastructure management capabilities a service provider needs to offer an offsite repository service to Veeam customers.
Dimension Data Launches Enterprise Mobility-As-A-Service Dimension Data, the USD6 billion global ICT solutions and services provider will launch Enterprise Mobility-as-aService (EMaaS), signalling its intent to provide a suite of cloud-based end-user computing services on a global basis. EMaaS establishes the platform for the Group’s future initiatives that will see Dimension Data announce increased functionality and feature sets that assist enterprise clients to deal with their rapidly changing end user computing requirements. Dimension Data’s EMaaS offering is an integrated enterprise mobility management service that provides organisations with the ability to deliver comprehensive policy-based, device-independent, mobile device management, mobile expense management, integration to the enterprise and underpinned by true cloud principles of automation and consumption-based commercials. Ettienne Reinecke, Dimension Data’s Group CTO and Group Executive, End-user Computing says, “The launch of EMaaS is an important step for Dimension Data as it marks the establishment of the platform that we will use to rapidly evolve to deliver enterprises with a suite of services that addresses their emerging user-centric end-user computing requirements.”
News Bytes
Sophos strengthens Management Team Sophos has promoted Thomas Thoelke to the new Territory Manager for Northern and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (NEEMEA). Prior to this, he was Sales Director for Eastern Europe and Nordics. In his new role he will be responsible for recruiting and enabling Sophos partners in the NEEMEA region. Focus is the establishing of effective sales structures to support the ongoing growth of Sophos in that region. Sophos CEO Kris Hagerman says, “Thomas Thoelke has demonstrated the ability to adjust to different cultures and partner requirements across a large and diverse number of countries. He has been a key driver of our success in NEEMEA and brings a passion for performance and results with an ability to both start new businesses and effectively manage existing relationships.” Thoelke said, "I believe Sophos has a huge and growing opportunity to capture sizable market share. The 'mega trends' of cloud, mobility, virtualization and big data all represent growth opportunities for Sophos and our partners, and I'm thrilled to be part of the team."
6 | July 2014
Exclusive Networks wins F5’s EMEA award for distribution Exclusive Networks has been awarded as the Distributor of the year award from F5 during the 2014 Agility Partner Awards for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. Presented at F5's Agility customer and partner conference in Copenhagen, the awards recognise F5 partners from across the EMEA region that have excelled in delivering the benefits of F5's Synthesis architectural framework to customers as they seek to redefine application delivery in the face of challenges around mobility, security, cloud and SDN. Commenting on the news Fariborz Boustantchi, CEO of Exclusive Networks Middle East said, "It's a fantastic achievement to have won recognition from one of our strategic vendor partners and we're delighted to receive this award. This award testament to our continued investment and development along with F5 Networks in the high potential Middle East market.
Imation focuses on growing Nexsan Storage channel Business Imation has announced accelerating global channel momentum and growth in its Nexsan storage business. Since purchasing Nexsan in January 2013, Imation has launched several popular product offerings and further enhanced its comprehensive channel program, making it even easier for partners to sell and implement industryleading storage solutions for customers worldwide. As a result, Imation has rapidly increased the number of partners in its Storage Solutions Channel Program by 25 percent over the past year. “Our channel partners are essential to our success, and these strong growth figures are a testament to their unique talents as well as the deep relationships and tight collaboration we have with them,” said Ian Williams, group president of tiered storage and security solutions at Imation. “We give our partners an edge in the market, delivering cutting-edge products and services to their customers and growing their bottom lines. We look forward to continuing these efforts, and ultimately delivering even more leading storage solutions that solve real business problems to the market.”
News Bytes
Aptec introduces IT solutions to Kuwait partners Aptec, an Ingram Micro company, organized a Solutions Forum for reseller partners in Kuwait last month. The event was held in Sheraton hotel in Kuwait City and saw gathering of more than 100 people from reseller community, representing more than 70 IT reseller companies, mostly senior executives and owners. Aptec invited top vendor speakers to present at the event. Reseller community in Kuwait was excited to hear the latest product and technology updates from Aptec vendor partners: Cisco, NetApp, Microsoft, Veeam, D-Link. The Forum delivered an intense series of well-run, informationrich speeches and discussions, and a lively, business-oriented networking environment between sessions. The agenda for the event was to embrace a focused range of topics relevant to the current evolution of latest technologies in Big Data & Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Networking, Servers & Storage, Enterprise Software, forming Advanced Solutions to help resellers to address requirements of the current IT market.
8 | July 2014
Sophos signs ComGuard as VAD Sophos has appointed ComGuard as its new Value Added Distributor for the Middle East. According to the terms of the agreement, ComGuard will promote and distribute Sophos’ complete range of security solutions including its network, endpoint and server security solutions through its strong reseller network across the region. With its sign-up with Sophos, ComGuard will be able to offer its customers a wider range of products and tailored solutions in line with its suite of complementary offerings. In addition, Sophos will benefit from ComGuard’s local presence and market expertise, allowing the security vendor to increase its market reach and growth opportunities in the region. “We are happy to sign on Sophos, which is a global leader in IT security and data protection. Our focus is to bring Sophos’ superior solutions to our highly skilled reseller base and support their own customer development initiatives with our pre sales, post sales, market development, and training and vendor certification services. Therefore from our partners’ perspective, there is immense scope to benefit from Sophos’ wide range of product suites and to exponentially increase the business by signing up with a single and reliable brand. We look forward to working closely with the Sophos team to increase their footprint in this region,” said Ajay Singh Chauhan, CEO, ComGuard.
Brocade sees increased partner accreditation Brocade has seen a 69 percent increase in all partner accreditations, largely driven by interest in the Brocade Certified Ethernet Fabric Professional (BCEFP) level. Introduced in 2013 as the company’s highest level accreditation, Brocade has seen more than a 1,500 percent increase in BCEFP certifications in the past six months. This high level of interest is consistent with the recent finding that more than 60 percent of the channel believe fabric networks will be "standard" or "very common" in data centers by 2020[i]. John Mitchell, Head of Channels, EMEA, Brocade commented: “With many legacy networks now beginning to show their age, businesses are increasingly looking for technology partners to help them deliver next-generation innovation, applications and services. At Brocade, we have designed our accreditations to help our partners seize this opportunity, working with them to build the technical and sales expertise they need to meet the growing demand for emerging technologies such as Software Defined Networking, Ethernet fabrics and cloud.” The Brocade Certified Network Engineer accredited partner base has also seen significant growth in the past six months with new accreditations up by more than a quarter across EMEA. The growth in accreditations follows a major drive from Brocade to help its partners improve their technical expertise. The company updated its Alliance Partner Network (APN) Program earlier in 2014 to enable partners to deliver next generation SDN and Ethernet fabric solutions to market. The company has also recently launched a series of webinars and Partner Academies on emerging technological and market trends.
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News Bytes
Dell brings Flash to mid-tier storage Dell intends to bring its high-end storage capabilities to mid-sized deployments with the creation of a new series of full-featured, enterprise storage arrays. Dell also shared details of its growing softwaredefined storage (SDS) ecosystem and plans to broaden its portfolio with new Dell converged server and storage appliances. The new Dell Storage SC4000 Series arrays demonstrate Dell’s intent to bring full-featured, enterprise-class storage to costefficient, high-performing, mid-tier solutions. According to Dell, with these new arrays, customers can achieve all-flash performance – costing up to 72 percent less than competing pure flash arrays1 – or a highly cost-efficient combination of high-end flash performance and low-cost disk storage all in one array. The storage array series joins Dell’s customer-driven, enterprise data center portfolio of solutions. “The Dell Storage SC4000 Series is redefining the economics of enterprise storage, offering the advanced capabilities of larger-scale enterprise storage and outstanding price for performance to help customers with mid-tier storage needs become more competitive,” said Alan Atkinson, VP and GM, Dell Storage. “While Dell continues to make huge strides in evolving our storage portfolio with industry leading value propositions for customers seeking innovative SAN technology, we’re also supporting organizations opting for a revolutionary approach to data management by growing our portfolio of software-defined storage and converged solutions.”
10 | July 2014
Oxygen and RedSeal Networks partner Oxygen, a Secure Mobility Value-Added-Distributor (VAD), and RedSeal Networks, a leader in network infrastructure security management have partnered to provide customers in the region with RedSeal Networks security risk management solution providing an end-to-end visibility and control to prevent cyber-attacks. RedSeal, a continuous monitoring solution helps security professionals discover and remedy infrastructure security gaps in their networks before hackers can exploit those gaps to launch cyber attacks. It also gathers the configurations of all the network devices: firewalls, routers, mobile device controllers and load balancers, building a virtual model of the network by analyzing how the rules on all of these devices work together to defend business assets. Khalid Laban, CEO, Oxygen said, “RedSeal Networks provides an integrated platform that fills security gaps within its customers’ network infrastructure. RedSeal has also extended its security risk management capabilities to visualize and monitor access policy for wireless network controllers. Support for wireless network controllers extends visibility to constantly changing and elusive Wi-Fi endpoints. With the rise of BYOD initiatives it can be critical to monitor additional endpoints and ensure that access to critical network assets is monitored.
Global Distribution conducts SolarWinds Product Training Global Distribution FZE, an authorized SolarWinds distributor in the Middle East, recently conducted its first Value Added Reseller Technical Enablement Training in Dubai. Twenty Value Added Resellers from the UAE were invited to join the Technical Enablement Training on the award-winning SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM). Key partners such as ThinkSoft, ALMOE, SEVEN SEAS, GRIDZ MIDDLE EAST, CNS and many others joined the full day session. "Training is an important element to make any Vendor and Technology Enablement Program a success. We are very fortunate to have a “New Horizon” Computer Learning Center, one of the largest independent IT training providers in the UAE, in the same building. It made it easy for our trainer to conduct the training in a state of the art classroom," said Mario M. Veljovic, VP Solutions MENA at Global Distribution. “SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is an affordable, easy to use product that offers robust network performance monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities,” said Peter O’Connor, vice president of sales, EMEA, SolarWinds. “Seeing Global Distribution take the initiative to train its channel partners will allow SolarWinds to reach more customers across the Middle East region and further grow the number of active users in the region."
News In Detail
T
he Integrator Awards, now under the banner of the Integrator ICT Champion Awards, was held at the Oberoi hotel, Dubai on the 10th of June at a Gala winners ceremony. The Integrator Awards were launched last year to recognize outstanding achievements in key categories representing the value side of the ICT industry. This is in parallel to the VAR COC Awards that saw its 9th edition held at the Meydan hotel in March. These awards are now being consolidated under the common banner of 'The ICT Champion Awards'. The award winners were chosen through a polling of votes from industry participants during a 3 week long online survey, hosted on www.varonline.com and winners were decided on the basis of maximum votes polled. There was a great participation from the industry in the voting process. The vendor nominees were shortlisted initially on the basis of top names in specific domains and among them the active ones in this region were then requested to send in their nominations for relevant categories of the survey. For distributor and integrator categories, the names were shortlisted on basis of known activities that have been broadcast over the year as well as past communication of the editorial team with those companies.
Integrator Awards applauds the champions Cloud Computing vendor of the Year
Microsoft
Virtualization Vendor of the Year
VMware
SMB Storage Vendor of the Year
NetApp
Enterprise Storage Vendor of the Year
EMC
SMB Networking Vendor of the Year
D-Link
Enterprise Networking Vendor of the Year
Cisco
Unified Communications Vendor of the Year
Avaya
Video Conferencing Vendor of the Year
Polycom
Data Management & Analytics Vendor of the Year
SAP
Disaster Recovery and Backup Software Vendor of the Year Symantec Client Security Software Vendor of the Year
Kaspersky Lab
Network Security Appliance Vendor of the Year
Dell
WAN Optimisation Vendor of the Year
Riverbed
Power Solutions Vendor of the Year
APC by Schneider Electric
DCIM Solutions Vendor of the Year
Manage Engine
Enterprise VAD of the Year
Aptec, an Ingram Micro Company
SMB VAD of the Year
Redington Value
Networking VAD of the Year
Westcon Group
Security VAD of the Year
Comguard
UC Infrastructure VAD of the Year
FVC
Storage VAD of the Year
StorIT
Information Security Specialist VAD of the Year
Spire Solutions
KVM solutions VAD of the Year
Wave Tech
Emerging VAD of the Year
FDC Provalue
Visionary VAD of the Year
SNB
Managed Services Provider of the Year
Dimension Data
Networking Integrator of the Year
Alpha Data
Storage Integrator of the Year
CondoProtego
Telecom Integrator of the Year
Prologix
Security Integrator of the Year
Paramount
Software Solutions Integrator of the Year
Finesse
Emerging Integrator of the Year
IBT July 2014  |  11
Feature | Enterprise Storage
Operations Per Second) storage performance. Virtualization and demands of cloud computing are further accentuating the need for Flash storage arrays in enterprise data centers. According to Pure Storage, a vendor focused on enterprise storage Technologies, there are similar trends in all regions of its business including MEA and therefore a growing demand for Flash arrays. The company’s distributor in the region, Global Distribution FZE has already commenced Partner recruitment and enablement, both Technical and Sales. Steven Rose VP EMEA Pure Storage says, “In the virtualized datacenter, it is now commonly I/O performance that limits server consolidation ratios, not CPU or memory. These bottlenecks can affect customer satisfaction and slow down business processes. Further, Virtualization has the effect of multiplexing multiple logical workloads across a Steven Rose VP, EMEA Pure Storage
stack, the legacy storage based on traditional HDDs is mostly designed for sequential I/O. When a multitude of applications and services are competing against the resources of a spinning disk storage array the response times gets higher and higher and the disk array struggles to keep up as result of bottlenecks caused by the disk contention. Christian Putz, Vice President-EMEA Channel Sales at Violin Memory, a leading provider of all-flash storage arrays and appliances delivering application solutions for the enterprisesays, “Flash technology allows to run random workloads without having backend contention, and specifically speaking, the Violin Memory Flash technology provides sustained, predictable and sub-milisecond latencies for any kind of random workload (even with a huge component of
A Flashy outlook Flash continues to gain traction throughout the storage landscape as the technology removes several bottlenecks of commonly I/O performance
F
lash storage in the enterprise segment is gaining ground for very obvious reasons. Reduced costs of Flash memory are making it conceivable to have more data stored on Flash arrays. Several bottlenecks in traditional enterprise data center storage have caused an acceleration towards flash storage arrays as a general trend in data centers globally.Leading vendors including EMC, Hitachi, IBM and
12 | July 2014
so on have added flash drives to their existing arrays. With application performance and availability top priority for Businesses, Flash helps deliver reduced data processing times and faster application service uptime. Keeping more active content on SSD arrays helps retrieve and deliver that data much faster. This is more in the case of critical applications that need high IOPS (Input/Output
single physical I/O path. The greater the consolidation achieved through virtualization, the more randomized the physical I/O requests become. And random I/O is the Achilles heel of the rotational disk drive, because seek and rotational latency dominate transfer times 20 to 1.” While Virtualization randomizes I/O as a variety of IO workloads are run together against the storage
writes). With Violin Memory Flash technology running mixed workloads results in no I/O penalty and allows to fully virtualize business critical applications, sustain high performance for all virtualized databases and applications and fully adopt VDI deployments because of an increased VDIs/core ratio. Last but not least, Violin Memory Flash technology dramatically reduces the impact of
overcommitting resources, which typically occurs in this space, and allows to even run more VMs per host with low latency storage.” According to Steven, while the demand for IOPS is growing, the supply is actually shrinking because the I/O rate to a single hard drive has been roughly constant while the capacity of a hard drive doubles every 18 months or so. This means that their performance per GB is actually declining. Therefore Flash is poised to have a disruptive effect on the enterprise storage market by applying solid state storage to tier 1 applications in the data center. He adds, “A solid state storage solution based on flash removes these bottlenecks because it has no seek time, no rotational latency, and is equally fast on random workloads as on sequential ones, he says. Flash can accelerate virtual server and desktop deployments while affording higher consolidation and greater efficiency. Flash can also accelerate SQL and NoSQL workloads without partitioning or changes to the application.With flash memory, any block of data can be fetched in nearly constant time. This means that applications can be designed to expect sub-millisecond latency no matter what the I/O stream (random or sequential) or data distribution. Also, Solid state storage uses 10x less power and space than rotational hard drives, allowing users to substantially expand capacity in place. Further, with all flash arrays, customers spend much less time planning and
tuning their arrays to remove bottlenecks.”
Flash all the way Vendors are delivering hybrid arrays that include Flash and hard drives as well as all flash arrays which contain multiple flash memory drives instead of hard disk drives. Industry experts suggest that deployments must take into account use case scenarios. For instance, typical application workloads will see a considerable improvement in performance as well as savings in power, cooling etc with marginal inclusion of flash technology. Therefore, the hybrid approach works out as a viable option to accelerate workload performance. However, there are also application scenarios that demand dramatic improvements in responsetime performance (latency) or high IOPS which are well taken care of all Flash array options. All-flash arrays have been designed from the ground up to work with flash media unlike traditional arrays that have been built to work with the relatively slower spinning hard drives. Christian says, “All Flash is one of the fastest growing markets in IT infrastructure. Nowadays, real-time data access and operational efficiency are the new norms and IT forces are starting to drive a transformation of the datacenter pushed by the demands of Business Critical Applications, full Enterprise Virtualization adoption, Data analytics, etc. “ He adds, “Flash storage is a proven and mature
Christian Putz VP, EMEA Channel Sales Violin Memory
technology and we are seeing Tier 1 apps and virtualization driving adoption of flash arrays. VDI, Transactional databases, Data analytics, ERPs, and Cloud initiatives are being moved towards an All-Flash storage to make real-time data access and operational efficiency become a reality: a tremendous boost in performance with dramatically reduced response times allows not only guaranteeing the future business growth pace, but it also provides higher consolidation ratios, to be able to fully embrace business critical application Virtualization, to reduce over-provisioning, to reduce licensing costs by increasing
compute node utilization, and an impressive datacenter footprint reduction.” Agreat example of the impact of Flash instead of legacy hard disk drives is in a Virtual Desktop environment. One of the biggest challenges VDI presents to storage is the variable and spikey nature of IO requirements throughout the day. Typical use is write-heavy (often 80/20), but boot storms and anti-virus scans introduce huge read spikes. Overnight maintenance tasks (patches, recomposes) introduce even more heavy write bursts. You need storage that keeps up with it all without sacrificing end-user experience the way a caching solution can. This July 2014 | 13
Feature | Enterprise Storage
is another great example of where flash really outpaces hard disk drive based hybrid arrays. “Many VDI pilots go well– until it is time to scale-up the deployment and move into production. That's where too often deployments hit the IO wall – exceeding the IO capabilities of traditional disk storage and requiring expensive additional storage purchases which blow the VDI ROI case. Pure Storage scales seamlessly from pilot of a few hundred to 1,000s of users, all with non-disruptive incremental capacity and resiliency expansion. If all the benefits of VDI(security,
14 | July 2014
consolidation for managent, etc.) can meet or exceed the performance of local laptop performance, then more and more customers will consider to move to Virtual Desktop.” Salil Dighe, the CEO at Meta Byte Technologies,a regional partner for FusionIO, that was recently acquired by SanDisk claims that the region has been slow and cautious in its adoption of Flash storage as they haven’t seen significant gains from traditional Flash storage options available from different vendors. He says, “The Middle East region is a followers market. The other parts of the world have already tried to utilize
The transition in effect The transition from flash arrays is bound to accelerate. This would suit the growing virtualized environments as Flash helps customers eliminate bottlenecks of applications delivery in virtual
environments.So will hard disk drives have a place in the data centres in the long term? Responding to that question, Steven says, “In some areas such as deep archive, or areas where performance isn’t a requirement, then hard disks may be here to stay for some period of time.But with the pace of innovation and focus on the flash industry, its anyone’s guess as to how soon even large footprint slow hard disk drives might be replaced by SSD(solid state drives). Consider that in early 2014 the standard Enterprise All flash array SSD was 512GB and by the beginning of 2015 this could be 2TB per SSD and you can see why we could be rid of hard disk drives much faster than most Enterprises anticipate.Therefore we recommend highly that all customers when making their storage refresh plans consider the benefits of an All-flash approach to storage.” Combining the speed of flash SSDs with the capacity of HDDs has enabled faster access to hot data, while keeping cold data that is not critically needed on high-capacity HDDs. The Flash manufacturers are emphatic that the trend is bound to accelerate. “We clearly see flash memory as the Tier-1 storage for the enterprise datacenter, as it needs to be offer the highest sustained performance with the lowest possible latency while keeping the lowest cost per I/O. And this is actually starting to be a reality for Violin Memory customers. Traditional hard disk based storage will be still the preferred solution for reference
Laurent Binetti, VP & GM EMEA Channel Sales, Dell
Salil Dighe CEO Meta Byte Technologies
flash storage arrays and have not seen much benefit in terms of performance increase or IOPS. For the investments vs performance the gains are minimal hence now they are turning towards what is known as Flash on PCIe. One such product is FusionIO which provides significant throughput in terms of IOPS. Today many of the customers prefer FusionIO due to its flexibility in supporting various scenarios be it increasing the IOPS on a standard tier1 server to server virtualization or to provide significantly high VDI and VM densities on the same servers.“ PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) based solid-state storage has better performance than server-based SATA, SAS or Fibre Channel (FC) solid-state drives because of the direct connections. He adds, “If you are using a disk controller to write on hard drives whether flash or non-flash the bottle neck is still the controller. The difference can only be significant if you use Flash as a memory tier. FusionIO uses Flash memory in its best suited architecture that is flash on PCIe, meaning CPU has faster access to data. As a result the CPU is efficiently utilized and can process many more operations or support more connections.”
data as it needs to be capacity optimised and needs to offer the lowest possible cost per GB (at the expense of inducing a high cost per I/O),” says Christian. According to him, the cost benefits of Traditional disk based storage needs to be relooked as traditional disk storage offers the best possible cost per GB but the worst $/ Transaction ratio compared to Flash. So price and cost is still a concern when all the variables are not properly set into the equation. He adds, “Nevertheless, Flash storage is evolving very fast and the fact is that Violin Memory´s technology is even exceeding Moore´s law: flash density and performance is doubling every ~16 months. Violin Memory´s unique intellectual property is leading
the market by continuously developing the next generation of flash technology. This will guarantee continuing the same pace of doubling or even quadrupling the capacity and performance, and when combined with additional data efficiency mechanisms like compression and de-duplication this results in many PBs of Flash with dozens of millions of IOPS per Rack with a lower CAPEX/GB than performance disk. “ According to Dighe, Cost is definitely a big concern and a bottleneck. In order to take advantage of Flash in the most limited budgets, enterprises must look at different architectures and not go by legacy storage providers. They should consider hybrid storage which allows enterprises to take benefit of both Flash
as well as HDD’s and can outperform any standard flash enabled enterprise storage in a single appliance. He says, “Definitely we see customers replacing hard disk and standard enterprise storage with flash technology provided they are able to deliver high performance in a small hardware infrastructure footprint. For example, FusionIO has proved recently that they can achieve 1.1 Billion IOPS using 8 standard tier one servers with one FusionIO drives in each server leading to a quantum leap in terms performance and acceleration, which has never seen before.” Pure Storage claims that a number of customers that have completely eliminated their legacy hybrid hard disk drivebased arrays in exchange for All Flash Arrays.
“We continue to engage with the thought leaders in many of our Enterprise customers that are seeking advice in terms of planning to eliminate hard disk from their data centres because of the many benefits of All flash storage arrays.Thanks to data reduction techniques such as compression and deduplication implemented by Pure Storage, flash has already become the preferred choice of business critical applications, and that trend is increasing. Nearly 50% of all flash storage for Pure Storage is made up of database applications because of the ability to get data reduction 3-10X. “ So there it is. Flash enabled datacenters are likely to be one of the major shifts on the IT Infrastructural roadmap.
July 2014 | 15
TechKnow | EMC
Through a federated approach, EMC is laying out the road to the new era of computing which is now being increasingly referred to as the third platform of IT, a term originally referred to by IDC. Habib Mahakian, Regional General Manager, Gulf and Pakistan, EMC discusses the new areas of focus.
Getting to the Third Platform What is the third platform about? In the early years of the industry, we went through the Mainframe era wherein we had a few applications and thousands of users. Then we moved into the clientserver era wherein we had thousands of apps and hundred of thousands of users. With the introduction of social Media, mobile computing etc, there is a lot of pressure on the current infrastructure which may not be able to accommodate the big push of data. The four trends, namely mobile, cloud computing, Big Data and social networking comprise the “third platform” of IT as IDC defines it. The third platform will be enabled to handle millions of applications and millions of users. Earlier, typically there was the
16 | July 2014
structured database type of information coming in but now unstructured data is coming and you need an elastic and agile platform to address the burst of applications and users. Today even kids are users of applications thanks to the tablets and smartphones and so we need the shift to a new architecture. Discuss what the EMC federation is all about? The EMC federation comprises EMC II, VMware, Pivotal and RSA that collaborate towards enabling the emerging '3rd platform' of mobile, cloud, big data and social. This federation is leading the industry on the road to the third platform. This enablement will take place
Habib Mahakian Regional GM, Gulf & Pakistan EMC
on different fronts. For instance, while Virtualization started out with server Virtualization, it is now heading into network, storage etc and the datacenter. VMware which is 80% owned by the EMC federation, leads the federation’s hybrid cloud and software-defined data center initiatives. On the other hand, Pivotal which is 100 % owned by EMC, is focused on next generation application development and will focus on bringing the Third Platform to the enterprise. EMC II (EMC Information Infrastructure) focuses on storage infrastructure that is being redefined with software defined storage. Further, we need trust about secured infrastructure, which is where RSA comes in and enables identity access
management and actionable insights into security threats.
Are rollouts of such emerging third platform technologies unfolding in the region? We have implementations already in the region. Also when you look at trends like e-governance for instance, three countries in the region, namely the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are well ahead. Pivotal will play a huge role in these three countries and enabling the smart services that Smart cities will need to be able to come up with for the public. If you need to manage roads for instance in a smarter way, in real time, you need a platform equipped to provide the realtime analysis and similarly to do analysis of social media, you need to have the necessary platform. The second platform of IT is not equipped to provide such solutions. How do the different entities within the federation collaborate? VMware is within the federation but works independently. There are several coupled solutions between EMC and VMware like the hybrid cloud announcement recently. Pivotal is 100% owned by EMC but some of its solutions have also been adopted by IBM and the cloud foundry – so it is becoming the de-facto platform of the next wave of applications. EMC II has storage, data protection, infrastructure and security with the RSA unit that is within EMC.EMC II is the biggest revenue generator within the federation and we will continue strongly by bringing out the next wave of products that will support the whole federation. For example the ViPR, a software-defined
requirements. Whether they are Banks, insurance companies etc, they need to be able to offer realtime solutions. The traction is there. That is we need more data scientists today to go out and meet these customers, map their requirements and help us design those solutions. Flight trackerapps for instance tell you in realtime how planes are moving and you don’t need to check with your airlines when the flights will arrive. A lot of applications in Business are changing to accommodate for the shift. Customers are aware that who lead today will prevail. If you lag behind, you will be out of Business.
"The EMC federation comprises EMC II, VMware, Pivotal and RSA that collaborate towards enabling the emerging '3rd platform' of mobile, cloud, big data and social. This federation is leading the industry on the road to the third platform."
storage solution that abstracts, pools and automates the storage infrastructure are the kind of solutions that will connect the dots when it comes to developing a solution framework for the third platform. The EMC federation supports open platforms. We don’t limit the customer to buying from one stack of solutions. So our software define storage platform supports even third party storage arrays. What are the strong verticals for EMC in the region? The major three industries are telcos, Banking, public sector. We are seeing good traction for mid-market solutions as well. The surveillance and security solutions are seeing good growth across the industry. What is EMC’s focus on mid-market customers? We recently announced the launch of VNXE 3200 midrange unified storage solution whose attributes are efficiency, security and agility. This meets the purpose of small and medium customers. We are working with service providers also to provide solutions to small and medium sized Businesses. Do you see traction for Big Data Analytics deployments? A lot of customers are realizing that they need to have Realtime analytics to be able to meet business objectives. Regular IT solutions aren’t enough to give Businesses the edge in meeting customer
Discuss your partner program focus? The Business Partner Program (BPP) which replaces the Velocity channel program empowers and supports business partners in their current market space while also providing the tools they need to succeed in the dynamic “3rd Platform” that’s characterized by mobile, cloud, big data and social. The way we had partners classified previously was on basis of products and that suited the second platform. Now with the third platform, it is based on solutions. While each company in the EMC Federation will have their own program, a lot of solutions will be cross track solutions. Training points from pivotal for instance can be used with EMC because we want to encourage solution selling for the third platform. We intend to be more flexible to make it easier for partners. It will be effective 1st of January 2015. We announced so that partners can be ready to meet new program requirements. July 2014 | 17
Cover Feature | Virtualization
Virtualization’s next phase The next leg of the journey is to port mission critical workloads to virtualized infrastructure.
C
onsolidation and automation of their IT infrastructures are what customers are seeking to make their Business processes and services more effective and virtualization has been a means to that. To take the process further, Virtualization must extend to the domain of the mission crucial Business applications. Historically, the challenges in moving Mission critical applications to virtual infrastructures have been about high availability, predictable performance and security primarily. There are however solutions available that help customers
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tide over these challenges by testing and validating infrastructure performance as well as troubleshoot issues that arise in the test phase. While Virtualization deployments in the region are no longer confined to only the commodity workloads, the instances of virtualizing mission critical workloads are still in the early stages but are showing an increase. Most of the Virtualization deployments continues to be limited to servers and systems. Feras Abu Aladous, Manager, Systems Engineering, Services & Support at Brocade
says, “Many Enterprises in the region are targeting virtualization of up to 90% of their servers and systems, to increase Server’s utilization efficiency, increase mobility, orchestration agility. A reduced number of physical servers require reduced space and cooling inside the datacenter which leads to cost savings as well.” Companies in the region are definitely starting to virtualise business critical applications at a rapid rate opines Gregg Petersen, Regional Director Middle East & SAARC at Veeam Software. He adds,
“In some instances we are seeing banks deploying on a virtual workload, however the Middle East region is in the infancy stages of this compared to USA and Europe. But, there is definitely a huge move towards Virtualization of these core applications.” Operational agility is a key reason driving Businesses to head into the next phase of virtualization. The next leg of the journey is to port the more difficult workloads to virtualized infrastructure. “We believe most of the technical barriers to virtualization of these more difficult workloads have already been resolved, and it is already becoming mainstream to virtualize across the board. We are seeing different factors driving the virtualization of these database and “big iron” workloads though. In the first phase of virtualization customers were focused on consolidation of “easy workloads.” For this next phase, they are much more focused on operational agility and speed of time-to-market. So IT departments that virtualize all of their workloads tend to do so because they want to offer a cloud utility experience to their lines of business – this is no longer just about asset cost avoidance,” says Aaron White General Manager, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, Hitachi Data Systems. Over the past few years, other hypervisors have gained ground while VMware’s vSphere still dominates by far in terms of x86 server virtualization infrastructure with Microsoft a distance second. Hyper-V from Microsoft has constantly improved and added more features to compete with VMware and gain market share while there are other competitors including Citrix’s XenServerthat carries no licensing charge, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH) etc that have smaller market share. The focus has however shifted away from hypervisors to innovations around the Management layers above the hypervisor. Aaron says, “We have started to see them, but this tends to be within System Integrators and Service Providers’
landscape rather than in the traditional internal enterprise IT. The reason for this is a “leveling-up” of the capabilities of the hypervisor. So whereas in the past there was clear white space between ESX, the leading hypervisor, and Hyper-V/OpenStack, we have now seen that the hypervisor layer is becoming commoditized over time. And customers are starting to focus more on the management layers above it. We tend to see customers introducing at a “second hypervisor,” because they are looking at leveraging the merits of a specific management ecosystem, rather than because the specific hypervisor brings differentiation. Enterprises mostly stick with one virtualization vendor to reduce cost of operational expenses but that is beginning to change.Customers are looking for best functionalities as some workloads do perform better on some hypervisors vis-à-vis others. Greg says, “We are witnessing many cases where customers order Veeam Software – both hyper-V and VMware in large quantities. This tells us that customers are utilising the best of both worlds. Generally, we see a lot of production environments on VMware and hyper-V and this is where Veeam plays a crucial role because we have the ability to provide the best of both worlds. In addition we have also seen a large amount of deployment in business critical applications with hyper-V and VMware, once again proving that multi-hypervisor environments are becoming more common.” Multi-hypervisor environments
Feras Abu Aladous Manager, System Engineer Brocade
bring along its own set of challenges and therefore there could be customers sticking with one hypervisor. However, cross platform management will be a reality that needs to be taken in stride for those who are willing to look at the best of the options. Aaron argues, “The downside of that is that managing two hypervisors increases your operational overhead – you need to have two sets of operational and integration processes. This is why it mainly occurs within the System Integrator space - they have the organizational economies of scale that can make it cost effective. We have also seen this drive an interest in converged platforms such as Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform. This platform takes care of all the workflow required to integrate and manage everything from the hardware elements July 2014 | 19
Cover Feature | Virtualization
up to the hypervisor. As it supports both VMware and Hyper-V, it frees customers up to focus on business workflow “above the hypervisor” and is a key enabler for this new trend in Infrastructure as a Service.”
The datacenter
Gregg Petersen, Regional Director ME & SAARC, Veeam Software
In the datacenter Server virtualization has seen widespread adoption and continues to be the primary focus of virtualization efforts. With the increasing adoption of virtualized computing infrastructure, enterprises are able to run multiple servers on the same equipment, reducing the demand for additional servers. As a result, data centers are becoming smarter and supporting more users than ever before while requiring less hardware to do all of this. Feras says, “Virtualization is the major trend inside the data centers; and it’s
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expected that by the end of 2014 around 70% of Server workload will be virtualized, but Storage and Network virtualization is still very low.” Virtualization in other domains is still growing at a modest pace and would be the focus in the second phase. Virtualized infrastructure offers the potential for higher productivity, scalabilityand manageability compared to traditional computing which is what customers are in pursuit of as they allow virtualization to get deeper into their networks. Aaron says, “We would consider server virtualization to be pretty well advanced – we’re about 90% there, and are just about tying up loose ends with it. People are now looking to technical innovations in network and storage virtualization, as well as the management ecosystem to provide the next level of agility and efficiency.” Automation would be a key objective going forward in the datacenter.An effective virtualization strategy lays down the framework for more automation of regular tasks and this enables greater efficiency with available computing resources. Greg says, “There is a lot of buzz around automation in the datacentre at the moment. Over the last three years Virtualization has moved from 30 – 40% to 60 – 70%. Most of our customers are about 60% virtualised. As organisations become mature in Virtualization, automation will continue to become an important aspect for companies.” There are bottlenecks along the way for a wider adoption of virtualization. For instance, there are some very mature technology offerings in the Storage Virtualization space but significant differences between individual vendor strategies are slowing down adoption, believes Aaron. He comments, “Most vendors still sell separate storage virtualization appliances, whereas Hitachi has integrated storage virtualization capabilities into every enterprise storage array that we have sold for the last ten years. And our customers have now leveraged
this during several transition events to virtualize legacy assets and accelerate transformation. So we believe pretty strongly that Storage Virtualization just needs to be an integrated feature of every storage controller in order to gain broader adoption.” He also believe that applications are still too tightly coupled to physical storage assets and physical locations. Aaron adds, “This is the next wave of value-add from Storage Virtualization, and it is why we have invested in Storage Virtualization OS, which will enable us to run a common storage virtualization platform across all of our storage hardware containers. We also believe that customers will move to active/ active architectures and have introduced distributed Virtual Storage Machines which can live forever, delivering zero downtime during site disaster recovery and nondisruptive technology refresh.” On the other hand SDN (software defined networking) has still had very limited adoption and there are a lot of competing standards at the transport virtualization and management control layers. There are also strong requirements for a more integrated approach between the management frameworks for SDN and Network Function Virtualization. “We believe that the benefits in terms of total cost to provision new services are so substantial that we will see very active investment for these use cases in the short term within the SI and Service Provider space. Once this technology is proven in this arena it will become more common in tradition enterprise IT.
SMB adoption Virtualistion technologies suit growing SMB Businesses as well as the already large sized customers. In fact Virtualization helps dynamically scale up capabilities of a Business’s IT infrastructure and this is a trend seen in the case of companies who are looking to add more virtual servers. Greg says, “SMB clients are definitely adopting Virtualization and we can see this with our customers. We are seeing
companies who have up to 10 servers and instead of putting it on physical servers they are recognising the need to virtualise. It’s a trend that is rapidly increasing and more and more customers are realising the value in adopting Virtualization.” There is better understanding among SMB Businesses that Virtualization will help them not only manage costs of upgrading IT infrastructure but also improve critical tasks like data backups and high availability. Feras says, “SMB market is considering virtualization more than ever. SMBs are trying to get more performance and flexibility out of their existing server resources, considering the rising cost of managing physical data centers. Server virtualization improves disaster recovery and high availability allowing administrators to take VM snapshots, and recover from existing snapshots, and reduces the number of required servers to implement solutions. However, SMBs have limited exposure to Virtualistion benefits within their networks and largely confined to only server consolidation. Enterprises on the other hand are more focused on optimizing the benefits across and therefore adopt innovations faster. Aaron says, “We’ve seen large enterprises that are much more virtualized than SMBs. In fact, the most virtual organizations are the ones who are process-driven, focused, and committed to achieving efficiencies as a primary goal. Those who lag behind in the virtualization landscape the most are those who have taken some individual areas of the business, and run the IT departments for those sectors almost as pet projects. In addition, the SMB space tends to focus on Server Virtualization whereas SI’s and large enterprises have clear additional use cases that they can enable by deploying network and storage virtualization layers as well.” Server virtualization will be the key driver of Virtualization market but for customers who have already gone through a first phase of virtualization, they will have the opportunity to look at
Aaron White GM, MENA & Turkey Hitachi Data Systems
tapping into other innovations from the Virtualization industry. Aaron says, “Servers and to a certain extent storage virtualization too have seen growth. For networking it’s a bit of a different story – they’re not necessarily about consolidation they’re about programmability. Networking efficiency comes from bringing complex systems into a virtual, manageable space, and alleviating IT departments dependency on hardware segmentation and re-config.” With virtualization, the utilization rates of the installed hardware has a huge jump. The ROI benefits are seen in a short time. Greg says, “With server Virtualization the benefits are seen instantly. Storage and network Virtualization are yet to gain traction in this region compared to other regions. But, it’s just a matter of time before network and storageVirtualization takes off, because it’s cost effective and far more efficient.” While most virtualized workloads are
either server or desktop workloads, there is an increased interest in virtualizing network and application delivery etc. Feras says, “Sever virtualization is the major trend in Data center virtualization and very mature, on the other hand network and storage virtualization is still under evaluation by enterprises, and not widely implemented.” In summary, there are applications that are still ring-fenced from virtualization and while that percentage may begin to come down each year, even outside of that the scope for virtualization remains high. So while there is a huge variance among customers, the number of those that have virtualized the entire stack – server, storage and network is increasing rapidly. Further, while virtualization may not be seen as essential before adopting cloud computing, cloud deployments in virtual environments deliver optimized results and hence a key consideration factor for Businesses looking to adopt cloud services. July 2014 | 21
TechKnow | InfoWatch Group
confidential, non-confidential, etc.) a DLP system can be installed. The set of monitors is installed on all data transfer channels and starts monitoring all data circulating inside the company and transferring outside the company perimeter. If there is any attempt of confidential data transfer outside the corporate network the system will either block the process or alert information security officer. Post-DLP stage includes investigation of data leak incidents with help of InfoWatch Forensic Storage. It’s a specialized storage containing an archive of all information flows in the organization, including incidents of security policy breach and leakage of confidential information; this storage is a legally relevant evidence base for internal incident investigation and court proceedings.
Andrey Sokurenko Business Development Director InfoWatch Group
Battle lines drawn Beyond firewalling and endpoint security is perhaps the biggest future security battleground, Data Protection. Andrey Sokurenko, Business Development Director at InfoWatch Group discusses the set of technologies the company has in its arsenal in this crucial fight.
Discuss briefly a typical process of securing client information from leakage/theft In brief the process of data leakage prevention consists of three main stages which we call Pre-DLP, DLP and PostDLP. Pre-DLP stage includes deep data analysis and categorization (with help of InfoWatch Auto-linguist engine and
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consultancy of InfoWatch linguists), since 80% of data in modern companies are unstructured and spread over different documents, files and storages; companies simply do not know which of their data are confidential and therefore can’t protect them effectively. After all data classification into several categories of confidentiality (strictly confidential,
Who’s at risk of data leakage in the Middle East and why? Of course, the companies with most valuable information are most at risk. First of all they are companies which have big volumes of personal data (mobile operators, big online retailers, authorities working with citizens, etc.) Then there are companies which possess different trade secrets (manufacturing, oil and gas, etc.) Banks, big insurance companies, governmental structures also operate highly sensitive data. We can add to the list any other company which considers its information valuable. Discuss InfoWatch’ssolutions for protecting data, networks or endpoint clients InfoWatch has a set of information security solutions among which are InfoWatchEndPoint Protection (protection of enterprise endpoints from a variety of threats),InfoWatchAppercut for securing company’s applications from backdoors and vulnerabilities, InfoWatch Targeted Attack Detector aimed at detection and prevention of attacks the target of which is frequently large corporations, government agencies and defense
companies. But Discuss the future of course the "The companies with most valuable information of information key InfoWatch are most at risk. First of all they are protection in the expertise lies in age of Big Data, field of Data Loss companies which have big volumes of personal Cloud, Internet of Prevention since data. Then there are companies which Things and other we are already for possess different trade secrets" emerging trends more than 10 years I believe several in the market and trends will have accumulated solutions. All our partners undergo dominate in field of information a huge experience of DLP systems InfoWatch certification and so get the security in future. First of all they successful integrations in hundreds status of InfoWatch Group certified are different privacy protection of companies in different industries partners. technologies. For example when a worldwide. InfoWatch Group organizes special mobile device user wants to stay channel events in the region and actively private he will just need to press some Are regional firms taking the concept button and immediately switch to of information protection seriously and takes part in events held by our partners. We stand for active cooperation with the “private mode”. Newsecurityto investing in the same? the channel and contribute our budget, olswillfollownewcommunicationmea Since the number of data leaks resources and expertise into establishing ns especially in the matter of private worldwide grows increasingly and ME reliable partner chain in Middle East. space protection. being no exception, we see the growing Another promising trend is further demand for data protection solutions in Discuss the challenges of information development of content and behavior the region. InfoWatch is working in the protection brought on by increased analysis technologies including for Gulf region for several years already and mobility and BYOD the purposes of detecting malicious from our clients and partners experience The main challenge BYOD brings to the insiders in corporate environment at an we can say the companies understand network is a security risk, where the more early stage. Today’s security systems the severity of data leakage problem and convenient and mobile the technologies normally work in “catch after the the necessity for reliable protection and are, the less they are secure. There are incident” mode. But crime prevention so are ready to invest. three main challenges BYOD brings to the is much more important than cure of network. effects. Until an employee illegitimately Discuss briefly your partner strategy/ The first, among other challenges, copies client database we never know channel programme in the Middle East is the loss of mobile devices. The he is malicious insider. But every man InfoWatch Group actively invests into major vulnerability in this case is the has his personal characteristics and if it good channel partners in Gulf region human factor where people fail to use suddenly changes dramatically it may to build a reliable partner chain. Our the necessary security tools, such as be alarming for his chief. With help of strategy for Middle East includes three encryption, on their mobile devices. At content and behavior analysis systems key elements – efficient regional the same time they constantly forget or it will be possible to detect such representative, several successful misplace their gadgets in public places. offences at a preparation stage, thus partners in the region and active The second challenge is the vague limit proactive systems for protection against marketing promotion. We have a strong between personal and corporate data on insiders are a promising field. desire to support and invest into good private mobile devices of employees. This Besides, development of security partners and are open for winning data should be used and stored separately systems against targeted attacks will be cooperation with the channel. on a private device, thus companies in demand. Current antivirus solutions We have an extended program for require special policies for BYOD regarding are good in protection against mass partner technical education: InfoWatch personal and corporate data processing. attacks (mass viruses and phishing, technical experts regularly come to ME The last difficulty is intellectual etc.) but they are unable to combat countries to educate partner technical property protection. Employees often sophisticated targeted attacks aimed at teams providing them with the deepest regard the results of their intellectual specific organizations (often strategic knowledge and expertise in data leakage work as their private property, where as a sites and big corporations). Obviously prevention and other information security matter of fact, it is usually the company’s one should invent specific protection areas and thus with extra competitive property. tools providing higher level of security. advantage in terms of selling IT security
July 2014 | 23
TechKnow | Huawei
Discuss how your product portfolio focus for the enterprise segment? The Huawei enterprise Business group has three major solution groups. Among these, our IP product portfolio includes IP based systems like switching, routing, wireless and security. The IT product portfolio includes servers, storage, datacenter products. The UC&C portfolio includes voice and video products – IPT, video conferencing, tele-presence all come under this. All products are included in our distribution business from the enterprise segment. Please elaborate on Huawei’s reach into enterprise channel? We are at a stage where we are expecting a large growth in this segment. We are focusing on how the channel can become trusted advisors of our solutions into that space. Our entire engagement will pivot around four pillars. First, we will rely on our strong focus. That focus is going to become a strong ring for us in knowing who stays in and who stays out. Second, enablement will play a key role. We will look to ensure that partners are duly empowered to become trusted advisors as I mentioned. Profitability of the partners is the third element. That will ensure that they stay committed. Our channel program will bring clarity as to how this is driven. In a nutshell, Focus, enablement, profitability and a strong channel program will be the key aspects of our engagement with the enterprise segment channel. What are the kinds of partners who will suit your focus? We are looking at partners who specialize in verticals and technologies and can add value to our Business. The market is wide enough – there is the government sectors, large enterprises and then the commercial segment. Not all our products and solutions fit into each and every element. We need to be careful in selecting partners who cover a vertical. We are assessing the market space in this area. We are talking to some large
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Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group focuses on the enterprise infrastructure, enterprise communications, data centers, and industry applications. The Enterprise Business Group also provides cloud computing-based data center and enterprise applications. The vendor is committed to partner enablement and profitability as its key strategies to make strong inroads in the enterprise segment. Shailendra Sainani, Sales Director Commercial Business, Enterprise Business, ME region at Huwaei discusses. Shailendra Sainani Sales Director, ME Region Huawei
Eyeing partner led growth systems integrators who cover enterprise spaces like enterprises, public safety, oil & gas, and the large government sectors. We are talking to many mid-market players who have good reach into the space and are good with mid-market solutions. How will you ensure the balance between widening market reach as well as ensuring partner profitability? We will have a good number of partners which is sustainable from the profitability point of view. We are focusing on achieving a consistent progress. At the end
of the day, it is going to be one Huawei approach – for instance, the enterprise partners will have strengths that we would like to utilize in the commercial space. The final number of the partners will depend on market size and our requirements. We have four tiers- we have tier one partners called VAP( value added partner) and this type of partner engages directly with us. Then there are distribution led partners whom we categorize as Gold, Silver and Registered. Typically, between VAP and Gold, we will look to have not more than 3-4 key integrators. From Gold
for post sales to Silver, we will resources. There look to 15 in these "The channel is looking for a change and the channel is a hands on markets like the has great confidence in Huawei to be the change training wherein UAE and Saudi Huawei assists the Arabia. There is because of the vast product portfolio that we offer. We partner in the first the much wider cover end to end solutions portfolio and there is no implementation space in the silver other vendor who has that range under one umbrella" scenario so that and registered the partner gets partner ecosystems, enabled on site. We where we will like also have certifications programs running. the distributors to increase our channel Apart from these, Stage 2 is our Discuss your distribution and breadth, enabling as many partners as authorized training partner here and in geographical focus? possible to tap as many customers. At the Saudi Arabia. Certifications given out From an enterprise Business group same instance, we would want to ensure include sales Associate, Sales Expert, perspective, we cover from mid-market that partner profitability is taken care of. Network experts, design experts, to enterprise and in terms of the implementation experts etc. These cover territories that we oversee include GCC Do partners have any stake in the our key areas of focus. including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq and telecom Business? Afghanistan. Our distributors cover the Telecom is a direct Business and is taken How do you view the opportunities regional markets for us. As of today, we care of by the Carrier Business Unit. That in emerging technologies and what’s have Enterprise Systems, Huawei, Empa is a different engagement model over a Huawei’s value differentiation? longer period of time. The service model is and Stor IT. Optimus is specialized on UC, Definitely, there are opportunities in Empa on IT and Enterprise Systems is also different and we need to deploy our across the board and StorIT on storage. Our the market in areas like cloud, BYOD, own teams. VDI, Big Data etc and customers are partner program is across the region but looking for such solutions and there are focused on certain markets. We want to Has the partner program been implementations. We want to enable our enhance our partner program further and revamped and what have been the key partners in such emerging areas. We have take it to the next level. features of the refresh? some good cloud solutions. For instance, The channel is looking for a change There has been a refresh and one Huawei FusionCube is an IT infrastructure and the channel has great confidence of the aspects we focused on was platform based on an open and integrated in Huawei to be the change because of partner profitability. The focus was on architecture. It integrates blade servers, the vast product portfolio that we offer. differentiating our rebates program. We distributed storage devices, and switches We cover end to end solutions portfolio have created a model for our partners into its 12 U subrack. Distributed and there is no other vendor who has to use our marketing funds to create storage, a virtualization platform, and that range under one umbrella. From demand. We are giving rebates to cloud management software are also computing to storage, networking and the our partners on the basis of revenues generated, specialization basis and third on voice video IPT portfolio, we offer solutions factory installed which makes it an ideal product for a cloud provider or a cloud across. Marketing basis where we are supporting integrator. We have launched a product them on all their marketing initiatives. called OceanStor 9000, suitable forBig Elaborate on your enablement focus for There are two kind of funds used – one Data. Using a symmetric distributed the channel? is the Partner development fund which is architecture, the OceanStor 9000 We are selecting partners on basis of wholly funded by Huawei and the other delivers large-scale horizontal expansion solutions focus and verticals focus. Based is co-funded . The rebates program is capabilities, and a super large single file on these, we are enabling them. We offer therefore structured to ensure profitability system to provide shared storage for sales training for the sales teams from for partners while dealing with Huawei. unstructured data. resellers and equip them with product We have a rebate based program We are wrapping our products with a knowledge so that they can talk in detail for our distributors and this is classified solutions focus as well as a vertical focus. about the products Huawei offers and on a product basis. We are encouraging Partners are looking for profitability and understand the key selling points. We distributors to specialize and where we who cares for them. Our partner program enable the pre-sales partners where we see that a significant level of investment takes care of such aspects and today what focus more on transferring the technology is required, we will reward them on that we offer is one of the best in the industry. knowhow. The third area is certifications basis.
July 2014 | 25
Discuss broadly the primacy of redefining network security in a world made borderless? Essentially, the well-defined perimeter has disappeared. Instead, we have seen security and application delivery tasks merging together. Most internal traffic passes security devices and most security devices predominantly handle internal traffic. We call these zero trust environments. Application control capabilities featured in next generation firewalls were an important step, but the combination with traffic control and load balancing is what provides the actual value. Is Barracuda positioned as an end to end provider in network security? We have been pursuing a broad technology strategy for several years now. We strongly believe that modern IT infrastructures rely heavily on consolidated approaches instead of a large number of isolated specialised devices. This especially affects deployment options. Almost all our products are available as hardware appliances, virtual appliances and clouddeployed devices.This is an important element in providing comprehensive security in rapidly dispersing application and data architectures. Is it necessary to have a seamless integration between host based security and network security devices? Definitely. However, since BYOD is unstoppable, host based security moves a bit out
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Toni El Inati, Regional Sales Manager, MEA, Barracuda
TechKnow | Barracuda
Toni El Inati, Regional Sales Manager - Middle East & Africa at Barracuda Networks speaks about the changing realities of network security and Barracuda’s consolidated approaches.
Changing realities of focus and becomes a merely supporting part of a zero trust environment; whereas pervasive network security becomes the backbone of it. Do you also offer a centralised tool for managing and enforcing security policies across a network? We are especially strong in that area. Manageability is everything. Security only exists if you can be sure that your data and applications do what they should. We do not only provide central configuration management, but also put a lot of effort into visualisation and analysis of what exactly is going on in a network.
Is there reasonable awareness among customers from region about the perils of disconnected silos of security tools? The region has a history of an extremely fast adoption of IT and especially IT security in the early 2000s. Now many organisations have found out that despite having bought an impressive amount of security devices, they are struggling to operate them. Smart consolidation is a major trend in the region. Ten wellmanaged consistent firewalls provide more security than 20 different, but hardly managed ones. Discuss your approach to
Mobile device management? Discuss your new product SSL VPN 2.5 for mobile users? The SSL VPN 2.5 offers mobile users a platform to remotely and securely access networks and databases from anywhere. With the technology being compatible across all three major mobile device providers, iPhone, Android and Windows, this also opens up the opportunity for users to use other devices such as tablets to work effectively away from the office. This can be of real benefit to businesses if their staff are unable to make it into the office as it gives them the option to access files securely from home or on-the-go.
Point2Point | Capgemini
Discuss your focus in the region? We need to focus on 2-3 key areas in the region to begin with as we are late entrants. That is the only way to build a Business model successfully. We are trying to bring differentiators to our Business here. We bring our strengths on both sides of the region. We have our large global delivery centers back in India and we have European customers. That is a strength that customers are liking about us. Which are your strong verticals of focus? The strong public sector capabilities that we have demonstrated with European customers is a big plus for us in gaining entry and the trust of the customers in this region. We have established expertise in the telco segment in Europe with the strong delivery capabilities.We have had significant contributions in enabling smart cities, smart countries and some of that knowledge we have brought into this region, especially in the UAE.We are trying to bring in the right talent, values apart from the cost advantage of the India delivery centre. We are strong in utilities and oil & gas. We are strong in retail and the large private infrastructural sector. We see opportunities in the BFSI sector as well.
Capgemini is one of the world's foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services and and has partnerships with several leading Technology vendors. Kishor Chitale, CEO – Local Business Services, India & Middle East at Capgemini speaks about the company’s focus in the region. Kishor Chitale CEO, Local Business Services, India & ME Capgemini
The Orchestrator
How are you engaging the customers here? As relatively late entrants to the region, we have in the past engaged with customers once they had already decided where they are headed. Our success was in ensuring delivery of that technology. Now we are seeing engagement with customers from the stage of defining their next Technology architecture with the government, given the digital onslaught that is happening.
integration, aggregation and orchestration. We may not have large datacenters or such solutions, but we can help orchestrate the journey into the cloud services for instance. we have a large focus on Big Data and are equpped to deliver Big data projects. We are focusing on entire process enhancements and re-enhancements of the processes that are critical to the future of the digital enterprises.
What are your strengths as a consultant and integrator? Capgemini has strong expertise in service
What are the challenges you can helps enterprise address? Most of the large enterprise are struggling
with IT that is not able to scale up to meet Business challenges. That is where our consulting expertise comes in as an added flavor to the IT side of it. We can bridge the gap between their IT and their Business services. We are a Technology agnostic global systems integrator with a strong consulting capability. We will not only provide advice to customers about the required Technology architecture but also stand by their teams to execute. We can execute the transformation journey and the implementation part. This is the differentatior we bring to the region. July 2014 | 27
Insight | NetApp
T
he IT industry is changing faster than ever, thanks to trends such as cloud, big data, and mobile applications. These new technologies are not only changing IT, they are changing business itself, forcing Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to re-examine their role and contributions in organizations. We’re going through another IT revolution now, driven not by a single innovation but by several. According to a 2013 Gartner report based on a CIO survey, mobile (70%), big data/ analytics (55%), social media (54%), and the cloud (51%) will be the technologies which have the biggest impact on the industry in the next decade. IT is changing the game and, suddenly, it matters more than ever. But what about the role of the CIO? Some still see their role as managing fleets of PCs, rooms full of servers, the networks that connect them, and the software they run. However, the new wave of innovation will make all that IT infrastructure a commodity, perhaps even a function of purchasing or facilities management. Infrastructure will go the way of the desktop computer, offering no competitive advantage and available off the shelf. To ensure the maximum return on investment for organizations, “More CIOs will find themselves leading in areas outside of traditional IT,” according to the Gartner survey.“They are starting to assume responsibility for hunting for digital opportunities and harvesting value.”
28 | July 2014
This is reflected in the changing status of the job. Already, the majority of CIOs (67%) have substantial leadership responsibilities outside IT, a significant contrast from just five years ago when almost half of CIOs had no responsibilities outside of IT.
Creating Business Value When IT permeates almost every aspect of modern business and competitive pressures increase, the traditional money-in, servicesout approach isn’t good enough. What matters is delivering value to the business. With IT budgets coming under attack since the recession, the CIO’s mantra has been “doing more for less.”Even when companies do invest in new technology, they don’t always reap the full reward; in fact, they only realise less than half of its potential (43%) on average. Today, to make the most of new technology available, the CIO’s role is changing from costcutter-in-chief to cloud broker and chief innovator.CIOs can be pathfinders and navigators for businesses in the new all-digital era. There is a strong case to be made for investment in IT to exploit emerging mobile, big data, social media, and especially cloud technologies. As their roles transform, CIOs are also looking for more business responsibility. Recent PWC research indicates thatmore than half of all CIOs expect to be a full partner in meeting strategic objectives. After all, the end goal is not to align IT to the business,
Konstantin Ebert Director, MEA & Eastern Europe NetApp
The Case for “Chief Everything Officer” CIOs can be pathfinders and navigators for businesses in the unfolding era writes Konstantin Ebert, Director of MEA, Eastern Europe, NetApp but having IT drive business forward by using its prowess. The opportunity for CIOs to add value and competitive differentiation to the business increases exponentially as investment shifts from lowvalue, commodity IT to highvalue technology. Currently, Gartner estimates that only 16% of IT budgets are spent
on new opportunities, while a whopping 63% is spent running existing IT infrastructure. Imagine what would happen if these numbers were reversed. What could you do for your business if your role expanded? Perhaps it’s time for the chief everything officer.
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Insight | Brocade
Ken Cheng, Brocade CTO and VP of Corporate Development and EmergingBusiness at Brocade discusses how the Middle East Enterprises can turn the Network into a Platform for Innovation Ken Cheng CTO & VP Brocade
Redefining networks A
magician pulls a rabbit from a hat and the audience is captivated by the spectacle, but the real magic happened behind the scenes-a sleight of hand. When you stream a movie to your smartphone, it's the user experience that likewise captivates. But the real magic happens in data centers around the world, where more than a petabyte of information is transferred every minute
30  |  July 2014
through an endless patchwork of servers and endpoints. The audience clamors for new tricks, but the magician has grown old. There's no doubt we've come this far thanks to an IT backbone built on legacy network architecture, but this brave new world of tablets, smartphones, and connected everything has outgrown the network infrastructure that powers it. Increasingly,
this is becoming evident for businesses in their day-today operations. Ask your IT administrator the first word that comes to mind when you say "network," and chances are they'll respond with "bottleneck." The data flowing between data centers today has little in common with the data of ten years ago. It's not just the fact that there's a lot more of it-it's gone from thin
to rich, usage requirements have changed from static to dynamic, and connections have shifted from fixed to mobile. The new normal is driven by expectations of a constant stream of new services delivered cheaply and on demand. Traditional network architectures simply are not designed to meet these needs, and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), telecom carriers, and enterprise IT departments in the Middle East are starting to feel the pinch. It's clear that something fundamental needs to change if we're to continue down the path of innovation that has defined the digital era. Keys to the Network of the Future For decades, data centers have scaled simply by adding physical capacity. This more or less worked until recently, albeit with the caveat of huge amounts of waste generated in the form of server sprawl and underutilized resources. But in the age of cloud computing and ubiquitous mobility, this model is rapidly approaching a point of diminishing returns. Sure, you can deploy a 2 TB flash cache to address bottlenecks, but for how long, and is it really practical in the first place? Can businesses in the Middle East afford to waste resources like this. No, they cannot. The solutions to the biggest challenges hampering the data center will require
new products both hardware and and services, the software solutions, "Together, NFV and SDN are creating highly likes of which the not hardware automated and more efficiently architected networks world has never alone-but also a that deliver next-generation apps and services with seen, we need mental shift by ease and speed-we're talking about deployment in to do a better the IT departments minutes, not days or weeks" job of powering themselves. Many the products of today's senior and services we ITDMs cut their NFV, meanwhile, foundation that businesses already have. CSPs that began teeth back in the 1990s, when allows administrators to need to drive change. Like deploying SDN and NFV last legacy network architectures virtualize core network building a house, you cannot year are already beginning to were first conceived to fuel a functions. Instead of relying do anything without stable realize benefits, and carriers connected world, and often on a proprietary device for foundations. as well as enterprises are attitudes are still stuck in vital tasks like firewalling, Fabrics provide this in the expected to begin rolling out this era. However, today's administrators can offload the data center, and they enable SDN and NFV solutions in users need a more agile and function to a standard x86 greater innovation across the 2015. responsive network to support server. Virtualized functions rest of the business. a cloud-based world. As a Together, NFV and SDN are can even be deployed in the Breaking the Network result, ITDMs need to change cloud. creating highly automated and Status Quo their attitudes, challenge more efficiently architected All of today's business the status quo, and embrace networks that deliver nextFuture-proofing Network challenges provide a unique what users need today. This generation apps and services Architecture opportunity for IT departments means adopting a new way with ease and speed-we're So how can businesses in the to be change agents and of thinking. Although this talking about deployment in Middle East build a platform challenge the status quo. is never easy, and not all minutes, not days or weeks!for innovation in the data They need to continually ask ITDMs will make the change, enabling businesses to stop center? One key lesson "Why?" Why is the business they must do so in order to worrying about how to deliver that can be drawn from the following the same old succeed. their products and services issues currently plaguing strategy of adding boxes to and get back to innovating data centers is that it is very deal with different problems? Fabrics, SDN and NFV at the new ones. difficult to predict the needs of Why are we locking ourselves Forefront of Innovation Often misunderstood, SDN future products and services. into proprietary standards that For example, IT departments and NFV are complementary, That's why networks should inhibit flexibility and choice? need to redefine the way but not the same. For consequently be constructed Why are our users bemoaning data is distributed, and instance, SDN leverages with an eye toward open the ongoing lack of innovation? transformational architecture the flexibility of new standards and interoperability By addressing these models like fabric-based communication protocols like of hardware that provides a questions, IT departments in networks, Software OpenFlow to give network blueprint for innovation. the Middle East can begin to -Defined Networking (SDN), administrators unprecedented The most meaningful evolve network architectures and Network Functions control over the path of benefit of a fabricand to better meet the needs Virtualization (NFV) are network packets. If network software-based network of today's applications and leading the charge. Fabrics traffic begins to bottleneck, architecture is in the long services, broaden the way increase network utilization by administrators can redirect term-the freedom to they can positively impact 200 percent and reduce OpEx the flow to a different switch, innovate and the ability to the business, and lay the by more than 50 percent, and it's done entirely in cost-effectively deliver new groundwork for products while delivering zero-touch software. Routing rules can applications and services and innovations yet to be provisioning that radically be set ad hoc, or they can be in minutes instead of days imagined. In essence, they simplifies network deployment entirely automated through a or weeks. But before we can bring the magic back to and improves efficiency. This centralized interface. can look ahead to creating the data center. provides the agile physical
July 2014  |  31
eyetech
Trinergy Cube Overview: Emerson Network Power has announced that its nextgeneration Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), the Trinergy Cube, is now available throughout Europe, Middle East and Africa. Emerson Network Power continues to deliver the best-in-class data centre solutions which provide its enterprise data centre and colocation customers with the highest performance levels businesses have come to expect. The Trinergy Cube is designed to meet the needs of enterprise-class data centres, offering unparalleled flexibility and scalability to evolve with today’s everdemanding business trends. With high power density cores, optimised efficiency at partial load conditions and hot scalability, it delivers adaptability currently unavailable anywhere else in the market. Five years on from the launch of the original ground-breaking Trinergy solution, Emerson Network Power has worked closely with customers to develop another innovative industry-leading UPS, going beyond the power revolution and enabling customers to stay ahead of business demands for availability, capacity and high efficiency. Key features: • Trinergy Cube can reach up to 3 MW in a single static UPS, enabling extraordinary capacity levels previously only achieved by rotary UPS solutions. • The extreme high-power density within the single unit ensures that data centre managers can make the best use of available floor space, overcoming space constraints and ever-rising real estate costs, as well as optimising TCO. • Its design is extremely flexible, as Trinergy Cube is scalable up to 20 MW in a parallel system. • It can be easily configured in L-shape or back- to-back to suit the layout of a wide range of installation spaces.
FAS8000 Series storage systems Overview: NetApp FAS8000 Series storage systems are designed to adapt faster to changing business needs while delivering on core IT requirements for uptime, scalability, and costefficiency. Our most powerful hybrid storage array, the FAS8080 EX (PDF) is built specifically for business-critical workloads requiring massive performance (up to 4M IOPS), multi-PB scale, and leading flash integration— including all-flash configurations.
Key features: • Leveraging a new high-performance, multi-core architecture and self-managing flash acceleration, FAS8000 unified scale-out systems boost throughput and decrease latency to deliver consistent application performance across a broad range of SAN and NAS workloads. • Simplified management and proven integration with cloud providers let you deploy the FAS8000 in your data center and in a hybrid cloud with confidence. • Nondisruptive operations simplify long-term scaling and improve uptime by facilitating hardware repair, tech refreshes, and other updates without planned downtime. • Proven storage efficiency and a 2x increase in price/performance over the previous generation reduce capacity utilization and improve long term ROI. • FlexArray storage virtualization software lets you integrate existing arrays with the FAS8000, increasing consolidation and providing even greater value to your business.
32 | July 2014
Dell Storage SC4000 Series Overview: Supporting customers seeking high-performing and cost-efficient storage arrays at a smaller scale, the new Dell Storage SC4000 Series arrays will debut with the enterprise-class Dell Storage SC4020, a 2U, 24-drive storage area network (SAN). These enterprise-class arrays leverage technology from both the Dell Compellent and EqualLogic family of products, incorporating full-featured Dell Storage Center 6.5 array software and the EqualLogic iSCSI software stack. The new series supports both Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity and is designed to offer the same advanced capabilities as larger SANs in a solution sized and priced for mid-sized deployments. The Dell Storage SC4020, which can scale to more than 400 terabytes of raw capacity, supports a wide range of workloads for organizations, across all industries and sizes, seeking a high-performing, midsized SAN entry point or a remote or branch office storage solution. For example, the Dell Storage SC4020 can host up to 10,000 Microsoft Exchange 2013 user mailboxes in a single 2U SAN with 24 hard disk drives or can achieve nearly 120,000 IOPS (input-output operations per second) with less than one millisecond latency for OLTP or mixed workloads. Key features: • Unprecedented value with a highly efficient SAN and compact size, making it ideal for mid-sized needs or remote or branch office deployments • Enterprise-class performance with dual controller capability and SAN optimized for all-flash or hybrid SSD/HDD configurations • World class intelligence with advanced levels of automation and control to auto-tune the customer’s storage environment • Advanced software capabilities such as real-time automated tiering, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and centralized management for multiple local and remote SANs • Perpetual software licensing that enables customers to pay only once for software features, even across hardware upgrades
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
Overview: Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the latest major release of the company’s flagship platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 not only lays the foundation for the open hybrid cloud and serves enterprise workloads across converged infrastructures, but it also pushes the operating system beyond today’s position as a commodity platform. Built to meet modern datacenter demands along with next-generation IT requirements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 powers the spectrum of enterprise IT, from application containers to cloud services. Answering the heterogeneous realities of modern enterprise IT, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 offers a cohesive, unified foundation that enables customers to balance modern demands while reaping the benefits of computing innovation, like Linux Containers and big data, across physical systems, virtual machines and the cloud – the open hybrid cloud. Key features: •
Enhanced application development, delivery, portability and isolation through Linux Containers, including Docker, across physical, virtual, and cloud deployments as well as development, test and production environments.
• Significant file system improvements, including XFS as the default file system, scaling to 500 TB. •
Cross-realm trust to easily enable secure access for Microsoft Active Directory users across Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux domains, providing the flexibility for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to co-exist within heterogeneous datacenters.
• Powerful and secure application runtimes and development, delivery and troubleshooting tools, integrated into the platform and container-ready.
July 2014 | 33
Stats & Trends
MEA BI and Analytics Software Market grows
B
usiness intelligence (BI) and analytics software in the Middle East and Africa (MENA) totaled $217 million in 2013, an 11 percent increase from 2012 revenue of $196 million, according to Gartner, Inc. The BI and analytics market consists of consisting of BI platforms, corporate performance management (CPM) suites, analytic applications and advanced analytics. The BI market in MENA slowed from a growth of 23 percent in 2012. There were a number of factors slowing the market in 2013. First the challenging macro had an effect. The Middle East and Africa grew only marginally faster than the worldwide growth rate of 8 percent, which breaks the strategic assumption that many of the large vendors have held for years that emerging markets are growing at a much faster rate. Secondly, confusion still reigns around how to best leverage
analytics on big data. Much big data investment happened outside traditional BI in experimental silos, infrastructure and services. Thirdly, growth in IT budgets is flat and IT-led traditional BI tools are over-bought. Therefore, some market share leaders targeting those constituents showed sub-market growth. In the top spot, SAP continued to have significantly higher revenue than any other vendor at $ 59 million with 27.2 percent of the market, up 16.7 percent from 2012.
SAS Institute experienced the highest growth among the top five vendors in 2013, with revenue rising 17.8 percent compared with 2012, to reach $27.1 million. On a segment level, BI platforms are showing a slow but steady shift in emphasis from reporting centric to analysis centric tools. Advanced analytics is also growing quickly, showing the increasing focus organizations give to predictive and prescriptive analytics.
Business Intelligence and Analytics Software by Segment, Worldwide, 2012-2013 (Millions of Dollars) Subsegment Analytic Applications and Performance Management BI Platforms
2013 Revenue
2013 Market Share (%)
33.5
15.5
33.2
1.1
119.3
55
105.7
12.9
2012 Revenue
2012-2013 Growth (%)
CPM Suites
47.7
22
43.1
10.6
Advanced Analytics
16.3
7.5
13.7
18.5
216.9
100
195.8
10.8
Total
Source: Gartner (June 2014)
Fortinet Reveals “IoT: Connected Home” Survey Results
F
ortinet released the results of a global survey that probes home owners about key issues pertaining to the Internet of Things (IoT). Completed in June 2014, the survey asked 1,801 tech-savvy home owners questions relating to the Internet of Things as it pertains to the connected home. These were the top findings: The Connected Home is a reality – A majority (61 percent) of all respondents believe that the connected home (a home in which household appliances and home electronics are seamlessly connected to the Internet) is “extremely likely” to become a reality in the next five years. Home owners are concerned about data breaches – A majority of all respondents voiced their concern that a connected appliance could result in a data breach or exposure of sensitive, personal information. Privacy and trust are concerns – When
34 | July 2014
asked about the privacy of collected data, a majority of global respondents stated, “privacy is important to me, and I do not trust how this type of data may be used.” Data privacy is an extremely sensitive issue – Relating to privacy, respondents were also asked how they would feel if a connected home device was secretly or anonymously collecting information about them and sharing it with others. Most (62 percent) answered “completely violated and extremely angry to the point where I would take action. Users demand control over who can access collected data – When asked who should have access to the data collected by a connected home appliance, 66 percent stated that only themselves or those to whom they give permission should have this information. Consumers look to their government for data regulation – Many respondents
(42 percent) around the world stated that their government should regulate collected data, whereas 11 percent said that regulation should be enforced by an independent, non-government organization. Device manufacturers are mostly on the hook for security – If a vulnerability was discovered in a connected home device, 48 percent of all surveyed agreed that the device manufacturer is responsible for updating/patching their device. The next looming battle: secure home routers versus clean pipes – A clear schism appears worldwide when homeowners were asked about how connected home devices should be secured. In nearly equal proportion were those who replied, “a home router should provide protection,” versus those who said, “my Internet provider should provide protection.”
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