Try it free: sophos.com/mobile

bymyCan you

SECURELOCATERESTOREWIPEUNLOCKLOCKMANAGE

GALAXY S4IPHONE 5IPAD 4BOLD 9700NEXUS 7LUMIA 925

3 PM?END OF DAY?TOMORROW?IMMEDIATELY?IMMEDIATELY?IMMEDIATELY?IMMEDIATELY?IMMEDIATELY?9 AM?RIGHT NOW?

LUNCHTIME?HTC HD2

Sophos Mobile Control

The answer is yes.

Countless devices. One solution.Countless devices. One solution.Countless devices. One solution.

Sophos Middle East | Offi ce 205-EIB 5 | Alpha BuildingPO Box 500469 | Dubai Internet City | Dubai | UAE

Email: salesmea@sophos.com | Tel: +971 4375 4332

Sophos SMC print ad 210x285.indd 1 20.01.2014 15:14:49

Cont

ents

R. NarayanManaging Editor

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.

Published by: JNS Media International MFZEP.O. Box: 121075, Montana Building 404, Zabeel Road, Near GPO, Karama, Dubai-UAETel: 04-3705022 Fax: 04-3706639

Editorial

Founder & CEO: Vivek Sharma Managing Editor: R. NarayanEditor: David NdichuArt Director: Faiz Ahmed Sr. Sales Manager: R. Subramanyan Sales Coordinator: Smitha Jithesh

Adopting 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.

Meeting great expectations

Cover Story - 18

Virtualization’s next phaseThe next leg of the journey is to port mission critical workloads to virtualized infrastructure.

News in Detail - 11

The Integrator Awards applaudsthe champions

Feature - 12

A Flashy outlookFlash continues to gain traction throughout the storage landscape as the technology removes several bottlenecks of commonly I/O performance

Point2Point - 27

The orchestratorKishor Chitale, CEO, Local Business Services, India & Middle East at Cap Gemini speaks about the company’s focus

TechKnow

Getting to the Third Platform - 16Habib 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 - 24ShailendraSainani, Sales Director, Enterprise Business Group, Huawei Technologies ME discusses the vendor’s commitment to partner enablement and profitability.

Changing realities - 26Toni 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” - 28The 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 - 30Ken 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 BytesEyetechStats & Trends

4  |  July 2014 

News Bytes

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.

StorIT and Huawei hold Event on Data Management

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, the USD6 billion global ICT solutions and services provider will launch Enterprise Mobility-as-a-Service (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.”

Veeam Cloud Connect unveiled

Dimension Data Launches Enterprise Mobility-As-A-Service

6  |  July 2014 

News Bytes

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."

Sophos strengthens Management Team

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 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 industry-leading 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.”

Exclusive Networks wins F5’s EMEA award for distribution

Imation focuses on growing Nexsan Storage channel Business

8  |  July 2014 

News Bytes

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, information-rich 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.

Aptec introduces IT solutions to Kuwait partners

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 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.

Sophos signs ComGuard as VAD

Brocade sees increased partner accreditation

High-Speed RecoveryData Loss AvoidanceVeri�ed ProtectionLeverage DataComplete Visibility

Keeping your business up and running at all times is critical. Businesses today demand 24/7 access to data, efficient management of exploding amounts of data and zero downtime. Veeam® enables the Always-On Business by providing solutions that deliver Availability for the Modern Data Center™.

Enable your Always-On Business with:

vee.am/me

10  |  July 2014 

News Bytes

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 software-defined 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 cost-efficient, 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.”

Dell brings Flash to mid-tier storage

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 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."

Oxygen and RedSeal Networks partner

Global Distribution conducts SolarWinds Product Training

  July 2014  |  11

The 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.

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

Integrator Awards applauds the champions

News In Detail

12  |  July 2014 

A Flashy outlook

Flash 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

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

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

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

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

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

Flash continues to gain traction throughout the storage landscape as the technology removes several bottlenecks of commonly I/O performance

Feature | Enterprise Storage

Steven RoseVP, EMEAPure Storage

  July 2014  |  13

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 wayVendors 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 response-time 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

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

Christian PutzVP, EMEA Channel Sales

Violin Memory

14  |  July 2014 

Lau

ren

t B

inet

ti,

VP &

GM

EM

EA C

hann

el S

ales

, Del

l

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,

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

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.”

The transition in effectThe 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

Salil DigheCEOMeta Byte Technologies

Feature | Enterprise Storage

  July 2014  |  15

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 drive-based 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.

16  |  July 2014 

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.

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 client-

server 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

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

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

Getting to the Third Platform

Habib MahakianRegional GM, Gulf & Pakistan

EMC

  July 2014  |  17

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

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

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.

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.

"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."

18  |  July 2014 

Cover Feature | Virtualization

Virtualization’s next phase The next leg of the journey is toport mission critical workloadsto virtualized infrastructure.

Consolidation 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

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,

  July 2014  |  19

“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

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

Feras Abu AladousManager, System Engineer

Brocade

20  |  July 2014 

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 datacenterIn 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

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 non-disruptive 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 adoptionVirtualistion 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 G

regg

Pet

erse

n,

Regi

onal

Dire

ctor

ME

& SA

ARC,

Vee

am S

oftw

are

Cover Feature | Virtualization

  July 2014  |  21

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

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.

Aaron WhiteGM, MENA & Turkey

Hitachi Data Systems

22  |  July 2014 

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,

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.

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 clientsInfoWatch 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

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/theftIn brief the process of data leakage prevention consists of three main stages which we call Pre-DLP, DLP and Post-DLP. Pre-DLP stage includes deep data analysis and categorization (with help of InfoWatch Auto-linguist engine and

Battle lines drawn

Andrey SokurenkoBusiness Development Director

InfoWatch Group

TechKnow | InfoWatch Group

  July 2014  |  23

companies. But of course the key InfoWatch expertise lies in field of Data Loss Prevention since we are already for more than 10 years in the market and have accumulated a huge experience of DLP systems successful integrations in hundreds of companies in different industries worldwide.

Are regional firms taking the concept of information protection seriously and investing in the same?Since the number of data leaks worldwide grows increasingly and ME being no exception, we see the growing demand for data protection solutions in the region. InfoWatch is working in the Gulf region for several years already and from our clients and partners experience we can say the companies understand the severity of data leakage problem and the necessity for reliable protection and so are ready to invest.

Discuss briefly your partner strategy/channel programme in the Middle EastInfoWatch Group actively invests into good channel partners in Gulf region to build a reliable partner chain. Our strategy for Middle East includes three key elements – efficient regional representative, several successful partners in the region and active marketing promotion. We have a strong desire to support and invest into good partners and are open for winning cooperation with the channel.

We have an extended program for partner technical education: InfoWatch technical experts regularly come to ME countries to educate partner technical teams providing them with the deepest knowledge and expertise in data leakage prevention and other information security areas and thus with extra competitive advantage in terms of selling IT security

solutions. All our partners undergo InfoWatch certification and so get the status of InfoWatch Group certified partners.

InfoWatch Group organizes special channel events in the region and actively takes part in events held by our partners. We stand for active cooperation with the channel and contribute our budget, resources and expertise into establishing reliable partner chain in Middle East.

Discuss the challenges of information protection brought on by increased mobility and BYODThe main challenge BYOD brings to the network is a security risk, where the more convenient and mobile the technologies are, the less they are secure. There are three main challenges BYOD brings to the network.

The first, among other challenges, is the loss of mobile devices. The major vulnerability in this case is the human factor where people fail to use the necessary security tools, such as encryption, on their mobile devices. At the same time they constantly forget or misplace their gadgets in public places.

The second challenge is the vague limit between personal and corporate data on private mobile devices of employees. This data should be used and stored separately on a private device, thus companies require special policies for BYOD regarding personal and corporate data processing.

The last difficulty is intellectual property protection. Employees often regard the results of their intellectual work as their private property, where as a matter of fact, it is usually the company’s property.

Discuss the future of information protection in the age of Big Data, Cloud, Internet of Things and other emerging trendsI believe several trends will

dominate in field of information security in future. First of all they are different privacy protection technologies. For example when a mobile device user wants to stay private he will just need to press some button and immediately switch to the “private mode”. Newsecuritytoolswillfollownewcommunicationmeans especially in the matter of private space protection.

Another promising trend is further development of content and behavior analysis technologies including for the purposes of detecting malicious insiders in corporate environment at an early stage. Today’s security systems normally work in “catch after the incident” mode. But crime prevention is much more important than cure of effects. Until an employee illegitimately copies client database we never know he is malicious insider. But every man has his personal characteristics and if it suddenly changes dramatically it may be alarming for his chief. With help of content and behavior analysis systems it will be possible to detect such offences at a preparation stage, thus proactive systems for protection against insiders are a promising field.

Besides, development of security systems against targeted attacks will be in demand. Current antivirus solutions are good in protection against mass attacks (mass viruses and phishing, etc.) but they are unable to combat sophisticated targeted attacks aimed at specific organizations (often strategic sites and big corporations). Obviously one should invent specific protection tools providing higher level of security.

"The companies with most valuable informationare most at risk. First of all they are

companies which have big volumes of personaldata. Then there are companies which

possess different trade secrets"

24  |  July 2014 

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.

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

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

Eyeing partner led growth

TechKnow | Huawei

Shailendra SainaniSales Director, ME Region

Huawei

  July 2014  |  25

to Silver, we will look to 15 in these markets like the UAE and Saudi Arabia. There is the much wider space in the silver and registered partner ecosystems, where we will like the distributors to increase our channel breadth, enabling as many partners as possible to tap as many customers. At the same instance, we would want to ensure that partner profitability is taken care of.

Do partners have any stake in the telecom Business?Telecom is a direct Business and is taken care of by the Carrier Business Unit. That is a different engagement model over a longer period of time. The service model is also different and we need to deploy our own teams.

Has the partner program been revamped and what have been the key features of the refresh?There has been a refresh and one of the aspects we focused on was partner profitability. The focus was on differentiating our rebates program. We have created a model for our partners to use our marketing funds to create demand. We are giving rebates to our partners on the basis of revenues generated, specialization basis and third on Marketing basis where we are supporting them on all their marketing initiatives. There are two kind of funds used – one is the Partner development fund which is wholly funded by Huawei and the other is co-funded . The rebates program is therefore structured to ensure profitability for partners while dealing with Huawei.

We have a rebate based program for our distributors and this is classified on a product basis. We are encouraging distributors to specialize and where we see that a significant level of investment is required, we will reward them on that basis.

Discuss your distribution and geographical focus?From an enterprise Business group perspective, we cover from mid-market to enterprise and in terms of the territories that we oversee include GCC including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. Our distributors cover the regional markets for us. As of today, we have Enterprise Systems, Huawei, Empa and Stor IT. Optimus is specialized on UC, Empa on IT and Enterprise Systems is across the board and StorIT on storage. Our partner program is across the region but focused on certain markets. We want to enhance our partner program further and take it to the next level.

The channel is looking for a change and the channel has great confidence in Huawei to be the change because of the vast product portfolio that we offer. We cover end to end solutions portfolio and there is no other vendor who has that range under one umbrella. From computing to storage, networking and the voice video IPT portfolio, we offer solutions across.

Elaborate on your enablement focus for the channel?We are selecting partners on basis of solutions focus and verticals focus. Based on these, we are enabling them. We offer sales training for the sales teams from resellers and equip them with product knowledge so that they can talk in detail about the products Huawei offers and understand the key selling points. We enable the pre-sales partners where we focus more on transferring the technology knowhow. The third area is certifications

for post sales resources. There is a hands on training wherein Huawei assists the partner in the first implementation scenario so that the partner gets enabled on site. We

also have certifications programs running. Apart from these, Stage 2 is our

authorized training partner here and in Saudi Arabia. Certifications given out include sales Associate, Sales Expert, Network experts, design experts, implementation experts etc. These cover our key areas of focus.

How do you view the opportunities in emerging technologies and what’s Huawei’s value differentiation?Definitely, there are opportunities in the market in areas like cloud, BYOD, VDI, Big Data etc and customers are looking for such solutions and there are implementations. We want to enable our partners in such emerging areas. We have some good cloud solutions. For instance, Huawei FusionCube is an IT infrastructure platform based on an open and integrated architecture. It integrates blade servers, distributed storage devices, and switches into its 12 U subrack. Distributed storage, a virtualization platform, and cloud management software are also factory installed which makes it an ideal product for a cloud provider or a cloud integrator. We have launched a product called OceanStor 9000, suitable forBig Data. Using a symmetric distributed architecture, the OceanStor 9000 delivers large-scale horizontal expansion capabilities, and a super large single file system to provide shared storage for unstructured data.

We are wrapping our products with a solutions focus as well as a vertical focus. Partners are looking for profitability and who cares for them. Our partner program takes care of such aspects and today what we offer is one of the best in the industry.

"The channel is looking for a change and the channel has great confidence in Huawei to be the change

because of the vast product portfolio that we offer. We cover end to end solutions portfolio and there is no

other vendor who has that range under one umbrella"

26  |  July 2014 

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 cloud-deployed 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

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.

TechKnow | Barracuda

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 well-managed 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.

Changing realities

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.

Ton

i El I

nat

i, R

egio

nal S

ales

Man

ager

, MEA

, Bar

racu

da

  July 2014  |  27

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 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.

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.

The Orchestrator

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.

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.

What are your strengths as a consultant

and integrator?

Capgemini has strong expertise in service

Point2Point | Capgemini

Kishor ChitaleCEO, Local Business Services, India & ME

Capgemini

28  |  July 2014 

Insight | NetApp

The 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.”

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, services-out 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 cost-cutter-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,

CIOs can be pathfinders and navigators forbusinesses in the unfolding era writes Konstantin Ebert, Director of MEA, Eastern Europe, NetApp

The Case for“Chief Everything Officer”

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 low-value, commodity IT to high-value 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.

Konstantin EbertDirector, MEA & Eastern Europe

NetApp

The Case for“Chief Everything Officer”

In U.A.E Technical800-334629

Support

Regional Techincalsupport.gct

Support

ThecusMea

ThecusMe

GCT MEA

GCTmea2

THECUS Branch Office, Jebel Ali Free ZoneDubai, UAE, P.O. Box 18372, Plot, No. MO 0646, T +971 4 804 1888 | F +971 4 883 4079sales@gctmea.com | www.thecus-me.com

Unparalleled Multi-User Performance for Best-in-Class Value

The UltimateThe UltimateThe Ultimate10GbE Business NAS

GCT is Thecus brand represtative for Middle East, Africa and CIS & Distributed by Microtop (info@microtop.ae) in UAE

30  |  July 2014 

Insight | Brocade

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-to-day 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 FutureFor 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

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

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

Ken ChengCTO & VPBrocade

  July 2014  |  31

both hardware and software solutions, not hardware alone-but also a mental shift by the IT departments themselves. Many of today's senior ITDMs cut their teeth back in the 1990s, when legacy network architectures were first conceived to fuel a connected world, and often attitudes are still stuck in this era. However, today's users need a more agile and responsive network to support a cloud-based world. As a result, ITDMs need to change their attitudes, challenge the status quo, and embrace what users need today. This means adopting a new way of thinking. Although this is never easy, and not all ITDMs will make the change, they must do so in order to succeed.

Fabrics, SDN and NFV at the Forefront of InnovationFor example, IT departments need to redefine the way data is distributed, and transformational architecture models like fabric-based networks, Software -Defined Networking (SDN), and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) are leading the charge. Fabrics increase network utilization by 200 percent and reduce OpEx by more than 50 percent, while delivering zero-touch provisioning that radically simplifies network deployment and improves efficiency. This provides the agile physical

foundation that businesses need to drive change. Like building a house, you cannot do anything without stable foundations.

Fabrics provide this in the data center, and they enable greater innovation across the rest of the business.

Together, NFV and SDN are creating highly automated and more efficiently architected networks that deliver next-generation apps and services with ease and speed-we're talking about deployment in minutes, not days or weeks!-enabling businesses to stop worrying about how to deliver their products and services and get back to innovating new ones.

Often misunderstood, SDN and NFV are complementary, but not the same. For instance, SDN leverages the flexibility of new communication protocols like OpenFlow to give network administrators unprecedented control over the path of network packets. If network traffic begins to bottleneck, administrators can redirect the flow to a different switch, and it's done entirely in software. Routing rules can be set ad hoc, or they can be entirely automated through a centralized interface.

NFV, meanwhile, allows administrators to virtualize core network functions. Instead of relying on a proprietary device for vital tasks like firewalling, administrators can offload the function to a standard x86 server. Virtualized functions can even be deployed in the cloud.

Future-proofing Network ArchitectureSo how can businesses in the Middle East build a platform for innovation in the data center? One key lesson that can be drawn from the issues currently plaguing data centers is that it is very difficult to predict the needs of future products and services. That's why networks should consequently be constructed with an eye toward open standards and interoperability of hardware that provides a blueprint for innovation.

The most meaningful benefit of a fabric- and software-based network architecture is in the long term-the freedom to innovate and the ability to cost-effectively deliver new applications and services in minutes instead of days or weeks. But before we can look ahead to creating

new products and services, the likes of which the world has never seen, we need to do a better job of powering the products and services we

already have. CSPs that began deploying SDN and NFV last year are already beginning to realize benefits, and carriers as well as enterprises are expected to begin rolling out SDN and NFV solutions in 2015.

Breaking the Network Status QuoAll of today's business challenges provide a unique opportunity for IT departments to be change agents and challenge the status quo. They need to continually ask "Why?" Why is the business following the same old strategy of adding boxes to deal with different problems? Why are we locking ourselves into proprietary standards that inhibit flexibility and choice? Why are our users bemoaning the ongoing lack of innovation?

By addressing these questions, IT departments in the Middle East can begin to evolve network architectures to better meet the needs of today's applications and services, broaden the way they can positively impact the business, and lay the groundwork for products and innovations yet to be imagined. In essence, they can bring the magic back to the data center.

"Together, NFV and SDN are creating highly automated and more efficiently architected networks that deliver next-generation apps and services with ease and speed-we're talking about deployment in

minutes, not days or weeks"

32  |  July 2014 

eyetech

Trinergy CubeFAS8000 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 cost-

efficiency. 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.

Overview:Emerson Network Power has announced that its next-generation 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 ever-demanding 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.

  July 2014  |  33

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.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Dell 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, mid-sized 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

34  |  July 2014 

Business 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

Stats & Trends

MEA BI and Analytics SoftwareMarket grows

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.

Fortinet 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

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.

2013 Market 2012-2013Subsegment 2013 Revenue Share (%) 2012 Revenue Growth (%)Analytic Applications and Performance Management

33.5 15.5 33.2 1.1

BI Platforms 119.3 55 105.7 12.9CPM Suites 47.7 22 43.1 10.6Advanced Analytics 16.3 7.5 13.7 18.5Total 216.9 100 195.8 10.8

Business Intelligence and Analytics Software by Segment,Worldwide, 2012-2013 (Millions of Dollars)

Source: Gartner (June 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.”

Fortinet Reveals “IoT: Connected Home” Survey Results

Office 202, Building 12, Dubai Internet City, PO Box 73030, Dubai, UAE. | o: +971 4 4534 664

Barracuda Firewall | Barracuda NG FirewallBarracuda Spam Firewall | Barracuda Web Filter

Barracuda Web Application Firewall | Barracuda Load Balancer ADC

DCS-6010L DCS-7010L DCS-7513DCS-6010L DCS-7010L DCS-7513

Wireless N HD 360º Fisheye Camera

Outdoor HD Day/Night Mini Bullet Network Camera

Full HD WDR Day & Night Outdoor Network Camera

Wireless N HD 360º Outdoor HD Day/Night Outdoor HD Day/Night Outdoor HD Day/Night Full HD WDR Day & Night Full HD WDR Day & Night Full HD WDR Day & Night Outdoor Network CameraFull HD WDR Day & Night Full HD WDR Day & Night Outdoor Network CameraFull HD WDR Day & Night Outdoor Network CameraFull HD WDR Day & Night Full HD WDR Day & Night Outdoor Network CameraOutdoor Network CameraOutdoor Network Camera

DCS-6113

Full HD Day & Night

Dome Network Camera

DCS-6113 DNR-322L

9-Channel 2-Bay

mydlink NVR

DNR-322L

with3TB/6TB

HDD

AUTHORIZED DISTRIBUTOR

Aptec - an I ngram M icro Company

P. O. Box 33550Dubai Internet City,Dubai, UAEE-Mail: sdawda@aptecme.com

Tel.: (+971 4) 3697 111Fax: (+971 4) 3697 110www.apteconline.com

www.dlinkmea.com

On guard? The complete IP Surveillance

education solution from D-Link helps to

monitor your school premises, to ensure

student and staff safety, and to prevent

theft and vandalism.

SECURING AND SAFE GUARDINGYOUR SCHOOLwith D-Link IP Surveillance Solutions

D-Link’s IP Surveillance solution is ideal to monitor your campus, school entrances, offices and classrooms from

virtually anywhere at any time. With D-Link you’ll enjoy greater peace of mind to help build a safer school.