ontents
Cover Feature - 18
A converged future
Editorial
Scaling vertical limits I
ntegrators have indeed engaged in several of the key sectors that have always been perceived to be at the forefront of IT consumption and adoption. They will do that on a broad basis, across a few while some may focus more deeply in a couple of sectors. The usual suspects in this region that are seen as high potential in terms of commitment to invest in IT are BFSI, government, oil & gas, Education and to some extent hospitality and healthcare. In this context, the uncertainty in the oil sector would have brought a slowdown effect on IT investments at the moment, at least until the sector gets back towards recovery. Being one of the larger segments, that has also had a spillover effect on some of the other verticals in terms of confidence. This could be a passing phase but nevertheless, it brings into question for every integrator doing large Business in Oil & Gas, whether any probable shortfall of anticipated IT investments by Oil & Gas companies can be offset by enhancing focus on other verticals like Logistics, real estate etc that might be faring better. Further, rather than going with received intelligence, integrators could also review how their Business has sized up in each vertical of focus over the past 2-3 years or so. If those Businesses have sized up significantly, do also look at how those customers were serviced and whether the portfolio of solutions targeting them was expanded. There could be more questions along the way and that could bring out some answers as to what verticals need more of time and focus. By making these slight adjustments, it could work wonders in terms of sales growth.
R. Narayan Managing Editor
Founder & CEO: Vivek Sharma Managing Editor: R. Narayan Art Director: Faiz Ahmed Sales Director: Alishan Zaidi Sr. Sales Manager: R. Subramanyan Sales Coordinator: Smitha Jithesh
Converged infrastructure promises to do away with many challenges of traditional datacenter architecture as it offers scalable integrated solutions
News in Detail - 12
Brocade to acquire Riverbed Technology’s SteelApp Business News Feature - 14
Thermal cameras gain spotlight
Once limited to military use, the cost of the technology has been dropping in recent years, while the number of applications for these devices has increased dramatically.
TechKnow
Store it all - 16
Sofocles Socratous, VP of Sales & Marketing for Seagate EMEA and Christian Assaf, Senior Sales Manager MEA, Seagate discuss trends that Seagate has adopted
Accelerating efficiencies - 22
Taj ElKhayat, Regional Vice President at Riverbed Technology discuss Riverbed’s focus on converged infrastructure solutions for Branch offices
Point2Point
Rising graph - 24
Kartik Shankar, Senior Sales Manager, StorIT Distribution discusses the highlights of StorIT’s growth over the past year
Fast-tracking growth - 26
Mario M. Veljovic, VP Solutions MENA at Global Distribution speaks about the company’s focus and initiatives
Insight
Keeping Your Business Continuity Plan Up-to-Date - 28
Tamer Saleh, Director of Operations, eHostingDataFort elaborates on 5 key steps towards enabling a BCM (Business Continuity Management) plan for Businesses
Simple Security is better Security - 30 Chester Wisniewski, Senior Security Consultant at Sophos discusses how small and medium-sized businesses can benefit from cloud-based security
Regulars
News Bytes Eyetech Stats & trends
Published by: JNS Media International MFZE P.O. Box: 121075, Montana Building 404, Zabeel Road, Near GPO, Karama, Dubai-UAE - Tel: 04-3705022 Fax: 04-3706639 Disclaimer: While the publishers have made every attempt possible to get accurate information on published content in this handbook they cannot be held liable for any errors herein.
News Bytes
Dimension Data to hire data center experts Dimension Data will hire an additional 300 data centre experts over the next 18 months. This is vital to the group’s ambition to quadruple its data centre business from USD 1 billion to USD 4 billion by 2018. In addition, Dimension Data also intends to make data centre-focused acquisitions to build out skills and drive scale in major growth markets. Steve Joubert, Group Executive of Dimension Data’s Data Centre Business Unit says the company’s success has always been based on the quality of its people. “Demand for our next-generaiton data centre skills and services sees Dimension Data growing faster than the market, and we need great people to help us continue this growth. As a provider of solutions and services, not an equipment manufacturer, we are dependent on the quality and skill of great people to help us deliver the best service to our clients. Dimension Data will be recruiting across Singapore, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, West and East Africa, the UAE, UK, Germany and the US. The Group is also building out central teams.
4 | March 2015
G4S wins recognition from Allied Telesis Allied Telesis has named G4S, UAE as their Innovation Solutions Partner, to recognize their valued contribution during 2014. The award was recently received at Intersec, Dubai by Shishirant Chandra, Director Operations, Electronic Security Solutions at G4S - UAE. Allied Telesis and G4S are working together to deliver a broad range of interoperable solutions and technologies that help customers to seamlessly connect their business with their voice, video, and data applications. “Allied Telesis network solutions are widely positioned in the Digital Video Surveillance sector across the globe, and we want to ensure our partners are leaders in this domain, and have full capabilities to carry out projects. G4S has shown great strength in this area, and are consistently investing in Allied Telesis training and certification of their engineers,” said Sabbah Khan, Regional Manager, Middle East – Allied Telesis.
Lenovo strengthens server portfolio in MEA Lenovo unveiled its ThinkServer family of products for the first time in United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Egypt, strengthening the company’s portfolio to become a one-stop solution provider for enterprises and small and medium-sized business (MSB) clients. Lenovo announced that ThinkServer will be launched in rest of Middle East & Africa within the next couple of months. The ThinkServer product portfolio includes Rack Servers suited for cloud deployments, database, or virtualization workloads, as well as Tower Servers designed to manage business’ file/print and point-of-sale workloads. Lee Allcorn, Enterprise Business Group Leader, Lenovo MEA said: “Lenovo is well positioned as a strong global contender in the enterprise and SMB market, offering customers complete end-to-end solutions, including storage, server, networking, and related software and services. The launch of ThinkServer in the region is a testament to our commitment to our clients in the country who desire exceptional performance, reliability, and easy-to-use tools and solutions.” ThinkServer Rack Servers launched include the ThinkServer RS140, a compact, entry-level 1U rack server with a purposeful design for small business or distributed environments. Other Rack Server models launched by Lenovo include RD350, RD450, RD550 and RD650. The ThinkServer Tower Server models launched by Lenovo include TS140, TS440, TD340 and TD350.
News Bytes
StarLink becomes Arbor Networks’ distributor StarLink has signed a Distribution agreement with Arbor Networks, the leader in DDoS Mitigation, Network Visibility and Advanced Threat Protection for service provider, cloud hosting and enterprise networks. StarLink will sell, install and support Arbor Networks products through its extensive network of Channel Partners to enterprise and government customers in the region. Mahmoud Nimer, General Manager at StarLink added, “DDoS attacks in the region are becoming more frequent, taking down networks, tarnishing reputations and impacting businesses. Arbor has solutions that specifically address the needs of the Middle East’s enterprises and service provider customers. We are excited to align Arbor’s best-of-breed technology with our Channel so that Partners can deliver the situational awareness, security intelligence, incident response and forensic capabilities that customers need to detect, mitigate and analyze DDoS threats.”
6 | March 2015
Polycom recognizes FVC for excellence FVC has been recognized with the Polycom Circle of Excellence 2014 Award as the EMEA Distributor of the Year at a special Awards Gala hosted by Polycom during TEAM Polycom 2015, the company’s annual partner conference, held in Orlando, Florida, USA, Feb. 9-11, 2015. Polycom recognized its top partners with its 2014 Circle of Excellence Awards recognizing Honorees that excel at incorporating value-added solutions and services which create lasting value for customers. These partners also demonstrated the highest level of expertise in implementing Polycom’s solutions, while delivering bestin-class performance and exceptional sales results. K.S. Parag, Managing Director at FVC, Polycom’s authorized distributor in Middle East & Africa, said, “We are honoured by this award and would like to take this opportunity to recognize not just our own team that works together with the Polycom team in the region but also all our authorized Polycom partners across the region that have been a strong contributor to our success. We will continue our commitment to enhancing our partnership with Polycom and look forward to many more successful years (and many more awards).” "The needs of the modern workplace are constantly evolving, so it’s critical for Polycom to have partners like FVC who can meet our customers complete business needs with transformative solutions today and into the future," said Mark Arman, Polycom Vice President of Worldwide Channels. "We congratulate FVC and look forward to supporting their continued success.”
emt partners with University to offer free online course for channel emt Distribution, the specialty IT security products distributor announced that its education and training arm, emt Academy has tied up with Australian’s Charles Sturt University (CSU) to offer free online course for its preferred channel partner on virtualisation. The online course capsule tailored to suits all the aspects of virtualization and it consists of in-depth study of virtualisation and the key advantages of VMWare and Microsoft virtualisation. The course Introduce virtualized data centers and will highlight the main components of the virtualized data centre. The course will focus on how to configure and manage data centre in Microsoft or VMWare respective environments. The course curriculum also includes creating virtual machines, virtual machine hardware, and virtual machine files, deploying a virtual machine. There will be a webminar from the faculty of CSU in Australia. “As a value added distributor, we wanted to enrich channel with specific skills and knowledge that led us to initiate emt Academy. This is academy is part of strategic vision plan for channel growth in the region.” said, Mohammad Mobasseri, CEO at emt Distribution. “We have always believed that imparting required knowledge, skills and education will empower channel to be more robust and healthy.”
News Bytes
Dell unveils new web-scale Converged Appliances Dell announced its second wave of Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances. These highly scalable integrated solutions help streamline the datacenter and now offer up to more than 50 percent storage capacity and twice the rack density to support customers deploying a wide range of workloads, including VDI, private cloud and big data. The new Dell XC Series Version 2.0 appliances offer customers hyper-converged solutions based for the first time on Dell PowerEdge 13th generation server technology combined with Nutanix software and Dell global services and support. The appliances integrate enterprise-class storage, compute and hypervisor resources into a single solution, and further expand Dell’s broad softwaredefined storage (SDS) portfolio. “We’ve seen strong customer interest in our debut Dell XC Series appliances, and our newest offerings substantially raise the bar,” said Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager, Dell Storage. “The new web-scale converged appliances add greater configuration flexibility and pack more performance and capacity into our 13th generation servers, making them even more compelling for customers looking to adopt a newer, integrated systems model for delivering IT to their organisations.”
8 | March 2015
Cybersecurity remains a top priority and concern in the Middle East Highlighting the increasing concern of securing information and minimising the impact of security breaches, the 3rd Gulf Information Security Expo & Conference (GISEC), the region’s leading I.T. security platform, will address key issues surrounding cybersecurity management, identity management and disaster recovery across susceptible industry sectors such as financial services, governments, oil & gas, I.T. and pharmaceuticals as well as in individual accounts. As the region’s largest and only I.T. security knowledge event, GISEC will be taking place at the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) from 26-28 April 2015. Showcasing over 150 exhibitors, GISEC is set to attract over 5,000 trade visitors from 50 countries, including Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs), who will learn how to develop cybersecurity strategies.
Growing Scale and Impact of DDoS Attacks Leading UAE IT decision-makers havehighlighted how distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are fast becoming one of the main business security risks across the country. In a survey commissioned by global Application Delivery Networking leader F5 Networks, 55% of surveyed UAE IT decision makers said they had endured a DDoS attack. The survey found that 27% claimed that recovery from a DDoS attack took a whole day, 46% said it took a few days, 13% a week, 9% a few weeks and 4% a month. 13% put the estimated cost of recovery as high as US $ 30 million, 31% put the figure at US$ 20-30 million, and 34% US$ 20 to 30 million. When asked what the “most disastrous” impact of a DDoS attack would be, 47% of respondents cited the impact on customers. 19% said it would be reputation damage and 14% believed it would be revenue loss. “DDoS attacks are a big problem in the UAE and they are only going to intensify as cybercriminals compete with each other to find new ways of causing disruption,” said Garth Braithwaite, Middle East Sales Director, F5 Networks. “DDoS attacks can affect businesses in many ways and attacks can cause damage running into many millions of dollars, permanently ruining a company’s reputation with everything from downtime to putting customer data at risk.”
News Bytes
Veeam achieves 40% growth in Bookings Revenue Veeam Software, releasing highlights of its FY 2014 results, reported total bookings revenue of $389 million, a 40 percent increase over the previous fiscal year. In addition, the fourth quarter of 2014 marks Veeam’s 28th consecutive quarter in which total bookings revenue has experienced double-digit percentage sequential growth. The release of the new Veeam Availability Suite v8 helped fuel these record results by creating a new category of IT solutions: Availability for the Modern Data Center. Veeam Availability Suite v8 introduces more than 200 new features and enhancements, including Veeam Cloud Connect, integration with NetApp and major enhancements in replication and disaster recovery. ”The modern business operates 24/7 and downtime is not accepted – ever – so business leaders are looking for technology partners that can help them deliver the AlwaysOn Business; Veeam’s success in 2014 clearly illustrates that we are delivering innovative availability solutions that solve real-life business challenges,” said Ratmir Timashev, CEO at Veeam.
10 | March 2015
Help AG achieves BlueTouch Certification Help AG has been approved as a BlueTouch Support Partner by Blue Coat Systems, Inc., a market leader in enterprise security. This allows the security specialist to extend 24x7 Level 1 and Level 2 technical support to regional businesses that leverage Blue Coat's market leading security, visibility and performance optimization technologies. Help AG boasts an over eight year partnership with Blue Coat and holds the status of Gold Partner. “We remain committed to addressing the complete life-cycle of our vendors' solutions. Our post-implementation service excellence has helped us establish long standing relationships with key enterprise and public sector customers in the Middle East who look to us as their trusted advisor and support partner,” said Stephan Berner, Managing Director at Help AG. “Achieving the BlueTouch partner qualification enables us to extend the same quality of expertise, reliability and availability that we deliver for other key vendor partners, across the entire spectrum of our Blue Coat solutions portfolio.” The company's dedicated support division, the Help AG Security Assistance Centre, is a benchmark support centre in the Middle East. All members of the team are fully certified on all the major vendor platforms that the solutions provider offers to its clients. Customers can avail of support via a comprehensive set of communications channels and are also provided access to a fully automated web-based support system.
Paladion Opens a New Global Security Operations Center Paladion Networks has unveiled their new Global Security Operations Center (GSOC), which is designed to provide clients from the Middle East region with the highest level of round-the-clock protection and services. Paladion expanded its GSOC hub with a new stateof-the-art facility in Bengaluru, India and linked the GSOC with existing regional Security Operations Centers (SOCs). Regional SOCs are currently located in Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Hanoi, Toronto and Herndon, and new centers are being setup in Doha, Dubai and Riyadh to provide a more robust local support. The existing SOC network provides real-time analysis of seven billion security events every day. This capacity would nearly triple with the new analytics powered GSOC expansion, taking the number of information security professionals to 400. Firosh Ummer, the Managing Director for EMEA at Paladion Networks, said, “Our GSOC initiative is equipped to analyse billions of events every day and protect hundreds of its customers regionally and globally from cyber risk. Apart from the Middle East and Asia regions,Paladion is also steadily growing its managed SOC business in North America and Europe. The GSOC network will help us expand and help new customers worldwide, while providing enhanced protection for existing ones.”
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News In Detail
B
rocade is beefing up its software, IP-based, data centre networking infrastructure portfolio by announcing its intent to acquire Riverbed Technology’s SteelApp product line of virtual Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) in an all-cash asset deal for an undisclosed amount. The deal is expected to close in Brocade’s second quarter of fiscal 2015 and then there will be a three to six month transition period during which customer support
sees a big future in softwarenetworking and the company now boasts an impressive software portfolio including virtual routing, firewall, VPN, SDN controller, and network visibility and analytics. It is now geared to assist organizations as they transition to the ‘New IP’ - a state-of-the-art, virtualised IP network. This new infrastructure provides a more dynamic, automated capability based on leveraging software and virtualisation. It
Brocade to acquire Riverbed’s SteelApp Business responsibilities and purchase order processing and invoicing will be handled jointly by Brocade and Riverbed. Once the acquisition is complete the SteelApp business unit will become part of Brocade’s Software Business Unit, led by Kelly Herrell, senior vice president. The deal is a win-win for both companies. The acquisition of SteelApp, a market leading virtual ADC advances Brocade’s leadership in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and enables more advanced solutions for the company’s data center and service provider customers. It is clear from recent acquisitions like Vyatta (virtual routing and firewall) and Vistapointe (virtual network visibility and analytics) that Brocade
12 | March 2015
allows customers to exploit best-of-breed technologies, based on open architectures and open ecosystems, and not be locked into any one vendor. For Riverbed, it is a continuation of its efforts to sell off non-core assets In October of last year the company’s SteelStore cloud storage gateway business was snapped up by NetApp for US$80million. “The decision to divest the SteelApp product line reflects Riverbed’s ongoing commitment to focus on businesses and opportunities that leverage our core competencies,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, chairman and CEO of Riverbed Technology. “Riverbed is focused on providing solutions that provide CIOs unparalleled visibility, optimization, and control in the hybrid enterprise, ensuring
Kelly Herrell Senior Vice President, Brocade on-premises, cloud and SaaS applications perform as needed.” SteelApp is one of the top virtual ADCs providing scalable, secure, and elastic delivery of enterprise, cloud, and e-commerce applications. The SteelApp product line controls traffic to and from applications and enables fast, reliable, and secure application delivery to users anywhere from the cloud or data center. The last Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers report mentions ‘the SteelApp products offer a rich and growing set of ADC capabilities, including content optimization and WAF security capabilities. The SteelApp ADC offers good integration with various cloud and SDN environments, and its micro-ADC Linux container provides for efficient, highly scalable ADC instances.’
ADCs provide application availability, acceleration, and security for users. This includes shielding them from interruptions due to bursts in demand, providing various optimizations based on application type, and facilitating access based upon specific policies. Deploying this functionality in software (vADCs) enables a dramatically better level of flexibility and cost, and aligns directly with Brocade’s NFV strategy. vADCs are also experiencing a much higher growth rate as compared to hardware-based ADCs with Dell’Oro a 30% CAGR growth for vADCs versus only 1% for hardware ADCs. “Brocade continues to execute aggressively to capitalize on the disruptive force of software in IP networking,” said Lloyd Carney, CEO of Brocade.
For more details please contact: Mr. Daniel Nargunam - Business Unit Manager Global Distribution FZE | Tel: +971 55 4090580 fujitsu@globalfze.com
News Feature | Axis Communications
T
hermal imaging cameras are playing a growing role in the world’s efforts to combat the spread of the deadly Ebola virus, with several countries around the world already deploying the technology at airports to screen high-risk passengers with fevers. In the Middle East, Qatar has already deployed the cameras at the Hamad International Airport, with several Asian and European countries said to be following suit as they attempt to prevent the virus from crossing their borders. Ebola has already killed more than 1600 people since breaking out in West Africa earlier this year. Marwan Khoury, Marketing Manager MEA for network surveillance company Axis Communications, says the heatdetecting camera technology could prove to be “a critical tool” in the fight against the disease. “Thermal imaging cameras look at people’s heat signatures, which means they are able to detect whether someone has a fever. This can be used to alert the authorities to someone who may have been infected with the Ebola virus if they have travelled through a high-risk area,” said Khoury. Thermal imaging cameras have been gaining in popularity in the UAE in the past couple of years. Once limited to military use, the cost of the technology has been dropping in recent years, while the number of applications for these devices has increased dramatically. These cameras have a number of advantages over conventional CCTV security cameras, including being able to detect threats in extremely low light or even complete darkness, and during unfavourable weather conditions like heavy fog, dust, excessive glare from the sun, or thick vegetation. Thermal imaging cameras work by recording images of the infrared radiation being emitted by the skin. The image produced by these cameras consists of a range of colours, with hotter areas shown in red, cooler areas appearing in blue and lukewarm areas in orange or yellow.
14 | March 2015
Once limited to military use, the cost of the technology has been dropping in recent years, while the number of applications for these devices has increased
Marwan Khoury Marketing Manager, Axis
dramatically.
Thermal cameras gain spotlight “Apart from airport security, we’re seeing a growing number of clients in the Middle East in areas like oil and gas, security, ports and large industrial complexes looking at thermal imaging cameras to complement their existing security networks,” said Khoury. “Although historically expensive in comparison to conventional cameras, new entrants to the market have made the technology more affordable. We are now seeing thermal imaging cameras becoming more widely adopted as a complementary technology to tackle a wide range of environmental factors and conditions.”
While thermal cameras are unparalleled in a situation of total darkness, they can also be an option in areas that are very difficult to illuminate effectively, for example a sea front, a harbour, or any other vast expanse of open water. Cameras that do not rely on light can also be the preferred solution in traffic situations, including railway tunnels, air strips or on regular streets. “All in all, thermal network cameras perfectly complement and complete a network video system, making sure that objects, people, and incidents are detected 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Khoury.
TechKnow | Seagate
Please elaborate on the rebranding? Sofocles Socratous: : The rebranding campaign includes our new corporate logo, which was revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. The rebrand of the company is to be seen as a trusted brand for all customer segments for their storage requirements. We want to be identified as a company delivering complete range of storage solutions. We offer hard drives, solid-state hybrid drives, SSDs, external storage products, recovery services, cloud services, and fully integrated cloud systems.
Store it all AT the partner conference earlier this year, Sofocles Socratous, VP of Sales & Marketing for Seagate EMEA and Christian Assaf, Senior Sales Manager MEA, Seagate pursued the agenda of meeting with their partners and apprising them of the opportunities in specific areas including surveillance. They discuss trends that Seagate has adopted to as well the opportunities that lie ahead
16 | March 2015
Do you see surveillance as a significant opportunity for Seagate? Sofocles Socratous: Surveillance is an important segment and opportunity and the Middle East is in fact one of the largest markets for surveillance as far as Seagate is concerned.This is also due to the regulations that have come into place with the phenomenal growth in infrastructure.We have been working in this segment for a long time now and we are now offering the seventh generation drives. Seagate’s seventhgeneration Surveillance HDD is also designed to ensure cost-effective and reliable performance and includes “idle 3” support to reduce power. We do have a full portfolio of surveillance products and solutions, also leveraging
solutions from companies that we have purchased in the past couple of years. There is a lot of data being created these days and as much as 50%, I believe is being recorded in accordance with surveillance regulations for longer periods. The content is also getting richer. So they require higher storage capabilities.I was talking to a couple of customers from Qatar and I believe they are installing surveillance cameras plus 4 TB of storage disk drive per ATM machine. Christian Assaf: with the emergence of the 4k cameras now, the 1 TB drive is not enough now for surveillance, which is why 6 TB drives are in. Further, Seagate surveillance drives are the only drives with RVsensors that prevents rotational vibration (RV) generating heat and movement from the stacked drives, thus prolonging the life of the drive and ensuring reliable performance. Today you can’t jeopardize one second of reporting. We therefore launched a dedicated surveillance hard disk drive featuring Seagate Rescue services. The Seagate Surveillance HDD offers data recovery services designed to restore lost data due to malice or accidental failure. The significant development in 2014 was that people started understanding the need for appropriate drives for surveillance. Initially, people were using desktop drives for surveillance. Desktop drives
are not designed for surveillance. Throughout 2014, we focused on educating the market. At the partner event, surveillance has been the key message. How are you driving market awareness? SS: We are partnering and doing roadshows with many of the key surveillance systems manufacturers across Europe. Many of these boxes sold are sold barebone without drives. We are educating the channel to include the right drives. We are also working with manufacturers with whom we partner such as Synology and QNAP to make sure customers are choosing the right drives that offer longevity and secure backup of data in their NAS solutions. Seagate has been among the larger Technology manufacturers that have been bringing specific technologies and innovative products as the markets evolve. We have made huge R&D investments in this direction. Seagate spent approximately $1.303 billion dollars on product development in CY2014. We are now opening up the intelligence that we have gathered to our partners so that they can see where the market is heading. We would like to see them make the right investments so that they can continue to add value to the
"We saw the surveillance Business taking off three years ago but are quite amazed to see how fast it is growing. We want to ensure our partners are ready to seize the opportunity and to be on top of it as it continues."
market segments they target. The key markets we see as of today are Surveillance, NAS, adoption of solid state drives and cloud storage. CA: We are entering a world where everything is connecting to everything else and the resulting big data is anticipated to solve virtually all our problems. Data has evolved from static information stored and forgotten to a living entity that drives every day interactions. We are focused on Storage innovation bringing new systems and solutions which are faster, more reliable and expansive. We are investing significantly in the region and Intersec was one example of the commitment that we are bringing in our approach to the region. We were present with all our premium partners at Intersec. We saw the surveillance Business taking off three years ago but are quite amazed to see how fast it is growing. We want to ensure our partners are ready to seize the opportunity and to be on top of it as it continues. Discuss the NAS Business solutions focus? CA: Seagate’s Enterprise NAS drive is available in capacities
up to an industry-leading 6TB and can deliver up to 96TBs in one 16-bay rackmount or tower form factor. Seagate started offerings NAS boxes 5 years ago.We offer a range of high performance NAS solutions from rackmount to desktop for Business users. Our focus is clearly on the drive itself that goes into the box and we work with other NAS manufacturers as well in offering solutions. How have the past several acquisitions changed Seagate’s go to market positioning? SS: In the last couple of years, Seagate has gone through several transitions, in terms of growth as well as acquisitions.These include EVault, which provides cloud storage technology as well as Xyratex, which makes storage test equipment and systems. As we acquired several different companies offering different solutions, we have been successful in integrating these to offer a range of complete solutions to the market, right from the device down to the integration of the infrastructure. It has allowed us to understand better from a device level why it requires
to better deliver the optimum result inside the solution. We have been able to do that. It is now about helping customers from a security perspective, scalability perspective, in terms of finding the right cloud solutions etc. With the different acquisitions we have made, we are not only a storage drives manufacturer but a storage solutions provider for different segments. Discuss the Solid state drives opportunity? SS: In the client market, they have enabled speed and performance. However higher capacity and price positioning has been a challenge. Last year, we had acquired LSI's Accelerated Solutions Division (ASD) and Flash Components Division (FCD). We now have great enterprise solutions in the high performance segment. What we have seen is that as a viable alternative, the Solid state hybrid drive (SSHD) delivers high capacity, economic value and almost equal performance in terms of boot-up time in comparison to SSDs. We have seen some adoption in the corporate segment with several customers taking the SSHD route for upgrades to achieve faster boot up times and also have the facility to store locally from a security perspective. March 2015 | 17
Cover Feature | Converged Infrastructure
A converged future Converged infrastructure promises to do away with many challenges of traditional datacenter architecture as it offers scalable integrated solutions
C
onverged infrastructure promises ease of deployment, central management, and optimization as it brings together storage, servers, networking, and management together. Leading vendors have been rolling out new converged infrastructure systems. Their objective is to offer a new way of integrated IT that radically redefines the way IT infrastructure is built and maintained and is geared to support cloud ready environments. The value-propositions are quite appealing for both SMB and enterprise customers. It helps meet Technology
expectations such as eliminate silos, simplify systems management, adopt efficiencies and effectiveness through virtualization, improve TCO alongside reduced footprints, improve automation as well as make the infrastructure far more agile. Shams Hasan, Enterprise Product Manager, Middle East at Dell says, “Converged infrastructure is one of the fastest-growing segments of the IT industry. Integrated infrastructure delivers ease of deployment, reduces capital equipment expenses, facilitates scalability
and reduces management complexity. Converged solutions are being widely adopted by large enterprises where infrastructure sprawl has chewed up budgets and made scalability a challenge, and as a method to speed delivery of IT services. They are also proving to be beneficial to IT-strapped small and mid-sized organizations, which often lack the skills and resources to keep up with increased business demands for IT services.� According to Kartik Shankar, Senior Sales Manager, StorIT Distribution, as data centres and storage solutions continue to evolve, converged infrastructure is also taking the centre stage in modernization. Organizations that have invested in software-defined technologies for their data centre transformation are seeing value in converged infrastructure solutions. He adds, “The trend towards converged infrastructure is primarily driven by TCO and performance objectives demands of emerging technology
building-block approach is categorised as converged infrastructure whereas Nutanix, SimpliVity and recently VMware etc offer hyper-converged infrastructure, taking the software defined route. While converged systems are in general separate components that are designed to work well together, hyper-converged systems are modular.Hyperconverged solutions integrate compute and storage resources in a single x86-based server deployed in scale-out clusters.
Jan Ursi, Senior Director, Nutanix
solutions. Sizing key components of the IT system infrastructure gets highly complex and challenging to meet the objective through the traditional way. Currently converged infrastructure is the most matured approach to address these challenges of the backbone infrastructure of web 3.0.” Traditional datacenters have seen the sprawl of technology silos of storage, networking, compute as separate racks. This can be addressed through taking the convergence route to IT deployment. Suda Srinivasan, Director for Product Marketing at Nutanix says, “Enterprise datacenters have become incredibly complex over the years. Every aspect of the legacy infrastructure lifecycle is a challenge, from buying and deploying to managing, scaling and support. At the heart of the problem is the traditional three-tier infrastructure model, with servers connected over a network to a shared scale-up storage solution. Converged infrastructure, or more specifically hyperconverged infrastructure, addresses this problem of complexity.” Virtualization has pretty much become a standard for enterprise infrastructure except for a few legacy business critical applications. Converged or hyperconverged infrastructure can help realize greater benefits of virtualization. Karthik says, “We can find enterprise setups managing both virtual and physical environment in many cases. This is majorly due to the limitations in the traditional infrastructure approach and support/compatibility challenges from the application vendor, etc. This is where converged infrastructure plays a major game changing role by providing custom engineered system components finetuned to run even legacy applications. This approach helps to balance and align the right system components to meet the business requirement, with improved performance and ease of infrastructure management.” There are two approaches to achieving the integrated systems infrastructure deployment. The hardware-focused,
Hyperconvergence on the ascent Hyperconverged infrastructure uses the webscale approach that is modular and scales up as required. This is well aligned with the needs of virtualization and cloud based infrastructure.
"Simplifying the datacenter by virtualizing without a SAN, using a converged webscale virtual computing platform is critical for Virtualization and Cloud projects to live up to their promise" Shams says, “Once deployed, with web scale, the converged compute and local storage platform with distributed software technology can create extremely dynamic data centers that can easily be scaled. This strategy and capability is crucial for the modern data center.” According to Jan Ursi, Senior Director, Channel Sales & Marketing for EMEA and India at Nutanix, the traditional datacenter architecture with multiple components that need to be glued together manually is not built for virtualization or cloud. It is too complex, too rigid, scales in too large increments and slows down provisioning of new applications. This is where hyperconvergence comes in. He adds, “While Virtualization is the default vehicle to Cloud, the underlying IT
infrastructure needs to change, learning from the most successful web companies like Google, Amazon, Azure, Facebook, etc. Simplifying the datacenter by virtualizing without a SAN, using a converged webscale virtual computing platform is critical for Virtualization and Cloud projects to live up to their promise.” Nutanix, the leader in the hyperconverged space deploys more hyperconverged infrastructure than all other players in this space together with a 52% market share, according to IDC. The EMEA region represents around 25% of the global Nutanix footprint. “Hundreds of datacenters rely on Nutanix to run their critical applications already for many years.The Nutanix projects are a mix of size and verticals, March 2015 | 19
Fadi Kanafani, Regional Director, MENA & Pakistan, NetAPP
Cover Feature | Converged Infrastructure
approach is when different vendors collaborate to bring the latest and best solutions based around a validated reference architecture that describe configurations of servers, storage, networking products etc which are integrated into one unified solution that is assembled, integrated and tested before selling it to the customer. The converged infrastructure space is populated by many of the large sized vendors including some new start-ups. The vendors in the fray include EMC,NetApp, Cisco IBM, Hitachi, HP, Dell, Oracle etc. Reference architecture offerings include NetApp’s Flexpod and EMC’s VSPEX. Hitachi offers both pre-fabricated solutions and reference architectures under its Unified Compute Platform (UCP).
The flexpods serving SMB enterprises like ADD in Belgium to large organizations like Orange Business Services.The uses vary from running critical tier-1 server workloads like Microsoft SQL, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft Exchange to others like VDI, Big Data, Branch Office and Disaster Recovery projects,” says Jan. Nutanix offers a software-defined solution that does not rely on any purpose built hardware. The Nutanix solution runs on a commodity server architecture on top of any industry standard hypervisor (VMware, Microsoft hyper-v or KVM). However, customers can also choose between a wide portfolio of Nutanix nodes with a different mix of compute and storage resources on board. Next to the native Nutanix NX series appliances, customers can also opt to source the Dell XC series converged webscale appliances powered by the Nutanix software.
Some divergence with the convergence Converged infrastructure has seen two approaches. One where a single vendor owns all the technology, bundles it, tests it and then sells it as a single bundled solution to the customer. The second
20 | March 2015
Flexpod is a reference architecture that uses technology from NetApp and Cisco Systems. The FlexPod solution portfolio combines NetApp storage systems, Cisco Unified Computing System servers, and Cisco Nexus fabric into a single, flexible architecture. “The FlexPod, is a combination of networking servers from Cisco, NetApp storage with software from VMware for virtualization. The result is an integrated stack which solves the problems companies had in the past of buying and building their solutions and trying to make them work. The FlexPod is configured to work from the get go and is typically used by customers wishing to build a private cloud and then start to move towards a hybrid public,” says Graham Porter MENA Channel Manager. The Flexpod converged portfolio has three offerings. FlexpodDatacentre is designed for large environments. FlexPod Express is targeted at small and medium-sized businesses. Finally, there is FlexPod Select, which is targeted at high performance workloads, including Hadoop big data analytics. According to NetApp, FlexPod has seen a sharp uptake in deployments and is an area of growth for the company moving forward.
Fadi Kanafani Regional Director, MENA and Pakistan at NetAPP says, “We have 50 validated designs between us and Cisco for this integrated stack which makes it the number one converged cloud-based solution in the market now, a market that now exceeds 3B dollars globally. We have in excess of 4000 customers on the FlexPod which is showing over 80% growth from 2013 to 2014. ”
The VCE way VCE, one of the key players in converged infrastructure, is a company founded by EMC, VMware and Cisco and now owned largely by EMC. The company has an appliance based approach and offers Vblocks that are prefabricated in their factories according to customer requirements. Tom O’Reilly, CTO – Middle East & Africa at VCE says, “Vblock is a highly engineered single product. We have determined the best possible way to configure networking, storage, software, compute and virtualization altogether into one product. We manufacture our Vblocks in the factory, where we build not only the physical box, wherein we rack, stack, power and cables etc but we also logically configure the entire Vblock for a customer’s datacenter. We also do logical configuration survey (LCS) at the customer site before that to understand the environment as to how they want use the Vblock. So when our Vblocks arrive at the site, they are ready to powered on, connected to the switches, to the networking and all ready to deploy mission critical applications.” The company provides customers support through the full lifecycle. It provides a one window support for different elements of the vblock. He adds further, “Each v-block is a single product to us and since we built it, we are best placed to provide the support. We do the support for the entire stack that includes networking, storage, compute, networking, virtualization etc.” VCE also have a proprietary software called pro vision intelligent operations
Tom O’Reilly, CTO – Middle East & Africa, VCE
demand for such (Vision IO). This integrated systems. helps customers "On a regular basis we release an Marketsand to manage the RCM – so that the customer can have an Markets forecasts Vblocks as a single entire firmware level update for the Vblock the converged set of resources infrastructure rather than have instead of the customers doing each market to grow a tool to manage update on their own." from $11.53 software, storage, billion in 2014 to networking etc remain EMC products – it is just that their $ 33.89 billion in 2019 at a Compound separately. It gives them a view of the Marketing and Engineering will be under Annual Growth Rate of 24.1%.MEA is also entire datacenter. In addition, VCE also the VCE umbrella and report to the VCE expected to experience significant growth has the Release Configuration Matrix Management. They go through the EMC during the forecast period. In the channel, (RCM) - essentially a firmware level for channel. Our go to market stays the same those who have a strategic client base the v-block. with the VCE channel.” and have a deep understanding of their Tom says, “When we ship the vblocks VCE is now expanding its lineup of client’s organization and from our factory, they are in a known integrated infrastructure solutions with the their business needs, good state; we know that they have VCE Foundation for Federation Enterprise will hold the interest of been configured correctly and everything Hybrid Cloud. This integrates VMware's value add distributor has been tested and validated. When a and vendors looking release comes from EMC, Cisco or VMware, NSX network virtualization technology and vRealize management and to take these customers may want to do updates orchestration software. In addition, the solutions to market. for security or performance reasons. solution includes EMC's ViPR softwareTherefore, on a regular basis we release defined storage (SDS) product. an RCM – so that the customer can have Tom adds, “We are going to offer an entire firmware level update for the VCE foundation for enterprise hybrid Vblock instead of the customers doing cloud. Software defined storage, each update on their own. We do the software defined networking testing and validation in our labs before and management orchestration we release the RCM so that spares tools will be pre-fabricated in the customer the hassle. This is true a Vblock from our factory. That convergence as we approach it.” will speed up the customer’s The EMC Federation appears poised to path to deploying enterprise take advantage of the growing demand hybrid cloud. That will be for converged systems, especially in data offered to the channel.” centres. So the companies that are part of the Federation operate as separate entities The outlook while they have integrated product Adopting either of development. the key approaches, Tom adds, “When we became part of through convergence or EMC, anything that was part of converging hyperconvergence, the end technologies was put under the VCE umbrella. Today there is EMC VSPEX- which goals are better alignment of the IT infrastructure in line is reference architecture, EMC VSPEX with need to rapidly provision blue- which is their hyper converged computing resources but solution that they just announced and is only as required, to reduce built upon VMware's EVO:RAIL, and then footprint and eliminate there is the VCE Vblock. These solutions sprawl, achieve pooling of all provide some rapid ways of achieving resources in a seamless some standard goals from customers and way and have the ability to wrap the customer expectations around scale. Vendors are betting on the solutions. The go to market strategy significant growth in terms of remain the same- VSPEX and VSPEX blue
March 2015 | 21
TechKnow | Riverbed
Taj ElKhayat, Regional Vice President, Middle East, Turkey, North, West, and Central Africa at Riverbed Technology discuss Riverbed’s focus on converged infrastructure solutions for Branch offices
Accelerating efficiencies Discuss growing demand of converged infrastructure Driven by providing less infrastructure and the reduction in complexity in the branch and data centre, convergence is one of the key trends empowering IT over the past five years. The promise of less hardware, reducing the cost of equipment and power, as well as consuming less IT staff resources, the benefits of convergence are many and significant How relevant is converged infrastructure for Branch offices and what is your focus in terms of solutions? The focus for Riverbed Technology in the area of convergence deals specifically with the convergence of branch infrastructure. That is, we help our customers simplify their branch IT footprint, converge branch servers and storage
22 | March 2015
into a single appliance while centralizing their data. We see the need for branch convergence arising out of the strong performance of Middle East organizations that have now begun expanding their global footprints. For these businesses, the ability to have remote offices in several locations delivers a range of benefits, including access to a wide network of professional talent and potential customers. A global presence is key in today’s international marketplace, with customers ordering goods from around the world and at the same time, expecting a seamless user experience. How can converged infrastructure benefit branch office functioning? To make branch offices as effective as possible, workers need to have quick access to
all the business information they need to perform their job. Traditionally this has been achieved by providing and maintaining technology locally. However costs can start to add up and spiral out of control when you look at the price of servers and storage, backups and the IT staff managing hardware and software. Worse, when disaster strikes, recovery of branch data and applications can take days, putting the branch at risk. With so much at stake, it no longer makes sense for today’s organisations to rely on traditional methods of technology deployment and management. When each branch operates and maintains its own equipment and data storage, the result is islands of technology that are rarely updated and patched at the same rate. The outcome is constant management churn and increased risk that a
Taj ElKhayat Regional Vice President, Riverbed Technology
disaster at any one of these locations can significantly impact the business. It is for these reasons that businesses are turning to convergence technologies that allow them to consolidate servers, storage and network infrastructure into a single appliance. Does converged benefit virualised infrastructure more? How about other legacy infrastructures where there is zero virtualization? As previously mentioned, the benefits of convergence are numerous, and can be experienced in various areas within IT, not just in the cloud and virtualised environment. For example, we have seen over a number of years the convergence of voice and data networks into one network, where voice just becomes one of many applications being supported.
set out to the The challenge branch. for IT is firstly to The focus for Riverbed Technology in convergence SteelFusion provide a set of deals specifically with the convergence of branch contains an visibility tools that infrastructure. We help our customers simplify their integrated instance can provide a branch IT footprint, converge branch servers and storage of Riverbed holistic view of all of SteelHead, the items of IT, including into a single appliance while centralizing their data. WAN optimization the virtualised solution. WAN infrastructure. And optimization helps further then allow for management By converging servers, storage, SteelFusion operates by streamline branch infrastructure and control over these, giving WAN optimisation and a taking SAN volumes from by consolidating services priority to certain types of traffic the organization's central hypervisor within one device back to the data centre, and and applications, in accordance it allows all the significant IT data centre and projecting accelerating all user traffic in with the needs of the business. services to be located into the storage volumes to the branch across the optimal one piece of hardware in the applications and hosts at networks at the lowest cost. Are your solutions branch; offering simplicity, the remote branches. These Services that cannot be interoperable? instant data provisioning and SAN volumes can be from centralized are run as virtual Any large scale enterprise data recovery, encrypted data any of our supported storage machines (VMs) on the will typically feature a multicache; whilst centralising data, vendors which include EMC, converged appliance. vendor IT environment so at so there is no need for the NetApp, Dell and IBM, all of In addition, the SteelFusion Riverbed, we are conscious backup of data in the branch. whom have also been tested Edge converged appliance of ensuring that our solutions SteelFusion employs the for their respective snapshot contains a fully integrated are interoperable and easily integration as well. Beyond this, paired relationship between instance of the VMware vSphere integrate with technologies SteelFusion Core in the SteelFusion can work with any hypervisor, optimized to run from other vendors. This is centralized data centre and iSCSI or FC-SAN in the market. remotely on a hardened branch why with our the Riverbed SteelFusion Edge which is appliance. Customers benefit SteelFusion solution leverages deployed at the branch. Elaborate on your converged from having the industrya number of industry-standard The solution integrates solution strategy and protocols such as the Challenge- solution? Do these solutions three unique features to deliver standard virtualization platform, which can be managed with Handshake Authentication new efficiency to branches. work in tandem with existing tools and capabilities. Protocol (CHAP) for These include solutions from other vendors SteelFusion seamlessly appears authenticating users and hosts BlockStream which is in the converged solutions and AES 256-bit encryption to Riverbed's patented technology as a standard host in existing space? secure and protect sensitive that centralizes data in the data VMware vSphere and vCentre SteelFusion is at the forefront of management tools. information. branch converged infrastructure. centre and projects a working
Riverbed SteelFusion
R
iverbed SteelFusion is a branch converged infrastructure solution that centralizes data in the datacenter and delivers local performance and nearly instant recovery at the branch. SteelFusion consolidates branch servers, storage, networking and virtualization infrastructure into a single solution. SteelFusion expedites branch office provisioning, backup and recovery and ensures continuous operations when disasters occur from
any cause – weather, fire or accident. With SteelFusion, businesses can restore branch operations in a matter of minutes vs. days, centrally protect and secure data in the datacenter and significantly lower the TCO of branch and remote offices. Riverbed SteelFusion is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, a platform for locationindependent computing that gives companies the flexibility to host
applications and data in the locations that best serve the business while ensuring flawless application delivery to better leverage global resources, radically reduce the cost of running their business and maximize employee productivity. SteelFusion 3.0, announced last year is arguably the first Branch Converged Infrastructure that centralizes data in the Datacenter and delivers local performance and instant recovery at the branch March 2015  |  23
Point2Point | StorIT Distribution
Rising graph Kartik Shankar, Senior Sales Manager, StorIT Distribution discusses the highlights of StorIT’s growth over the past year and domains including Big Data and converged infrastructure where it is seeing great potential Discuss the market outlook in all the areas of your interest? With respect to our business, apart from the continued growth in Data Storage and Data Protection we see great opportunities in the areas of All-Flash Arrays, Software Defined Storage, Converged Infrastructure, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and Big Data Analytics solutions in 2015. Enterprises have been showing keen interest to understand, evaluate and adopt emerging technologies that could give them distinct advantage over competition, enhance business productivity and achieve growth objectives. We are expecting a significant increase in the number of customers ready to deploy these solutions. Which are the areas of likely expansion? Third platform, being the next
24 | March 2015
Kartik Shankar Senior Sales Manager, StorIT Distribution
technological revolution creating a new era of computer technology, will be an area where we will look forward to expanding further in building infrastructure solutions for it. Was 2014 a year of growth as well as challenges? Please elaborate on specific highlights? 2014 for a growth year for StorIT. We launched our subsidiary called Data Science Technologies, signed on new vendor partners such as Huawei and ATTO. Our channel has done well across various countries in the Middle East in 2014. StorIT has grown by business and partners. The number of partners who have actually converted to new areas of technology such as cloud services and big data have also grown and they actually
contributed by investing their team as well as resources into these new areas of the technology where their understanding of the disruption is very clear now. They have also confirmed that cloud and big data is here to stay now and it not a passing fad. StorIT also won many awards and accolades from leading industry magazines. Elaborate on professional services focus at StorIT? StorIT offers customers professional services such as Presales Consultancy, Solutions Architecture & Design, Project Implementation, Systems Integration, Technical Support, Proof of Concept, IT Infrastructure Managed Services and Education & Training. StorIT helps develop
our channel their business "2014 for a growth year for StorIT. We launched by providing plans. StorIT has education and been successfully our subsidiary called Data Science Technologies, training programs involved in signed on new vendor partners such as Huawei such as Product significant Big and ATTO. Our channel has done well across Sales Training, Data opportunities Technical Training, involving some various countries in the Middle East in 2014." Sales & Technical large enterprises Certifications in the region. This to acquire vendor recognition status, motivates us to ramp up our investments over traditional storage are increased Technology Refresh seminars and in the areas of training and consultancy flexibility, automated management and Workshops. that leads to greater awareness and cost efficiency. Converged infrastructure demand. becomes the most compelling building Discuss if there are cloud based aspects The data storage domain in the region block of data center infrastructure. of many of those solutions you offer? continues to remain an exciting area with StorIT offers solutions in Converged How is the uptake for such solutions? All-Flash Arrays, Hybrid Arrays, Converged infrastructure, reference architecture and With our converged infrastructure offerings software defined storage solutions. Infrastructure and Software Defined we help built infrastructure for modern Storage leading the way into 2015. businesses thatadapt cloud with ease. How are you driving awareness with These solutions help them solve several What are your offering in this integrators of the region? How can major challenges in cloud deployment space? you help them achieve necessary like increased operational complexity, Our subsidiary, Data Science competencies to deliver these next application flexibility, increasing service Technologies works on most of the generation solutions? level requirements and rapid service Big Data platforms in Open Source. All Unlike the traditional distribution provisioning needs. So our cloud aspect Solutions and architecture designed can model, where we undertake the mass is in addressing these major challenges incorporate various variants of Hadoop. marketing and awareness approach, with using our infrastructure solutions. We also have integrated Cloudera Hadoop the converged infrastructure solutions offering where in the customer has a business we are only working with those What are the various solutions for choice to opt for having it integrated channel partners who have a strategic enabling and consolidating storage (factory installed) or to choose from client base and with those who have got virtualization? Has this areas seen choice of other Hadoop variants. Data complete understanding of their client’s exponential growth in region from key Science has the most exclusive Hadoop organisation/business needs. verticals? offering from one source. Data Science We also conduct seminars, workshops, As seen in the past few years can also deploy Hadoop in the Microsoft end customer events and customized virtualization is gaining momentum and Windows environment for various solution demonstration to create storage virtual machines are geared up to Microsoft Analytics deployments. Microsoft awareness on the benefits of converged provide application agility. has some very powerful analytics in the infrastructure adoption. We also ensure Future of the storage is software-led Big Data space and Data Science has the that we conduct channel training and and that too open system based. Many skill set to deploy in similar environments. enablement programs to enable our existing vendors will build building blocks On the Big Data front, DST currently channel partners with the required and frameworks around it thus exploiting contributes from the infrastructure, certifications, competencies and skills to the open source better than others by integration, data scientist, domain deliver these next-generation solutions. introducing feature rich options for their expert and Analytics analyst perspective. customers. Platforms will standardize over On the open source front, we use the What is the traction been seen for Big a software layer and all hardware should Hadoop platform and on the packaged data Analytics? see a variant or two of the software offerings front we have tools from SAS Big Data Analytics is gathering rapid communicating to each other. for Text Analytics, Social media Analytics, traction in the region. We foresee an The race towards software Sentimental Analytics ,Video Analytics exponential growth rate in the number defined storage is at its peak. The key and in addition to the above we also use of enterprises with a keen interest to benefits of software-defined storage custom build tools on open platforms. plan and adopt solutions that can propel
March 2015  |  25
Point2Point | Global Distribution
Global Distribution has expanded its association with several vendors over the past year or so and is consolidating its reach into the value add space. Mario M. Veljovic, VP Solutions MENA at Global Distribution speaks about the company’s focus and initiatives
in each segment. The Solutions Distribution Team in particular has developed a product portfolio to address key industry trends, such as out-of-the-box solutions, converged infrastructures, VDI and IPbased CCTV. All solutions promoted are offering a strong “ROI”, which is a compelling argument for end-users especially this year, as concerns over the regional Economy is felt. We already feel that end-users are questioning the IT Departments regarding what they have done to explore solutions apart from that Mario M. Veljovic available from mainstream and usual VP Solutions MENA Global Distribution
Fast-tracking growth Discuss Global’s growth highlights in the value add distribution space over the past year? Global Distribution continued to grow in double digits and achieved its Financial Goals, despite solid investments in new business and territories, which we are very proud of. Especially the investments we have made in 2014 will support Global Distribution’s growth in 2015. The Solutions Distribution Team has built a complete stack of Enterprise IT Solutions Vendors to cater the growing Data Centre requirements in the MENA Region. The Solutions Portfolio today represents more than 15 Enterprise Vendors. The High Performance Computing Unit, represents Fujitsu (Primergy Servers),Optoma (AV solutions) and HP. Our Enterprise Storage unit, addresses all requirements of Storage from Tier 1 to Back up, and represents FusionIO (SanDisk), Pure Storage, Fujitsu
26 | March 2015
(Eternus Storage), Overland Storage & V3 VDI and Tandberg Data. The Software & NAS Unit promotes Kaspersky and SolarWinds on the Software side and QNAP, Seagate NAS and Synology, along with a comprehensive HDD and SSD Offering. Last but not least, we have our IT Infrastructure & Physical Security Unit, which offers Linkcomn, Datwyler, ZyXel and Mobotix, helping to build “Layer-0” Infrastructures. Are there significant domains where you would like to expand? Today the solutions portfolio is able to address all Data Centre requirements, which comprises High Performance Computing, Enterprise Storage, IT Infrastructure & Physical Security and Software (mainly infrastructure monitoring). We have invested into new and proven technologies to ensure our Partners are getting the “best-of-breed”
suppliers. There are a few more vendors we are in final discussion to complete missing elements. Areas we are still keen to develop in 2015 are BI/Analytics, Data Security, Automatic Identification & Data Capturing (AIDC) and Digital Signage, as those are still key industry trends, which are not seriously addressed by Competitors in the Region. How has the company gone about to expand the in-house expertise to manage these separate domains in terms of pre-sales or account management? We have done significant investments into local teams and support structures, the demo and POC units, marketing funds and channel enablement (commercially and technically). What have been the on ground channel
engagements in terms of roadshows, training etc and in terms of frequency? We are not planning for anything extraordinary, but will have just more frequent channel activities this year, such as events, road shows, round tables, technical enablement sessions and training & knowledge transfer get-togethers etc. As last year was the year of on-boarding new vendors, this year will be to grow our Channel Partner community across the Region. How do you see the industry outlook for the VAD as well as the value channel Business? The traditional VAD Concepts is increasingly under pressure. The GTDC (Global Technology Distribution Council) has already in 2010 predicted that the next step beyond value-based distribution are wholesalers that embrace VAR business development, market segmentation, sophisticated sales and technical enablement to help their customers realize faster and more specific market
success. Key differentiators will be partner enablement and development, selling into target markets, Analytics based marketing, technical &sales acumen, partner practice consulting, developing a knowledge base of expertise and a comprehensive product portfolio. Global Distribution has probably been the 1st in the region to start venturing into this new segment and promoting solutions distribution since last year. Distributors have always offered dedicated sales and account management as benefits to their customers. But it hasn't been until recently that distributors have started working with suppliers and vendors to offer in-depth business and practice development to VARs. Distributors are now growing VAR revenue and loyalty by helping them identify new technology and market practices through distributorfacilitated business planning. Distributors are also assisting VARs with business transformation awareness and training as cloud computing continues to encroach on traditional on-premise business models.
Which markets in the region are you focusing at the moment? Any plans to expand with direct offices in other parts of the region? Today we have strong coverage of the entire GCC, with people on ground and supply chain set up in all major markets. An area we are keen to develop is North Africa. How many active channel partners do you currently manage? Are you looking to increase that in specific verticals? We have about 250 channel partners in the region and the list just keeps growing. Our partner community has a well coverage of all key verticals, though I would appreciate, if partner in general would develop a more vertical focus approach. Still today most of the partners in the region cover all verticals, rather than developing in-depth skills and understand of a specific vertical. The challenges of a client in hospitality is very different than education, for example. The focus should be on understanding the Business challenges a vertical faces, rather than merely the IT Challenges.
March 2015  |  27
Insight | eHostingDataFort
Keeping Your Business Continuity Plan Up-to-Date Tamer Saleh, Director of Operations, eHostingDataFort elaborates on 5 key steps towards enabling a BCM (Business Continuity Management) plan for Businesses
G
artner predicts that an average cost of downtime for a midsize company is $70,000 per hour. In another research by PWC, it was revealed that 70% of companies that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year. These statistics clearly indicate the necessity of a BCM plan.Here’s a quick 5-step guide to get you started: Analyze your business to know which functions are the most crucial to keep your business up and running when a disaster strikes Assess the risks to know which are the risksthat your business is most likely to face as there may be some you would specifically like to prepare and plan for Plan and preparea framework for your organization
28 | March 2015
to respondeffectively to crises Communicate your plan to everyone in your organization, making sure it is understood by all Test the plan regularly to ensure it works effectively. Below, we highlight some methods to test the effectivenessof your businesscontinuity plan. 1. Walkthroughs - IT management can identify security gaps, weaknesses or system limitations with regularly scheduled walkthroughs of their business continuity plan 2. Simulation Test Enterprises can use this method during their first testing attempt. This is implemented in a controlled situation, and does not usually impact business operations. This works by simulating a
Tamer Saleh Operations Director, eHostingDataFort
real-life disaster scenario at the workplace and allowing employees to react to these. This should be able to direct you to all theloop-holes, if any, and in updatingyour plan 3. Full Interruption - During a full test, IT professionals organize an actual failover of their datacenter or servers, which is a much riskier option. This can be time-consuming and expensive, especially in cases where data is lost. This may not always be the best testing methods for all companies, especially those who cannot afford downtime. However, tests like these are very accurate 4. Install automated solutions and software for remote updates and alerts, so that you have an eye on your system even when you are not in close proximity to your datacenters
Next Steps: After one of these tests have been implemented, it is important to review the results and evaluate them. It is recommended to conduct a short debrief and gather necessary feedback from the participants. The outcomes should beclearly mentioned in a report, highlighting success, failures and suggestions that would ultimately lead to a better business continuityplan. For your business continuity plan to stay up-to-date, it is necessary to implement such drills regularly. It is also a good practice to keep all previous records in place as the previous reports will help you measure the effectiveness of your plan year on year. Statistics Sources: cloudcollaborative.blogspot.ae and smallbusinesscomputing. com
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Insight | Sophos
Chester Wisniewski Senior Security Consultant, Sophos
hodgepodge of technologies managed by a shared console, bringing all the coordination and configuration challenges to one busy interface. A second root of complexity is vendor bias to the skilled user. A security specialist with a large environment to protect may prefer to have granular control of every feature, capability and configuration setting. But for the SMB administrator, this can be a recipe for information overload and paralysis.Making simple products that small businesses can use is costly, which is why most vendors merely repackage their enterprise offering for the SMB market.
Ponemon Institute survey of IT managers at small to mid-sized companies, the average self-assessment score of security posture (ability to mitigate risks, vulnerabilities and attacks) was a 6 on a scale of 10. Respondents reported, on average, fewer than three full-time workers fully dedicated to IT security. And respondents reported a wide range of challenges including insufficient budgets, personnel and in-house expertise. You might think this would present large security vendors with a huge market opportunity. But most vendors find that selling to large customers is easier and more profitable.
Small businesses are a big target
The cost of complexity
Even if vendors seem to ignore the needs of small businesses,
Small organizations that deploy enterprise-grade security
Simple Security is better Security Chester Wisniewski, Senior Security Consultant at Sophos discusses how small and medium-sized businesses can benefit from cloud-based security
M
ost vendors seem to assume that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs or SMEs) have the expertise and full-time staff of a large enterprise to manage IT security. Too often for SMBs, this one-size-fits-all approach results in higher costs, lower productivity and more risk. In this paper we examine the inherent complexity of enterprise-class security products and the very different needs of SMBs. Then we look
30 | March 2015
at a simpler alternative: cloudbased endpoint security.
Complexity in IT security It’s no secret in the IT security community that SMBs are poorly served by the industry’s flagship vendors and products. The big companies that dominate the market design their offerings for enterprise customers with well-staffed IT organizations and dedicated security teams. Unfortunately,
a product that perfectly meets the needs of a trained security professional can potentially have the opposite effect and increase the vulnerability of a small business where security administration is handled by an IT generalist—or the business users themselves.One source of complexity in IT security products is historical. The largest vendors built out their portfolios through decades of acquisition, folding one product into another. The result is a
SMBs present a huge opportunity for cybercriminals. Out of the nearly six million employers in the United States, the vast majority of them have fewer than 100 employees. According to the 2013 Verizon Data Breach Report, 40% of 621 data theft incidents confirmed in 2012 affected organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees. Recent studies point to less rigorous security at smaller firms. In a Sophos-sponsored
products without the specialists necessary to manage them are exposed to a wide range of risks and costs. • An IT generalist may struggle to manually configure a host intrusion prevention system (HIPS) with hundreds of rules, deciding instead to turn off most of the product’s functionality. Only 10% of businesses use all the security features and functions they pay for. • An improperly configured firewall or IPS can leave open security holes, or generate false positives and lock down users. That hurts the productivity of IT personnel and the organization at large. • Different web security policies on network and endpoint filters can create interference and confusion, slowing or locking down
legitimate traffic. • Third-party integration services and maintenance contracts can dramatically increase security costs. • Keeping IT generalists trained on complex security solutions often requires annual, multi-day courses, adding to costs and taking the IT person away form the office. None of this is inevitable or unavoidable. IT security products aren’t complicated because it’s impossible to make them user-friendly for non-specialists. It simply requires that vendors build some of the specialist’s knowledge and experience into the products themselves. The growing movement to cloud-based, cloud-managed security-as-a-service gives you an opportunity to improve user experience, reduce complexity
and enhance security. Cloudbased security products could easily offer simple features such as: • Unified security management – knowledgeable workers use multiple devices to get their work done. Effective security solutions should provide unified management that protects Windows, Mac and mobile devices • User-centric management, reporting and licensing – Secure your end users regardless of which devices they use. User-based policy is set once and will automatically be enforced across devices. IT admins also get a single pane of glass view of the security status of the organization and can drill down per-user or per-device • Pre-configured settings – IT security suites can be
preconfigured to simplify setup of features like HIPS, web security and web filtering that previously required specialized skills to deploy and manage • Built-in web security filtering – Access to malicious or infected websites is automatically blocked and malicious files are intercepted before they infect your organization. • Coordinated web content filtering policy – Cloudmanaged and endpointenforced web filtering capabilities offer consistent protection and policy enforcement no matter where users log on. • Cloud-based security services are easy and quick to set up. With no server to install, deployment takes just a few minutes. It’s simple to manage and maintenance-free.
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March 2015 | 31
eyetech
Brocade VDX 6940
VSPEX BLUE hyper-converged infrastructure appliance
Overview:
Overview:
The Brocade VDX 6940 delivers the industry’s highest port
operations for both cloud and Big Data network fabrics.
EMC has announced availability of the EMC VSPEX BLUE hyper-converged infrastructure appliance that delivers compute, storage, networking and management powered by VMware EVO:RAIL and EMC software. The VSPEX BLUE hyper- converged infrastructure appliance enables customers to go from power on to provisioning virtual machines in under 15 minutes, offering impressive time to value when compared to other hyper-converged infrastructure offerings. The VSPEX BLUE scale-out infrastructure provides customers the ability to meet users’ changing demands at the speed of business and freedom from the burden of advanced IT forecasting. Comprised of common modular building blocks, the VSPEX BLUE hyper-converged infrastructure appliance offers customers seamless linear scalability from one to four 2U/4-nodes and is ideal for infrastructure consolidations, virtual desktops in large remote or branch offices and managed service providers.
Key features:
Key Features:
• Zero-touch scale-out through auto-forming fabric based
as a single switch
• The VSPEX BLUE hyper-converged infrastructure appliance simplifies IT configuration, management, and maintenance. • The VSPEX BLUE Manager extends the capabilities of the native EVO:RAIL Deployment, Configuration and Management (DCM) Engine, delivering a built-in support experience and Market providing customers access to select software titles and solutions from an EMC interface that leverages VMware EVO:RAIL’s clean and intuitive design principles. • The VSPEX BLUE Manager also simplifies IT management by delivering patch and software update notification that can be installed automatically without interruption or downtime so that the appliance software is always up-to-date. • The EMC VSPEX BLUE hyper-converged infrastructure appliance also provides EMC Secure Remote Support
• Efficient load-balanced multipathing at Layers 1, 2, and 3;
(ESRS) that is built into the interface.
density in a fixed switch, making it the most efficient leaf and spine switch. Ideal for building Ethernet fabrics in demanding environments, the Brocade VDX 6940 is available as a 40 GbE optimized switch in a 1U form factor or a 10 GbE optimized switch with up to 100 GbE uplinks in a 2U form factor. With Brocade VCS Fabric technology, the Brocade VDX 6940 simplifies network design and
on Brocade Fabric VCS technology • The market’s highest 10 GbE and 40 GbE density in a fixed form factor • Optimized packet buffer and latency for better application performance • Improved capacity, with the ability to scale up to a 120 GbE uplink with Brocade ISL Trunking • Seamless, unified physical and virtual resources with Brocade VCS Gateway for NSX • Centralized, automated management and provisioning • Management of an entire multitenant Brocade VCS fabric
multiple Layer 3 gateways • The industry’s most open programmability and the ideal choice for SDN with a plugin for OpenStack, support for REST APIs, OpenFlow 1.3 and DevOps integration for Puppet and Python
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Dell Precision M3800 Overview: Dell today announced updates to the Dell Precision M3800, the world’s thinnest and lightest true 15-inch mobile workstation, enabling video editors, graphic designers, engineers and other high-end users to create like never before with unmatched portability, breakthrough power and reliable performance. Dell has listened to its customers and responded by incorporating new features into its flagship mobile workstation, adding a 4K Ultra HD touch display option, introducing Thunderbolt™ 2 technology and offering an Ubuntu-based developer edition, among other updates. The Dell Precision M3800 is available with 4K Ultra HD (3840x2160) resolution and IGZO2 technology on its vivid 15.6-
The ETERNUS DX60 S3. Overview: The new FUJITSU Storage ETERNUS DX60 S3 cost-effectively scales to meet the ever-increasing data management needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Sold via Fujitsu's SELECT partners that provide dedicated customer support, the business-centric system is easy to install, configure, operate and maintain, removing the perennial headache of managing and storing increasing volumes of data at an affordable cost. This new addition completes the latest generation of the comprehensive ETERNUS DX family of disk storage systems. Among its highlights, the ETERNUS DX60 provides faster host interfaces, greater performance, a better price/performance ratio, twice the cache size and enhanced snapshot and replication functions compared to its predecessor. It also offers improved support of virtualized server environments plus enterprise features such as Thin Provisioning, which are usually found in more expensive, higher-classified systems. The ETERNUS SF Express storage management suite is also included in the purchase price. It can be upgraded to the full, richly-featured ETERNUS SF version which uses a more predictable controller-based licensing model rather than the more conventional capacity-based model.
inch UltraSharp touch display made with Corning Gorilla Glass NBT, delivering rich, saturated colour and stunning brightness, and enabling customers to view their content in even greater detail than was possible before. Key features: • With more than 8 million pixels, the 4K Ultra HD screen option is the highest resolution panel available on a 15-inch mobile workstation today, boasting 3.4 million more pixels than the
Key features: • Affordable • Leading performance for the entry-level • Rich data safety functionality • Enterprise proven capabilities already in entry-level storage • Easy to install, configure, operate and maintain • Perfect fit for storage consolidation starters & virtualization newcomers with medium capacity requirements and predictable growth rates • Free-of-charge, richly featured management suite • Single point administration • Easy and efficient operation
Retina display on the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch and allowing customers to experience 59 percent higher resolution. • The Dell Precision M3800 display also features ten-finger multi-touch, providing customers with an intuitive way to interact with the workstation. • Dell has added additional storage options and increased the total available internal storage on the Dell Precision M3800 up to 2TB
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Stats & Trends
Growing traction for hybrid model
E
MC released the findings of a global study of 10,451 IT business decision-makers across 33 countries, conducted by Vanson Bourne, which gauged global sentiment about IT’s evolving role in organizations today. The survey revealed increasing adoption of cloud computing globally, with the majority of respondents citing hybrid cloud as their preferred option for greater agility and security. Respondents believe IT is a business enabler now more than ever before, yet spending is moving outside of its control. To help support business growth, a majority of respondents believe IT must act as an in-house broker of on-demand services. This pressure combined with a widening IT skills gap appears to be driving interest among IT professionals in pursuing hybrid cloud. Critical findings from the survey include:
Challenges and Drivers for Adoption • 71% of respondents
globally favor a strategy for IT to serve as an in-house broker of on-demand services, survey data indicates a lack of confidence in IT’s own ability to help drive business growth. • 48% of respondents globally and 47% in EMEA believe that spending on technology is out of the IT department’s control, with majority of respondents in emerging markets like Saudi Arabia (65%), UAE (64%) and Qatar (63%) stating the same. • 35% globally believe their organization doesn’t have the right level of skills and knowledge to achieve key business priorities lead by respondents in developing markets like LATAM (34%) and EMEA (33%) • Majority of respondents in LATAM region (85%), UAE (85%) and Saudi Arabia (81%) believe training IT staff to keep pace with the implications of megatrends such as cloud, mobile, social, and Big Data, will be a challenge for their
organization over the next 1-2 years (beating the global average of 69%)
Increasing Importance of Hybrid Cloud & Automation •Hybrid cloud adoption has grown 9% since 2013, with 27% uptake across the globe, the highest being the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region (28%), followed by Latin America (24%) and Asia Pacific and Japan (24%).
•Hybrid cloud adoption is the highest in the EMEA region lead by countries like UK and Netherlands (36% reported to be using hybrid cloud) •In the Middle East, UAE and Saudi Arabia lead in hybrid cloud adoption with 32% and 30% reported to be using hybrid cloud (Global average is 27%)Roughly twothirds of global respondents (64%) expressed a need for a hybrid cloud due to the agility and security it provides
IT resilience more important than ever
T
he Seventh Annual State of Resilience Report from Vision Solutions titled “The Future of IT: Migrations, Protection & Recovery Insights,” highlights trends, opportunities and challenges for IT and business leaders alike.
Highlights include: • Nearly 75 percent of respondents have not calculated the hourly cost of downtime for their business • For those who experienced a
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storage failure, nearly 50 percent lost data in the process due to insufficient disaster recovery methods or practices • Nearly two thirds of those surveyed said they delayed an important data migration for fear of downtime or lack of resources • Hosted private cloud is still the most prevalent cloud environment at 57 percent usage; hybrid cloud adoption lags at 32 percent with room to grow • Despite the growing popularity of cloud, nearly two thirds state they do not have high availability or
disaster recovery protection in place for their data once it is in the cloud. The report combines findings from five industry-wide surveys of more than 3,000 IT professionals. Vision Solutions divided the surveys into the following categories: high availability/ disaster recovery, migration, data sharing and cloud computing. In addition, a separate executive insights survey provides a better understanding of how IT leadership perceives the state of IT compared to other IT professionals closer to the front lines.
• Upgrading your network to 10 or 40Gb? • Deploying virtualized servers or networks? • Installing new security devices? • Implementing network monitoring?
Dramatically improve your monitoring and security capabilities.
Look closer. Go further. www.gigamon.com/security
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