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Networking is no longer about product. It's about solutions. It's about strategy. It's about vision. For over six years, Network World Middle East has led the Middle East with a combination of forward-looking editorial, grounded in local reality. From details of cutting-edge technology to explanations of technical buzzwords in clear language, from demonstrations of networking advances in the region to details of solutions offered by key players, from case studies to exclusive interviews, Network World Middle East has provided strategic vision for senior management and tactical advice for networking professionals.
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www.networkworldme.com | Issue 144 | March 2011
PLUS:
Reality check foR unified communications
state unionof the
SPeciaLfocUSIt trends
In healthcare
DiSaSTeR RecoVeRY | ViRTUaL DeSKToPS | WiReLeSS LaN | feMToceLLS | MWc
TAKE THE OMNISWITCH™ 10K CHALLENGE Discover the performance and see how it outplays the competition at:
www.omniswitch10kchallenge.com
ALCATEL-LUCENT’S NEW OMNISWITCH™ 10K IS IN A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN, OFFERING:
> LESS COST> LESS COMPLEXITY > LESS COMPROMISE
WE’RE CHANGING THE GAME WITH A CLASS-LEADING DATA SWITCH
4287 Alu OS10K AD-207x270 v1.indd 1 13/01/2011 10:56
24
32
COVER STORY
contents COMMENT04 a different beat
NEWS UPDATE06 Zain trials femtocells in saudi
08 server sales kept bouncing back in Q4
12 Juniper leapfrogs cisco with QFabric
data centre
16 Femtocells deployments more than
double in 12 months
IN ACTION18 dubai silicon Oasis authority has set up a
centralized storage array at the main sites
as well as dr sire linked to a redundant
Fc fabric.
EVENT REPORT20 a brave new world – a roundup of Mobile
World congress
FEATURE28 In the safety zone
30 healthy attitude
32 toward a Gigabit Wi-Fi nirvana
TEST 38 Microsoft beefs up system center with
new module
NEW PRODUCTS40 a guide to some of the new products
in the market
LAYER 842 all the news that’s fit for nothing
State of the union:Reality check for unified
communications
IssUe 144 | March 2011
Quick FinderPage 6-22Zain, Alcatel-Lucent, Druva, EMC, Qualcomm, Global Knowledge, Etisalat, Juniper, Cisco, du, Ericsson, Riverbed, Alpha Data, Avaya, STME, DSOA, Ciena, HP Networking
Page 23-44FVC, NEC, Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, Symantec, eHosting DataFort, BT Global Services, Brocade, Zebra Technologies, F5, Blue Coat, HP, Siemon, HTC
28
www.networkworldme.com4 Network World Middle East March 2011
EDitorial
A different beat
Jeevan ThankappanSenior Editorjeevan@cpidubai.com
PublisherDominic De Sousa
COONadeem Hood
Commercial DirectorRichard Judd
richard@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9126
CMOKimon Alexandrou
kimon@cpidubai.com +971 4 440 9149
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Published by
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While the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all information in this magazine, they
will not be held responsible for any errors therein.
LTE, more tablets,more apps. That pretty much sums
up this year’s Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona.
This bellwether event for the mobile industry is a good
place to be in if you want to gauge the mood and get an
insight into what’s in store. If the trends visible at this
year’s event are anything to go by, 2011 is going to be a
pivotal year in the history of mobile communications. LTE
is already here, a bit earlier than expected, with many
commercial deployments underway all over the world,
including Etisalat in the UAE. Many operators in the
region are already trialling the technology and making
their networks LTE ready. However, I don’t expect any commercial roll outs to happen
this year, as most regional operators are looking to maximise their 3G assets before
moving to the next-generation. Besides, the eco-system around LTE in terms of
devices is not available in the market yet. Spectrum issues could also throw a spanner
in the works, delaying the deployment. But, what is for sure is that LTE is just a
question of when, as it offers many compelling reasons for operators, and represents
a complete paradigm shift – a huge shift in focus from voice to data. The portended
data explosion is going to force many to re-evaluate their current business models, and
come up with innovative marketing and billing strategies. With data tipped to overtake
voice big time, many would be left with no choice but to move from the existing
flat-fee structure to a volume-based billing model, not to mention other significant
changes in the back-end as LTE is built completely around IP. Will that be the only
change? I guess the most important change as move to the advanced mobile standard
is something very fundamental – while network coverage makes the difference between
winners and losers in the market now, tomorrow it is going to be all about who will
provide more data at a lower cost. Are you ready for that?
NoT YoUR coPY?If you’d like to receive your own copy of NWME every month. Just log on and request a subscription: www.networkworldme.com
PUBL
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www.networkworldme.com | Issue 144 | March 2011
PLUS:
REALITY CHECK FOR UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS
STATE UNIONof the
SPECIALFOCUSIT TRENDS
IN HEALTHCARE
DISASTER RECOVERY | VIRTUAL DESKTOPS | WIRELESS LAN | FEMTOCELLS | MWC
www.networkworldme.com6 Network World Middle East March 2011
bits
Through this project, the mobile operator
can experience first-hand how small
cells effectively address its three main
challenges: fill mobile coverage holes,
increase the network’s capacity to deal
with mounting mobile data traffic and
create new, value-added services in a
rapid, cost-effective way.
“Zain is the first mobile operator in
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to trial
Femto-based small cells, which clearly
positions us as an innovator in the
mobile broadband space,” said Dr, Saad
Al Barrak CEO and Managing Director of
Zain KSA, Zain. “Partnering with Alcatel-
Lucent, we want to assess how small
cells can help us provide 5-bar mobile
coverage to our residential and business
customers – even in circumstances
where this has traditionally been a
challenge, such as in in-building and
rural environments.”
Zain has been looking for ways to
increase the coverage of its network
without having to invest in expensive
macro site deployments. Additionally,
next to covering white zones, Zain wants
to continuously improve its customers’
Zain trials femtocells in Saudi
trUE Fact
706,000is the number of server units shipped out in the first quarter of 2010 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This represents an increase of 4.4 percent from the same period last year. Server revenue totalled $ 4.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, a growth of 10.4 percent from the same quarter last year.
Source: Gartner
The Qtel Group announced a commercial
agreement with Skype, whereby its
mobile broadband subsidiary wi-tribe, will
promote Skype and its related products
over wi-tribe’s networks in Jordan and the
Philippines; two key markets for wi-tribe.
Under the agreement, wi-tribe; a provider
of wireless broadband Internet, will enable
customers in the respective markets
to easily download Skype software and
connect with their family and friends.
Dr. Nasser Marafih, Group CEO, Qtel,
commented: “The Qtel Group’s strategy for
innovation is driven by the needs of our
customers, and enabled by partnerships
Qtel Group partners with Skype
quality of experience - offering them the
best-on-the-market mobile data plans
with the highest availability and fastest
access speeds, as well as the latest and
coolest services.
“As part of this project, we are
providing Zain with our proven small
cells product portfolio which is being
commercially deployed around the
world,” said Adolfo Hernandez, president
of Alcatel-Lucent’s activities in EMEA..
“Alcatel-Lucent’s small cells are plug-and-
play and enable the creation and delivery
of a new wide range of value-added
services through the use of application
programming interfaces (APIs) - such as
location, presence and security.
with like-minded companies. We recognise
the changes taking place in the market and
the increasing customer demand for rich
communications solutions, and so have
decided to partner with Skype - one of the
pioneers in the industry. This is a first-of-its-
kind in our Middle East region and we look
forward to working closely with Skype to
deliver the best possible customer experience.”
Skype had 145 million average monthly
connected users for the three months
ended 31 December 2010 and according
to TeleGeography in January 2011, Skype-
to-Skype calling minutes in 2010 were
equivalent to approximately 20% of total
global international PSTN and Skype-
to-Skype calling minutes. With today’s
partnership announcement, more users in
the Middle-Eastern and Asian regions will
enjoy easy accessibility to popular Skype
features such as free Skype-to-Skype calls,
instant messaging, low cost calls to landlines
and mobiles as well as the recently launched
Group Video Calling.
Dr. Nasser Marafih, Group CEO, Qtel
Alcatel-Lucent has been selected by Zain KSA for the first small cells trial in Saudi Arabia, which is expected to augment the mobile service experience.
Your complete source for performance and value!
Office No. Q4−252, Saif Zone, P.O. Box 121456, Sharja−UAE. Tel +971 6 557 9397, Fax: +971 6 557 9398, Email: info@multinetfze.com
March 2011 Network World Middle East 7
Your complete source for performance and value!
Office No. Q4−252, Saif Zone, P.O. Box 121456, Sharja−UAE. Tel +971 6 557 9397, Fax: +971 6 557 9398, Email: info@multinetfze.com
www.networkworldme.com8 Network World Middle East March 2011
Druva, a company that sells enterprise
backup software, has announced Druva
inSync 4.1 Enterprise, an application that the
company claims to offer near-instantaneous
automated backups of laptops.
An additional tool, included with the 4.1
release, also allows iPads and iPhones to be
backed up over a corporate network.
The inSync application also offers one-click
restores of any file or backup volume and uses
block-level data deduplication for backups and
restores, according to Borja Rosales, EMEA
Director of Druva.
Rosales said his company’s application can
be installed by users in less than 20 minutes
with a five-step procedure and its client-triggered
EMC has introduced a free Community
Edition of the its high-performance,
massively parallel Greenplum Database for
research and development projects. The
company said that the new Greenplum
Database CE offering includes free
analytic algorithms and data mining tools.
“This is a product designed to
get people started developing on our
products and on open source technology,”
Luke Lonergan, CTO of EMC’s Data
Computing Products Division. “It’s free
for research and development. If they
go production and want support, then
they have to pay license fee, which is per
terabyte or PC core.”
The Greenplum Database CE business
analytics tools allow users to view, modify
and enhance included demo data files.
The Community Edition can be
downloaded as a pre-configured VMWare
virtual appliance for use on laptops
and desktops, or as a set of packages
for deployment on user machines. All
users are free to participate in new
Greenplum Community Forums to get
support, collaborate, post ideas, and test
enhancements developed by various users
independently, Lonergan said.
Greenplum CE users can also take
advantage of the product’s open-source
analytic algorithm library, MADlib, to
give them data mining and machine-
learning methods for structured and
unstructured data.
Druva goes live with inSync
EMC releases free edition of Greenplum
Worldwide server revenue and unit
shipments continued a yearlong recovery in
the fourth quarter of 2010, but growth is
likely to slow this year, research company
Gartner said.
Revenue for all types of servers grew 16.4
percent from a year earlier, while the number
of servers delivered grew 6.5 percent in the
quarter, Gartner said. The company cited the
replacement of x86 servers that companies
had held on to through the global recession
in 2009, as well as the introduction of the
Nehalem family of processors from Intel and
new Opteron chips from AMD late in 2009.
Gartner believes the replacement of x86
servers following the economic downturn has
Server sales kept bouncing back in Q4: Gartner
passed its peak and will slow this year.
IBM led the industry in revenue for the
quarter, with a US$5.2 billion in sales, or
35.5 percent of the market. Sales of System
X and mainframe System Z platforms helped
IBM during the quarter, with the System
Z line showing a 68.3 percent increase in
revenue, according to Gartner.
HP came in behind IBM for revenue,
with 30.4 percent of the market, but led in
unit shipments for the quarter, delivering
767,026 servers or 32.2 percent of the
total. Dell was the second-biggest vendor by
shipments in the quarter, with 515,274 or
21.6 percent of the industry total. Dell was
also the third-biggest company in revenue.
Oracle suffered a 40.8 percent drop in
shipments and a 16.2 percent decline in
server revenue from last year’s fourth quarter,
when its server business was still owned
by Sun Microsystems. Cisco Systems, in
its first full year of shipping servers after
the introduction of its Unified Computing
System in 2009, earned a market share in
the low single digits, Gartner said.
backup architecture enables high levels of
scalability and security. The inSync application
also incorporates “smart bandwidth” throttling
through its Octopus WAN Optimisation
Engine, which automatically prioritises networks
and schedules backup bandwidth as a percentage
of overall network bandwidth. The WAN
optimiser chooses the optimal packet size and
opens up as many as eight parallel connections
at the same time.
Druva inSync 4.1 runs on Windows or
Linux commodity servers. The servers can
be configured with solid-state drives (SSDs)
to enable a “hyper cache” feature, which
will increase backup performance as much
as six-fold.
bits
Poor printing quality, risks of failure, leaks, you certainly would not want your business to look that bad. Only HP Original Cartridges can guarantee perfect prints and smooth printing.
So look for the following when buying new cartridges for your printer:
• a sealed packaging • an intact Security label (where present) • a certified HP Supplier • and be suspicious of “too good to be true” offers
Say it best with Original HP Supplies. hp.com/go/anticounterfeit
For more information visit www.hp.com/me
All you Are doing by not using HP originAl CArtridges is entering A dAnger zone.
March 2011 Network World Middle East 9
Poor printing quality, risks of failure, leaks, you certainly would not want your business to look that bad. Only HP Original Cartridges can guarantee perfect prints and smooth printing.
So look for the following when buying new cartridges for your printer:
• a sealed packaging • an intact Security label (where present) • a certified HP Supplier • and be suspicious of “too good to be true” offers
Say it best with Original HP Supplies. hp.com/go/anticounterfeit
For more information visit www.hp.com/me
All you Are doing by not using HP originAl CArtridges is entering A dAnger zone.
www.networkworldme.com10 Network World Middle East March 2011
bits
Qualcomm has announced its quad-core
Snapdragon chipset designed to meet the
requirements of next generation tablets
and computing devices. The new quad-
core APQ8064 is the flagship chipset in the
new family of Snapdragon chipsets and is
based on the new micro-architecture code
named “Krait.” With the purpose of being
built for mobile devices, this 28nm micro-
architecture will redefine performance,
achieving speeds of up to 2.5GHz per core
and minimizing power consumption and
heat generation to enable new, thin and
light form factors.
The Snapdragon APQ8064 chip
will be designed to enable the next
generation of converged computing and
entertainment devices. These devices will
have significantly higher performance
requirements, including support for
larger screen sizes and resolutions,
more complex operating systems, multi-
tasking, multi-channel audio, HD gaming
and stereoscopic 3D (S3D) photo and
video capture and playback, as well as
output in full HD to 1080P flat panel
displays over HDMI.
While performance requirements have
been increasing, battery technology and
capacity have struggled to develop at
the same pace. To meet this challenge,
Qualcomm created its next generation
architecture and integrated four new,
low-power CPU cores and its advanced
Adreno graphics into the APQ8064,
enabling it to offer twelve times the
available performance as well as 75
percent lower power than the first
generation of Snapdragon processors.
The combination of advanced processors
and multimedia technology will provide
tablets and mobile computing devices
with unsurpassed performance, battery
life, low thermal dissipation and the
broadest set of connectivity options
available in the industry.
Etisalat has inked an agreement with
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE:
ALU) for a planned deployment of the
Middle East’s first and widest Long Term
Evolution (LTE) network in the UAE.
Using Alcatel-Lucent’s end-to-end
solution, Etisalat will deploy the first
commercial LTE network in the Middle
East within the first quarter of 2011.
On the occasion, Mohammad Omran,
Chairman of Etisalat commented: “As
the region’s leading-edge telecom service
provider, this is a significant milestone
for our corporation and we are proud to
be the Middle East’s first and widest LTE
IT and business skills training provider
Global Knowledge has appointed Anders
Norregaard as its Managing Director
for UAE & Gulf. Anders joins Global
Knowledge MEA from Global Knowledge
Europe where he started his service with
Global Knowledge in October 2008 as
Managing Director for Denmark; During
that time, Anders drove the Danish
business to one of its most successful
periods in recent times. Before joining
Global Knowledge, he spent 5 years as a
sales director for Arrow ECS in Denmark
– The world’s largest value added IT
distributor. Anders – who is 36 years
old - has a total of 12 years experience in
the IT industry mainly focused on Value
added distribution.
Etisalat rolls out LTE network
Global Knowledge names new MD
Qualcomm debuts quad-core Snapdragon for next-gen tablets
network, thereby fulfilling our promise
to continuously deliver superlative
communication experiences to our
customers every step of the way.”
“Over the last year we’ve witnessed a
200% growth in data roaming traffic. Due
to the smartphone boom in the UAE, as is
globally, our customers continue to crave
for higher speeds and better connectivity.
There is an exploding demand for new
technologies and large bandwidth to
support and enable the surging data
traffic”, said Marwan Zawaydeh, Etisalat.
“We are confident that this advanced
next-generation network from Alcatel-
Lucent will meet our customers’ needs for
innovative mobile broadband services.”
LTE can accommodate multimedia
applications such as video conferencing,
high definition content transmission and
high speed video downloads from social
networks, giving Etisalat’s customers
faster mobile broadband.
Alcatel-Lucent will provide Etisalat with
a complete end-to-end High Leverage
Network solution – including LTE base
stations (eNodeBs), all-IP wireless Evolved
Packet Core (EPC), a converged end-
to-end network management solution
and a range of professional services
including project management, planning,
installation, commissioning
and integration.
www.networkworldme.com12 Network World Middle East March 2011
bits
The UAE-based SI Alpha Data has
been certified as a “Platinum Business
Partner” with Avaya, a leading global
provider of B2B communications
networks and services.
The ‘Platinum’ certification is the
highest Avaya offers and is an industry-
recognised designation indicating that
Alpha has met the rigorous technical-
competency criteria that ensure the
delivery of best-in-class customer
service and support.
Alpha Data already provides Avaya
communications systems and services
to both government and private
enterprises in the UAE with services
that include design, implementation
and technical support to the client
business.
As part of the new 5 year managed
services agreement, Ericsson will augment
du’s IT applications and deliver application
development and maintenance for du’s IT
application landscape.
Fahad Al Hassawi, Chief Human
Resources and Shared Services Officer, du,
says: “We have grown rapidly as a company
ever since we launched operations. To
maintain the momentum and build on it
we have chosen Ericsson to partner us in
the field of IT Application Development.”
Under the terms of the contract,
Ericsson will develop and maintain
applications for about 35 platforms and
technologies, including upgrading and
consolidation of du’s software applications
domains, transformation of operations
and enterprise support systems and
managed services.
Riverbed has added a level service
dashboard designed to give business
executives a high-level view of how
well applications are performing on
the network.
With its WAN optimisation analytics
platform Cascade 9.0, executives can
drill down see if there are performance
problems that need immediate attention
or build a historical view of their network
to plan upgrades, the company says.
At the same time, the Riverbed has
upgraded the RiOS operating system
for its Steelhead WAN optimisation
appliances. RiOS 6.5 includes
application-specific optimisation for
Microsoft Outlook Anywhere and
Alpha Data goes platinum with Avaya
Juniper leapfrogs Cisco with QFabric data centreJuniper Networks has unveiled the
results of $100 million in research and
development: a new architecture for data
centre infrastructure called QFabric,
formerly code-named Project Stratus. The
company says QFabric will boost data
centre throughput 10-fold and be able to
scale 12 times larger than conventional
architectures while cutting costs for
infrastructure and operations. Analysts
and beta users say they are impressed.
Four years in the making, QFabric
promises to flatten data centre
architecture from two or three layers to
one, drastically reducing the number
of devices needed to build a data-centre
network.
The new architecture creates what
is logically a single data centre switch
overseen by a management platform that
gives one view of the fabric. QFabric is
supported by three devices – the director
management platform, the interconnect
switching fabric and the node, which
handles ingress and egress ports.
In making the announcement, the
company showed three products to support
QFabric – QF Director, QF Internconnect
chassis and the QFX3500 node.
The performance improvements that
QFabric claims would put Juniper ahead
of Cisco and HP for performance, says
Rob Whiteley, an analyst with Forrester
Research. Brocade comes the closest as
a competitor for a data centre fabric, he
says, and it remains to be seen how the
two will stack up. There are no full-fabric
deployments of either yet, he says.
Du partners with Ericsson
Riverbed upgrades WAN optimisation platform
SMB v2. The new version also includes
optimization for SSL certificate traffic for
client machines and for protocols used
by satellites.
The software makes it easier to
configure QoS settings on Steelheads for
customers who choose to use it rather
than QoS on their routers. Customers
rank their applications in importance,
categorize each site by the bandwidth of
their WAN connections and set minimum
and maximum use for classes of activity.
The QoS employs the hierarchical fair
services curves algorithm.
The devices now take latency into
consideration when determining how
to handle individual applications. For
example, if imposing deduplication on
traffic would introduce excessive latency
that would actually increase the time
it takes for traffic to arrive, the device
would skip it.
25th April 2011The Westin, Dubai
RECOGNISING THE MIDDLE EAST’SNETWORKING CHAMPIONS
www.networkworldme.com/nwmeawards2011
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www.networkworldme.com14 Network World Middle East March 2011
www.networkworldme.com16 Network World Middle East March 2011
Femtocells deployments more than double in 12 months
bitsbits
Informa Telecoms & Media has issued its
latest femtocell market status report which
revealed that deployments have more than
doubled in the past 12 months. The report
found that although residential services
represent the overwhelming majority of
femtocell deployments, the market has also
started to see particularly strong growth
in the enterprise sector. Almost a third of
femtocell deployments now include enterprise
offerings, contrasting strongly with the
situation 12 months ago when there were
no non-residential deployments. It also
highlighted the importance of the the first
urban and rural rollouts over this period.
In total there are now 19 femtocell
deployments globally compared with nine
at Mobile World Congress 2010. These
include six enterprise offerings, two urban
deployments from Vodafone Qatar and
Telefonica Spain as well as an outdoor rural
service from SoftBank in Japan. These
demonstrate that operator interest is not
limited to residential services alone. Non-
residential femtocell services focus on the
high-value enterprise market, public places
such as metropolitan environments where
they provide a capacity boost, and rural areas
where network coverage has traditionally
been uneconomical.
Furthermore, the past quarter has
also seen important progress in femtocell
technology. In addition to more powerful
models that cover larger areas, new low power
USB-connected femtocell designs promise
to open up new service opportunities for
operators. The second femtocell plugfest
also took place, indicating that the industry
is close to seeing widespread standardised
femtocell deployments.
“While residential femtocell deployments
continue to grow we are seeing changes in the
market as a whole with operators realising
the technology can extend to the enterprise,
rural and urban markets. Enterprise offerings
are rapidly becoming a standard component
of all femtocell deployments. Beyond this,
operators have already started to embrace
urban femtocells to overcome the coverage
challenge, and outdoor designs for rural
markets which could also revolutionise
developing markets too,” said Dimitris
Mavrakis, Senior Analyst at Informa
Telecoms & Media.
Informa Telecoms & Media expects the
femtocell market to experience significant
growth over the next few years, reaching
just under 49 million femtocell access
points (FAP) in the market by 2014 with
114 million mobile users accessing mobile
networks through femtocells during that year.
Healthy growth is anticipated throughout
the forecast period with femtocell unit sales
reaching 25 million in 2014 alone.
GOOD BAD UGLY
E-commerce booms in SaudiA new Arab Advisors Group survey of Saudi Arabia’s Internet users revealed that around 39% of the adult Internet users in the country
buy products and pay for services online through e-commerce services. Electronics are the most popular products bought online, followed by software, while airline tickets booking and hotel reservations are the top services paid for online.
A new major survey of the Internet users in Saudi Arabia was concluded by the Arab Advisors Group in January 2011. The survey revealed that around 39% of adult Internet users in Saudi Arabia buy products and pay for services online. The Arab Advisors Group conservatively estimates the number of these users to be around 3.1 million which is around 12% of the total population in Saudi Arabia. These e-commerce users have spent an estimated US$ 3 billion on buying products and paying for services through e-commerce transactions in 2010.
Iranian cyber army strikes againThe pro-Iran hacktivist group that defaced the Baidu and Twitter Web sites a year ago has hit another target: the U.S. Government's Voice of
America news site.Voice of America was knocked offline temporarily
after hackers were able to change the organization's DNS (Domain Name System) settings, redirecting Web traffic hitting Voice of America sites to another site controlled by the hackers.
Breaking into domain name registration accounts and redirecting Web sites is a favorite tactic of the Cyber Army, and it has pulled off this attack numerous times in recent years. The group posted similar messages in the Twitter and Baidu incidents.
Night Dragon stalks oil and gasThe recent news reports on the Stuxnet virus have helped highlight the importance of security in process industries like oil and gas. Recently,
McAfee released a reportdescribing coordinated covert and targeted cyber-attacks on the oil and gas industry which they attribute to Chinese hackers. Unlike a Stuxnet type virus which threatens to disrupt processes, the McAfee report uncovered attempts to hack into commercially sensitive data for competitive intelligence - attempts which McAfee has named "Night Dragon". Security is a top priority for the oil and gas industry. In fact, security is often cited by oil and gas companies as a barrier to outsourcing or sending data outside of the company firewalls. Oil and gas companies hold data such as detailed well logs and production figures close, while being more willing to outsource management of other types of data. In this case, it is not exactly clear exactly what data was the target.
BAD
UGLY
GOOD
March 2011 Network World Middle East 17
du, the UAE’s integrated telecom service
provider, has converged its fixed and mobile
IP transport networks using the Cisco CRS
Carrier Routing System. This will enable
FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) on du’s
network to meet the demand for high-
end broadband services and makes the
company unique in its ability to rapidly
deploy new high-bandwidth mobile
applications and data packages. Cisco and
du have collaborated previously to develop
a portfolio of data and mobility services
in the UAE. This new phase of network
development will allow du to improve the
speed, flexibility and scalability of mobile-
based services to its customers.
This is one of the first regional FMC
projects where all the fixed and mobile
services run on the same IP network with
mobile (signaling and bearer), mobile data,
residential internet, business internet,
residential voice, enterprise voice,
international voice, layer 2 VPNs, layer 3
VPNs and video running on a single IP/MPLS
core powered by Cisco. This collaboration
between Cisco and du also paves the way for
future mobile applications and services to
du’s customers in the UAE. By consolidating
cores, du is able to offer its customers in
the UAE a more scalable platform to deliver
future services at a higher quality. The
reduction in core equipment and moving to
latest technology also reduces du’s energy
consumption and reduce carbon footprint.
Du enters FMC world
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www.networkworldme.com18 Network World Middle East March 2011
MobilY DEPloYs100G NEtWorK
Saudi Arabian mobile operator Mobily, in partnership with Ciena, has activated what is said to be the
first commercial 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) network in the Middle East. This regional first, deployed within the Riyadh metropolitan area, is an extension of Mobily’s nationwide network.
Mobily, which owns more than 40 percent of Saudi Arabia’s mobile market, recently announced its selection of optical transport and switching platforms, Carrier Ethernet solutions, as well as management and maintenance services from Ciena – all aimed at supporting high-bandwidth services. The 100G coherent service delivered on Ciena’s ActivFlex 6500 Packet-Optical Platform – the industry’s first commercially available system equipped with coherent 100G optics – is key to that architecture. Mobily’s new 100G capabilities give the operator the ability to quickly and easily add network capacity in the crucial metropolitan area of Riyadh.
“This 100G deployment demonstrates our ongoing focus on innovation, aimed at bringing leading edge technology offering to our customers,” said Abdul Aziz Al Tamami, Chief Operations Officer, Mobily. “The demand for bandwidth coming from Saudi businesses is growing steadily, and applications like video, teleconferencing and cloud computing are fuelling a significant portion of this growth. By embracing Ciena’s 100G coherent technology, we are capable of fulfilling the needs of even the most demanding of our customers, while future-proofing our network for the years to come.”
Ciena’s 100G coherent technology will allow for a total throughput of 8.8 Terabits of data per second on Mobily’s network, carried over 88 optical channels on a single strand of optical fiber.
Ciena’s ActivFlex 6500 platform equipped with coherent 100G optics has been operating in live networks since Dec 2009 and provides a simple upgrade path from existing 10G and 40G networks – increasing the amount of bandwidth existing networks can carry by as much as tenfold – with minimal network changes and investment to cost-effectively maximise traffic transport.
an unprecedented evolution. We have
chosen STME to implement and update
our systems with the most efficient
technology and solutions because
of their sound understanding of the
integrated free zone park.”
The project was deployed by STME.
“We have created a high-performance,
high-throughput, scalable solution
that delivers optimum value to the
IT investments of DSO. Data security
is paramount for DSO considering
the nature of its business, which
is why we have deployed a best-
of-breed integrated solution for
storage, backup, disaster recovery,
and archiving of their email and file
server,” added Ahmed Galal, Sales &
Marketing Director, STME.
By using Symantec Storage
Foundation, solutions such as
high availability for critical
servers with remote failover, archiving
and enhanced backup were also offered.
The new solutions has successfully
eliminated a Single Point of Failure,
simplified IT administration, reduced
operational costs, and accelerated vital
IT processes such as the recovery of files
on Network-Attached Storage after user-
initiated file deletions.
Abdulsalam Bastaki, Vice-President
of IT at Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority,
said: “It is essential for us at Dubai
Silicon Oasis to make sure that
our systems are in line with all ICT
developments, especially at a time when
the technology sector is witnessing
An array of capabilities
Dubai Silicon Oasis has set up a centralised storage array at the Main Site as well as a disaster recovery (DR) site linked to a redundant Fiber Channel Fabric
in action: Dsoa
L-R: Abdulsalam Bastaki, Vice-President of IT at Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority and Ahmed Galal, Sales & Marketing Director, STME
Why is CommVault positioned as a leader in the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Disk-Based Backup /Recovery” Report?*
The 13,500 customers worldwide who trust us to solve their data management challenges
could answer this question for you 13,500 different ways.
But if you don’t have time to poll them, get the full Gartner
report and more at commvault.com/ITLeaders. Or, to set
up a personal conversation about how we can help you, call
our middle east office in Dubai at +971 4 3753491.
1207 Al Thuraya Tower 2 n PO Box 502224 n Dubai UAEHeadquarters: 2 Crescent Place n Oceanport, NJ 07757 Regional Offices: Europe n Middle East & Africa n Asia-Pacific n Latin America & Caribbean n Canada n India n Oceania www.commvault.com
©1999-2011 CommVault Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. CommVault, the “CV” logo, Solving Forward, and Simpana are trademarks or registered trademarks of CommVault Systems, Inc. All other third party brands, products, service names, trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of and used to identify the products or services of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice.
Backup & Recovery > Archive > VM Protection > Deduplication > Snapshot Management > eDiscovery
* The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2011 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
“
CV-966-Gartner Print Ad Resize.indd 1 2/28/11 2:18 PM
March 2011 Network World Middle East 19
Why is CommVault positioned as a leader in the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Disk-Based Backup /Recovery” Report?*
The 13,500 customers worldwide who trust us to solve their data management challenges
could answer this question for you 13,500 different ways.
But if you don’t have time to poll them, get the full Gartner
report and more at commvault.com/ITLeaders. Or, to set
up a personal conversation about how we can help you, call
our middle east office in Dubai at +971 4 3753491.
1207 Al Thuraya Tower 2 n PO Box 502224 n Dubai UAEHeadquarters: 2 Crescent Place n Oceanport, NJ 07757 Regional Offices: Europe n Middle East & Africa n Asia-Pacific n Latin America & Caribbean n Canada n India n Oceania www.commvault.com
©1999-2011 CommVault Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. CommVault, the “CV” logo, Solving Forward, and Simpana are trademarks or registered trademarks of CommVault Systems, Inc. All other third party brands, products, service names, trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of and used to identify the products or services of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice.
Backup & Recovery > Archive > VM Protection > Deduplication > Snapshot Management > eDiscovery
* The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2011 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
“
CV-966-Gartner Print Ad Resize.indd 1 2/28/11 2:18 PM
Mobile broadband and LTE hogged the limelight at this year’s Mobile
World Congress in Barcelona
A brave new world
The industry seems to have learned
its lessons from 3G, which was
beset with problems when it came
out ten years ago, and is now focusing on
robustness and quality of service in the 4G.
Though these are early days for LTE, the
mobile industry is bullish about the next-
generation, which is all about data.
At the show, mobile gear manufacturer
Ericsson presented its vision of the world
in 2020. Called Networked Society, it
envisions a world with 50 billion devices
with microprocessors connected to
network, many of them wirelessly. Buoyed
by a high demand for mobile broadband
solutions, the Swedish giant is betting on
a world where all microprocessors that
not connected today will be connected,
resulting in the number of connections in
tens of billions.
“We have deployed networks all over
the world. Next 20 years will see those
networks being used in ways never
imagined, with a huge impact on people,
enterprise organisation and society in
general. We believe three components will
make the difference in a networked society
– mobility, broadband and cloud,” said
Hans Vestberg, President and CEO.
Ericsson’s vision is one of machine
to machine (M2M) communication,
which means we can actually start using
event | mobile world congress
www.networkworldme.com20 Network World Middle East March 2011
March 2011 Network World Middle East 21
machines in a way that they talk to each
other and this is a major change relative
to how we have been communicating
in the past. The technology enablers for
this universally connected world are
broadband ubiquity and the declining cost
of connected devices, he added.
Vestberg’s talk on machine to
machine networking ecosystems included
descriptions and examples of smart
networks, smart services and smart cities.
Ericsson says 5.3 billion people are
connected worldwide today, which is
expected to reach 7-8 billion by 2015.
“Broadband penetration has, of course,
been the most important factor for
operators around the world. Every 1000
new mobile broadband subscriptions
generate 80 new jobs, which is why
governments need to think about
broadband infrastructure. We expect one
billion people to have mobile broadband
subscriptions this years, which can
reach up to five billion by 2016; the data
consumption will be 25 percent higher,
with video accounting for the major chunk
of traffic,” said Vestberg.
Ericsson says 500 million smartphones
are already on networks and by 2016 there
will be as much data on smartphones as
PCs, and more data capacity on networks
than voice.
To support M2M communications and
hook up operators to cloud, Ericsson has
launched Device Connection Platform at
the show, which makes it possible to create
tailored connectivity and price plans for
M2M services. Ericsson provides a complete
service that the operators can adjust to
serve its enterprise customers’ needs,
including a self-service interface, flexible
billing, charging and connectivity plans
for all devices connected to the network.
Since machine to machine applications
can communicate using any existing IP
protocol they can be accessed and share
data via internet. In addition, the operator’s
customer will be able to manage their
subscriptions and devices in real time.
In tune with the shift from host-to-host
connections to a focus on connections
from users to networks and vice versa,
Ericsson is expanding its IP networking
portfolio, with several new solutions to be
rolled out during 2011. At the show, it has
taken the wraps off its first solution in the
portfolio – Smart Service Router, which
the company says will form the basis of
the new mobile core network needed in
4G/LTE networks.
Though the show this year was
all about LTE, which is expected to
come early, Ericsson says HSPA will
continue to evolve in parallel to LTE.
The manufacturer has demonstrated
multi-carrier HSPA with 168Mbps on
the downlink and 24Mbps on the uplink
using a prototype consumer device and
commercial network equipment. This is
said to be a world record for the highest
HSPA speed achieved on commercial
network equipment.
To reach 168M bps, Ericsson used
a number of radio tricks, including
antenna technology MIMO (Multiple-Input
Multiple-Output) and sending data over
several channels at the same time. MIMO
uses multiple antennas in the base station
and on the device to increase speeds.
Besides HSPA at 168M bps, Ericsson
has also demonstrated HSPA with 42M bps
using a single channel and 84M bps using
two channels. Operators already offer
HSPA at 42M bps, but they have to use
two channels. By only using one channel
aided by MIMO, operators can “be much
more efficient with their valuable radio
spectrum”, Ericsson said.
Today, 79 commercial HSPA networks
offer download speeds of 21M bps. Add to
that 13 commercial HSPA networks that
can offer up to 42M bps, and five operators
that have committed to HSPA at 84M bps,
according to the latest statistics from the
Global mobile Suppliers Association.
Another major area of push for
Ericsson is manager services, which
accounts for 10 percent of the net sales for
the company. Its services organisation now
boasts of 45000 professional and has won
54 managed services contract in 2010.
Though the show this year was all about LTE,
which is expected to come early, Ericsson says HSPA will continue to evolve in parallel to LTE.
EricssoN airs sMallEr MobilEbasE statioNs
Ericsson has joined the move towards using smaller mobile base stations, launching Ericsson Air (antenna integrated radio), which aims to reduce power consumption while expanding coverage to more areas.
For mobile subscribers, the Air base stations can open the door to coverage where there was none before, such as in street and indoor environments that are hard to reach with traditional base stations, according to Jan Häglund, vice president and deputy head of product area IP and broadband at Ericsson’s Networks unit.
The Air base stations integrate the antenna unit into the radio unit. The first generation of the product will put the baseband unit, which handles the data and call processing, into a separate box. But in the future it will also be integrated into the main unit, according to Ericsson.
The Air base stations can be used in 2G, 3G and LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks, and will come in different sizes. The smallest ones will be the size of a one-liter milk carton, and can cover an area with a cell radius of up to about 100 meters, according to Christian Hedelin, head of radio product marketing at Ericsson’s Networks unit.
We organised a CIO roundtable in Kuwait to discuss the changing paradigm in networking in the context of emerging technologies, which yielded some good advice on network transformation
Changing the rules
Bolstered by 3Com acquisition
and a new go-to-market
moniker, HP Networking has set
its sights on Cisco in networking battle.
Against this backdrop, the company in
association with Network World Middle
East organised a roundtable discussion
in Kuwait to debate the changing rules
of networking and how HP Networking
is enabling customers to build next-gen
infrastructure.
The current networking paradigm
saps resources from IT innovation and
perpetuates a siloed approach to IT.
Networks are too complex, inflexible
and costly. In addition, the boundaries
between the network and data centre
infrastructure limit IT agility and leave
critical resources underutilized.
“With the acquisition of 3Com, HP
is bringing an end to this inefficient
model, enabling convergence that
accelerates business growth at a lower
total cost of ownership. We have
solutions that span from edge of the
network to the heart of the data centre,”
said Khaled Ibrahim El Desouky, Pre Sales
Technical Consultant, HP Networking.
He said customers are looking
for ways to break from business
limitations imposed by the networking
paradigm that has been dominated by
a single vendor. “We are delivering a
common platform, single operating
system, and single pane of glass
management. We are offering open
industry standards and market-driven
innovation, with security solutions
and intelligence integrated into the
secure network fabric.”
Desouky also explained the reasons
why HP Networking is emerging as a
credible alternative in the networking
market. “Customers are telling us that
one of the reasons why the cost of
managing and deploying networking
infrastructure hadn’t changed over
the years was because a competitor
that held a majority position in the
market just kept adding, adding, adding
more features without lowering their
cost, and many of these features were
features the customer never used. We
will deploy for you exactly what you
need, and then we’re going to translate
that to you in business value that you
won’t get anywhere else.”
He claimed what differentiates
HP networking from a technology
standpoint is the intelligence that
its brings to the table, which enable
customers to deploy the network fabric
and network architecture in much
simpler ways, that will open up new
opportunities for business growth. “We
have got one management solution end
to end. We’ve got Intelligent Resilient
Framework technology, which allows
you to do clustering performance and
leading-edge bandwidth access.”
This was followed by a presentation
by Arun George, Technical Sales Manager,
HP TippingPoint on the some of the
burning issues around virtualisaiton
security, where the threats are new and
the traditional security tools don’t cut
it anymore.
“To address the unique
requirements of the virtualised data
center, we are offering TippingPoint
Secure Virtualisation Framework
(SVF), which is designed specifically
for implementing best-of-breed
threat protection for the virtualized
infrastructure. We are extending our
threat research capabilities, breadth
of protection, ease-of-use, and
automation capabilities to include
virtual infrastructure.”
HP TippingPoint is also offering
active theat blocking, which filters
and detect malicious traffic and stop it
before it can compromise or damage the
virtualised data centre infrastructure or
its data assets.
The roundtable was attended by
Farhan Baboojee, Sr. Regional Manager
– IT Ops, Agility; Imran Saleh, IT Special
Consultant, PACE; Fahad Almenayes,
Executive Management – Technical
Support and System Operations, Al Ahli
Bank of Kuwait; Ahmed Helal, Manager-
IT, Al Muzaini Exchange; and Rehman
Shaik, Senior Technical Support
Engineer, Al Shaya.
www.networkworldme.com22 Network World Middle East March 2011
event | networking
March 2011 Network World Middle East 23
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While many businesses
tightened their IT budgets
during the recent recession,
a growing number of organisations
are deploying unified communications
solutions – integrated voice, data,
messaging, conferencing and
collaboration services over converged
networks – as confidence creeps back
and budgets expand. The driver?
Return on investment.
For the uninitiated, UC solutions
quickly increase an organisation’s
productivity and reduce operating
costs. UC not only provides more
reliable and cross-functional
communication, but also increases
resilience against network disruptions.
In addition, UC enhances the sense of
belonging and affinity amongst remote
or mobile workers.
However, getting to a UC platform
takes careful thought and planning.
Definitions of “unified
communications” are as plentiful as the
companies that provide the component
technologies. As such, there is no such
thing as one-size-fits-all. However,
there are several broad ways to
approach UC on a single platform.
feature | unified communications
Reality check foR unified communications
state unionof the
www.networkworldme.com24 Network World Middle East March 2011
March 2011 Network World Middle East 25
Many businesses are pursuing
either rich media or telephony-centric
approaches to implementation, while
others are focusing on e-mail- or
instant messaging-centric approaches.
Admittedly, the array of available
technologies, combined with their
unique implications, make selecting a
UC solution a complex undertaking.
There are many things to consider
when deciding what is right for your
company, including the nature of your
organisation’s work and its physical
structure.
“One of the most obvious concerns
has to be bandwidth optimisation.
Since UC involves real time voice
and video, CIOs need to have a
closer look at their bandwidth
and their prioritisation in terms
of services and traffic. The second
is the local ISP infrastructure and
regulations and what these cover. If
the communications system covers
several branches across the region,
then the local WAN links and basic
infrastructure needs to be set up
to handle the traffic that these
applications can (and will) generate,”
says Dharmendra Parmar, GM
Marketing, FVC.
Frits Neyndorff, MD of NEC
Unified Solutions, says in addition to
the infrastructure concerns such as
bandwidth, one of the key challenges
for companies is changing user habits
and processes among the staff and
providing the right level of skills and
training to ensure that they make the
most optimal use of the solutions.
Another common area of concern
is how will it affect network security?
“Some of the most common concerns
companies have is security, reliability
and user adoption. Network security in
UC is not any different from having a
voice or data infrastructure. Network
security in UC is all about user
privileges and access,” says Mohammed
Areff, MD – Gulf & Pakistan, Avaya.
Many of the obstacles faced in UC
implementations stem from at least
one of the following:
1. Rushed discovery phase – it’s
easier to address challenges prior
to implementation, so this phase
should carefully assess all potential
applications and systems that link to
the communications platform or may
be affected by the change in traffic
2. Assumption that equipment/
applications can be transferred “as is”
from existing systems – it is important
to clarify this before investing.
3. Lack of stakeholder involvement
in the process – since UC is not an
IT-only decision, you’ll only capture
the maximum benefit if you secure
the users’ input during the discovery,
planning, and implementation process.
4. Failure to establish a goal and stick
to it – this is where UC solutions can
become needlessly complicated, leading
to unanticipated costs.
Identify the weakest link in the chain
If your network is not strong enough
to handle an increase in traffic from
UC, you will not get the results you
are expecting. Review your current
business and network environments,
assess current and future needs, and
incorporate them into a scope of
work for design and implementation.
For most companies, unifying
communications is not a one-size-
fits-all, packaged solution. It is a
phased process, leading to an end goal
that meets business/organisational
communication goals. What is best
for your company is a network and
solution set that stays up and running
when the weakest link is at or near
maximum capacity.
Finally, remember that training
your associates on the maintenance
and use of the UC components is
essential. Begin preparing them for
implementation during installation
and configuration. Again, your goal is
to launch a reliable operating system
without disrupting business as usual.
If your network is not strong enough to handle an
increase in traffic from UC, you will not get the results you are expecting.
Frits Neyndorff, MD of NEC Unified Solutions
Dharmendra Parmar, GM Marketing, FVC
www.networkworldme.com26 Network World Middle East March 2011 www.networkworldme.com
feature | unified communications
Once viewed as a luxury that only
large organisations with hefty IT
budgets could afford, UC solutions are
now within reach of organisations of
all sizes, including many small and
midsize businesses (SMBs).
“At this stage of time and after
few years of penetration in the
enterprises, UC is within the reach
of any organization. The level of UC
penetration might differ as some
organisations may focus on mobility,
others on voice, video and web
conferencing,” says Wael Abdulal,
Collaboration Manager, Cisco UAE.
Microsoft, which has recently
launched its Lync server, says users will
no longer need to invest in expensive
hardware to adopt UC. “In fact, you
don’t need to even own any hardware
if you opt for the cloud based or
partner hosted version of Microsoft’s
UC solution. Owning hardware/IT
infrastructure is one of the key blockers
for small organizations while we offer a
comprehensive enterprise solutions for
some of our large customers. We have
references to support UC for business
from 5 seats to 100K seats,” says Yasir
Khokhar,Information Worker Business
Group lead, Microsoft Gulf.
Parmar from FVC adds that as UC
leverages voice, video, social media
and other communications into a more
converged platform, there is a wider
range of solutions available to suit the
budgets and needs of organisations,
whatever the size. “Organisations can
start with a simple solution using
voice/text messaging, and scale all
the way to conference room video
conferencing solutions.”
Payback time
While the goals of UC are admirable, it
is not always easy to sell management
on the idea of a revamped,
companywide communications
system. However, once management
understands the benefits of UC, they
may realise it is just the kind of
enhancement they are looking for.
“Well, it’s true that some of the
benefits of UC are not very easy to
measure. It also depends on the size and
the extent of how the systems are used.
Some of the clear, measurable areas
are productivity, in terms of increased
communication and collaboration,
access to resources that would normally
be out of reach, and time savings and
costs in terms of travel especially at
executive levels,” says Parmar.
Areff from Avaya adds that
enhanced productivity, employee
retention, cost reductions from staff
travel are just some of the factors
that CIOs could consider while cost
justifying a UC system.
Another option is to look at a hosted
UC system, which offers incredible cost
savings when compared to in-house,
thanks in large part to eliminating
the need for hardware, software and
licenses. Alongside the reduced need
for hardware and software, staffing
costs can also be easily manager, as a
hosted solution doesn’t require a large
team of internal experts to deal with
upgrades or maintenance.
“This would depend on the needs of
the organisation and where security can
play a very key role in deciding what
kind of systems to deploy. On-premise
deployment does have the advantage of
enhanced control, but hosted systems
give these organisations the possibility
of more flexibility,” says Neyndorff.
While unified communications is a
complicated field with many potential
challenges, it can undoubtedly help
transform an organisation, and result
in attractive operating efficiencies. The
facts speak for themselves – UC is on
the rise as an innovative way to change
the way your company does business.
While the goals of UC are admirable, it is
not always easy to sell management on the idea of a revamped, companywide communications system.
Mohammed Areff, MD – Gulf & Pakistan, Avaya Wael Abdulal, Collaboration Manager, Cisco UAE
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March 2011 Network World Middle East 27
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Featuring
feature | disaster recovery
applications don’t get a second chance, and
those that fail to reduce their operational
expenses may suffer the same fate. All
these factors driving the prioritisation of
business continuity and disaster recovery
as top priority,” says Ahmed Hassan, Area
Technical Manager, NetApp Middle East.
Wouter Vancoppenol, Regional Sales
Director of Double-Take (now part of
Vision Solutions), adds another perspective:
“Business continuity is an increasing
concern for enterprises locally - they are
following the same company growth and
user demand curves that we have seen
in other regions. This requirement for
services to be available at all times is a
pressing one, and means that companies
28 Network World Middle East March 2011 www.networkworldme.com
feature | disaster recoverydisaster recoverydisaster recovery
In the safety zone
With the outages costing dearly, business continuity and disaster recovery are
emerging as top priorities for regional businesses. Here is what you need to
know to plan right
Anthony Harrison, Senior Principal Solution Specialist – Storage and Server Management, Symantec
Businesses
are generally
confident about
the resilience of their IT
systems – until disaster strikes
and disruptions ensue. Most f the
businesses in the region have experiences
significant network disruptions during
the last 12 month, either in the form of
political turmoil, power loss, hardware
failures or a loss of telecom services
to facilities. Most of these disruptions
could have been reduced or avoided by
implemented by implementing a more
comprehensive business continuity and
disaster recovery plan.
To compensate for the unexpected
and account for the unpreventable,
prudent organisations utilize business
continuity products and services plans
to keep their enterprises up and running
in emergencies, and implement disaster
recovery
plans and
programs
against the
possibility that a
computer, server, office
or entire building becomes
unusable as a result of a
catastrophe.
Business continuity and disaster
recovery technologies are becoming
less expensive and easier to use, in part
because they are being integrated into
larger IT systems, and also because they’re
increasingly taking advantage of aspects of
cloud computing and virtualisation. There
are many factors that driving this as a top
technology priority for organisations in
the Middle East.
“Enterprises today are facing the
perfect storm. Challenging economic
times are compelling businesses to achieve
even greater levels of cost savings and
operational efficiency. Yet business-critical
applications still require vital data to be
protected and available to meet increasing
service-level demands. The majority of
businesses that fail to protect their critical
March 2011 Network World Middle East 29
are looking at developing how their
business can survive through a disaster
through investing in high availability
and / or disaster recovery planning and
solutions.
He points out at the industries in the
region that have been successful especially
banking and finance has seen a huge
demand for business continuity as more
services are rolled out via the internet to
online users. “Internet banking requires
that systems are available around the clock,
which has made investment in continuity
part of a wider company strategy. Other
industries like has seen the same business
driver - customers are more demanding,
and they won’t accept downtime.”
It is important for CIOs to make a
distinction between business continuity and
disaster recovery, which are often thought
of as the same thing. Disaster recovery is
about re-establishing IT services in the face
of large-scale hardware failure or sabotage,
facilities failure and/or regional natural
disaster. Disaster-recovery capabilities are
measured by the amount of time it takes
to re-establish services and the amount of
data loss. Business continuity is the ability
to continue operations with little or no
downtime in some of these scenarios.
“These two different perspectives on
the same core problem – how do I deal
with an event that is unlikely to happen
but could be big enough to threaten my
business? Disaster recovery has tended to
be viewed as data replication, and business
continuity extends that idea to include the
servers, their configuration, the office space
and equipment and indeed the complete
business process,” says Anthony Harrison,
Senior Principal Solution Specialist –
Storage and Server Management, Symantec.
He cites the example of a telco, for
which DR could include the system that
houses all of their call data records so they
do not lose track of their primary revenue
source, but business continuity would
include the application to generate the
bills at the end of that month, the printers
to print the completed statements and
the people to send them in the post to
ensure that the company’s cash flow is
not impacted.
Mohamed Rizvi, Manager- Information
Security and Advisory Services at eHosting
DataFort, defines DR as an arrangement
related to the preparation for recovery or
continuation of technology infrastructure,
which is critical to an organisation during
a disaster. “It is a sub-set of business
continuity and focuses on IT systems that
support business functions.”
While many regional businesses believe
they are prepared for an unplanned
network disruption, many are not – and yet
the most common causes of IT outages are
addressable by having a well-defined DR
plan in place. What should companies keep
in mind while formulating a plan? “The
main requirement should be to determine
the value of data and infrastructure you are
trying to protect with DR. Understanding
the value is key to determining the funding
an organization would put forward for
their DR strategy,” says Tareque Choudhury,
Head of Security Practice and Professional
Services MEA, BT Global Services
Harrison from Symantec says that taking
the simplistic view of “just copy the data
offsite and we’ll worry about the rest later”
represents a very high cost in terms of
duplicated storage requirements (usually of
the same model of high-end array), because
there is no appreciation of the business
value of the data. “We always advise a
more granular approach to understand
the business value both of the data and the
applications that access it.”
According to Vancoppenol, the first
step is to understand what your critical
applications are- that the business relies
on in order to be profitable. These are
the first that should be protected, either
through deploying high availability or
disaster recovery solutions. The second is
to know what platforms you are running:
even smaller organisations tend to have a
mix of different server hardware in place,
which makes planning how to protect
the applications running on those servers
potentially more difficult. Look at how to
protect these multiple platforms with one
tool, rather than having different products
for each one. This is a more cost-effective
approach, and secondly it makes it easier
to spot any potential gaps in the DR plan,
he adds.
With the cost of downtime going up,
sometimes even battening businesses down,
the pressure on IT organisations is now
more than ever to ensure their DR plan is
ready to go and unfailingly reliable. Think
you are ready about just about anything?
Think again.
Mohamed Rizvi, Manager- Information Security and Advisory Services at eHosting DataFort
Tareque Choudhury, Head of Security Practice and Professional Services MEA, BT Global Services
www.networkworldme.com30 Network World Middle East March 2011
feature | healthcare
Healthcare in Middle East is going digital, which brings both tremendous opportunities and security risks
Healthy attitude
Healthcare information technology
is expected to play a major role
in meeting the demand for
care, quality, and safety, while bridging
the gap to affordability. Healthcare
providers and players in the Middle East
are faced with the challenge of making
transformative changes to care delivery
and business models to respond to the
changing technology landscape , which
is essential to achieve cost savings and
efficiency goals.
“The healthcare industry in general
is conservative when it comes to
technology - after all, patient care is at
stake. However, in recent years healthcare
has accelerated adoption of technology
compared to other industries as a way to
deliver high quality care while keeping
costs in line,” says Ali Ahmar, Regional
Sales Manager, Brocade Communications
Today, there’s the widespread
migration from paper- and film-based
to electronic medical/ health records,
adoption of wireless technologies for
medical monitoring as well as bedside
care delivery, increased use and capability
of medical imaging (PACS, CT, MRI, etc.)
technology, unified communications,
and high availability/ disaster recovery
solutions are the current technology
trends, he adds.
Perhaps, the biggest disruptive
technology transformation in the industry
is the move towards electronic health
records (EHRs). Electronic records not only
allow general practitioners and specialists
to document and easily share patient
information; they also help support
“evidence-based” medicine. That allows
physicians to treat patients using best
practices derived from the systematic,
scientific study of standard treatments.
Given the huge upfront costs involved,
some industry experts believe a software-
as-a-service (SaaS) EHR model would
be the most cost-effective and least
complicated deployment for medical
practices, clinics and hospitals unable
to afford in-house IT equipment. Under
a SaaS model, EHR applications such
as physician-order-entry systems are
hosted on servers in a vendor facility
and hospitals would access those systems
through a secure Internet portal or via
a virtual private network. That way, the
health care facility would not need to
deploy hardware and software in its data
centre or hire the IT staffers needed to
support and maintain an EHR system.
Health goes mobile
Smartphones, tablet PCs and other
wireless devices are poised to play a
greater role in health care as doctors and
patients embrace the mobile Internet.
Smartphones allow doctors to check
e-mail, use mobile applications and surf
the Web, and also lead to collaboration
between physicians and patients.
In fact, a recent research report
suggests that smartphone apps are set to
become the killer health care product as
a research report projects that some 500
million people will be using them within
five years.
According to the Global Mobile Health
Market Report 2010-2015 compiled by
research2guidance, more than a third
of 1.4 billion smartphone users in 2015
will be running some kind of mobile
healthcare application.
Mobile health (mHealth) applications
allow doctors to monitor patients, no
March 2011 Network World Middle East 31
matter where they are, in real time. The
emergence of consumer health electronics
devices like portable ECG machines, blood
pressure monitors and weight scales can
help physicians seamlessly capture and
transmit patient information from home,
work or from the road.
According to a report released by
Accenture earlier this year, the rise
of inexpensive Internet connectivity
along with the development of smaller,
cheaper and “smarter” health electronic
devices should help health care workers
deliver better, more efficient health care
to patients.
“Wireless technology, specifically
the adoption of 802.11n is one of the
most transformational technologies in
healthcare. With the proliferation of
medical monitoring devices as well as
the broad adoption of PDAs, tablet PCs
and smart phones, wireless technology is
enabling healthcare providers to monitor
and deliver care whenever and wherever
needed. Mobile devices free from wired
terminals and combined with wireless
access have become extremely important
to healthcare providers giving them
ready access to patient information and
the ability to diagnose and treat patients
more quickly, regardless of their physical
location in the hospital complex: wards,
clinics, special-care units and so on,”
says Ahmar.
RFID is also set to play a crucial
role, according to Wael Hasan,
Territory Manager – Middle East,
Zebra Technologies. The use of RFID
in healthcare is vital to minimizing
errors in patient treatment and revising
process that were previously very
time consuming. When talking about
solutions for the Middle East, integration
is definitely a buzz word for the market.
“The fact is that patient histories—
especially those dating back to the
pre-computer era—are incredibly time
consuming to review if not recorded
digitally. In areas like medication
administration, additional time and costs
are incurred as some facilities still rely on
centralized networks which can only be
accessed from the pharmacy floor or the
back office. These bulky and immobile
systems of the past are becoming
exponentially more difficult to manage.
From staff ID cards to mobile printers
and patient wristbands, the combination
of RFID technologies becoming available
in the Middle East presents incredible
opportunities for healthcare providers,”
he adds.
The rapidly changing technology
landscape in the healthcare sector,
especially the transition to EHRs, is
stressing existing networks. Industry
experts point out a medical-grade
network that can guarantee continuous
high performance is the need of the hour.
“At the same time, high performance
needs to be matched with high security.
Confidential patient information is
among the most sensitive data that exists,
and, in most jurisdictions, is subject
to a host of legislative and regulatory
controls,” sums up Ahmar.
Ali Ahmar, Regional Sales Manager, Brocade CommunicationsWael Hasan, Territory Manager – Middle East, Zebra Technologies
www.networkworldme.com32 Network World Middle East March 2011
Today’s existing state-of-the art wireless LAN can achieve 300 Mbps using 802.11n with two spatial streams. Future developments will deliver three- and four-stream speeds of up to 600 Mbps. But the 802.11 working group has set its sights on a more ambitious milestone: 1 Gbps throughput.
Toward a Gigabit Wi-Fi nirvana
After considering several
approaches for getting
to gigabit speeds, the
802.11 WG settled on two related
approaches, and formed two task
groups to produce future gigabit
standards: 802.11ac and 802.11ad.
While both groups share the same
goal, the approaches taken are
techupdate
March 2011 Network World Middle East 33
different because the groups have
fundamentally different purposes.
Fundamentally, all wireless LAN
standards depend on access to radio
spectrum. 802.11ac will be designed
for use at frequencies under 6 GHz,
which in practice refers to the
existing radio spectrum available
today in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands
used by 802.11a/b/g/n. Therefore, an
important component of the work
in Task Group AC will be to design
backward-compatibility mechanisms
to peacefully coexist with existing
networks.
Higher data rates in 802.11ac
are supported by a set of familiar
techniques. Once again, the speed
will be supported by well-understood
OFDM techniques, another bump
up in the size of radio channels,
and MIMO. Advances in both chip
manufacturing technology and
processing power have also made it
possible to use more sensitive coding
techniques that depend on finer
distinctions in the received signal
as well as more aggressive error
correction codes that use fewer check
bits for the same amount of data.
Wider radio channels support
higher speeds. Just as 802.11n
provided a leap in speed by doubling
channel width from 20 MHz to 40
MHz, 802.11ac provides a bump in
throughput with still-wider 80 MHz
channels. At 80 MHz, channel layout
once again becomes a challenge,
even in the relatively expansive 5
GHz spectrum. Manufacturers will
need to adapt automatic radio tuning
capabilities to offer higher-bandwidth
channels only where necessary to
conserve spectrum.
Increasing data rates through
efficiency is an important goal of
every new 802.11 standard. One
common measure of efficiency is the
number of megabits transmitted per
megahertz of spectrum (Mbps/MHz).
802.11 began life at 0.1 Mbps/MHz,
and current 802.11n standards have
pushed that figure to 7.5 Mbps/MHz.
Several efficiency enhancements are
on the drawing board for 802.11ac,
and the most interesting of these is
multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO).
MU-MIMO builds on the
beamforming capabilities of 802.11n
and enables the simultaneous
transmission of different data frames
to different clients. Correctly using
MU-MIMO requires that vendors
develop spatial awareness of
clients and sophisticated queuing
systems that can take advantage of
opportunities to transmit to multiple
clients when conditions are right.
802.11ad has the same gigabit
goal, but is intended for use with
new spectrum around 60 GHz to
use. Range will be shorter, but the
spectrum is “cleaner” because many
fewer devices use it today. The open
spectral band is large enough that
the current 802.11ad draft supports
nearly 7 Gbps throughput.
The higher data rates of
802.11ac and 802.11ad will have
far-reaching influences into other
areas of the protocol. CCMP, the
existing encryption protocol first
The higher data rates of 802.11ac and 802.11ad
will have far-reaching influences into other areas of the protocol.
standardized in 802.11i, requires
two AES encryption operations for
every 16 bytes of data. To encrypt a
1,500-byte frame requires roughly
200 AES encryption operations. To
make matters worse, CCMP is based
on a “chained” mode of operation
that requires in-order processing of
the 16-byte chunks because chained
cryptographic modes require the
output of one stage to be used as the
input to the next. Many engineers
within the 802.11 working group
expect that the high data rates of
802.11ac and 802.11ad will be too
high for CCMP.
Fortunately, a solution is readily
available in the form of the Galois/
Counter Mode Protocol (GCMP),
which has been incorporated into
the 802.11ad draft. GCMP uses the
same AES cryptographic engine,
but embeds it into a more efficient
framework. Compared with CCMP,
GCMP requires only half the number
of encryption operations, and, more
importantly, is not chained so that
GCMP cryptographic acceleration can
be applied to an entire transmitted
frame in parallel. The downside of
the adoption of GCMP is that it is a
new protocol and will only become
available in new radio chips that
support it, and an entire generation
of centralized cryptographic
equipment, such as the security
processors in WLAN controllers, will
become obsolete.
As with every jump in speed that
has occurred in Wi-Fi, 802.11ac and
802.11ad present challenges for the
network administrator. The move
to gigabit Wi-Fi is needed to keep
up with demand for Wi-Fi network
capacity and enable Wi-Fi to remain
the technology of choice at the edge.
feature | VDI
Cost-saving technologies remain a priority for IT in 2011 and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), with its ability to streamline operations, is one of the
technologies at the top of the list.
Best practices for maximising VDI success
on network performance, understanding
the difference between LAN, WAN and
VPN activity is critical to project success.
How VDI affects the network
VDI pilots often stall when employees start
accessing their desktops via WAN, VPN
With VDI, IT administrators
can manage desktops and
applications from a centralized
location, eliminating the need to physically
touch and update every single desktop.
This, in turn, enables faster provisioning
and deployment - a framework that is
especially attractive for rapidly expanding
computing environments. End users also
benefit, gaining the ability to seamlessly
access critical applications from any
location with a myriad of devices.
So what’s the catch? Why do VDI pilots
fail? As the computing landscape has
changed, so have user expectations. With
mobile and ubiquitous computing fast
becoming the norm for most corporations,
end users don’t tolerate availability or
performance problems. In fact, end user
satisfaction has been identified as the No.1
factor in determining success of any VDI
pilot/proof of concept (POC). If the plan
includes thousands of desktops, ensuring
the first hundred users’ happiness is critical
to satisfying the next hundred, and so on.
The network is key to VDI satisfaction,
being the conduit by which the virtual
desktop continuously feeds the VDI
client desktop activity. This video feed
“paints” the monitor’s screen via a desktop
presentation protocol, such as PCoIP, ICA
or RDP. When the visual display depends
www.networkworldme.com34 Network World Middle East March 2011
March 2011 Network World Middle East 35
and other lower speed links. On the LAN,
contention is usually a non-issue, so pilots
that only involve LAN links can create a
false sense of accomplishment. If the VDI
team has not taken a baseline on WAN
and VPN links to see what headroom is
available for VDI traffic, there may not be
enough resources for even a small pilot.
When looking at bandwidth, be sure to
account for peak utilization and not just
average use. If there are legitimate spikes
of activity expected across the links, there
must be room for those peaks once VDI has
been added, or non-VDI users will complain.
Armed with this information, you
can work with the VDI vendors to
adjust protocol parameters to ensure
performance within the available
headroom. These parameters include
things like screen resolution, audio
quality, USB redirection, and other user
experience settings.
Once configured, it is important to
monitor the infrastructure continuously
for sudden bursts in network load that
drown out VDI users across the WAN. Over
the course of the VDI pilot deployment,
these optimizations will provide a stable
baseline from which to extrapolate full
deployment feasibility.
Real-time visibility is required
The network, shared storage, connection
brokers, desktop hosts, application
virtualizationservers, Active Directory
servers, DHCP servers, security gateways,
etc. must all work seamlessly for the
successful delivery of a VDI desktop.
The performance, availability and
constraints of each infrastructure
component impacts the quality of the
end user experience. For example, when
desktop logins are slow, it might be a
connection broker problem due to a
“login storm,” but it might also be a
lengthy anti-virus update that needs to be
scheduled to run after login. A sufficiently
granular performance management
solution is the only way to peer into these
critical seconds.
current performance against the
historical response time thresholds. If
anything changes, administrators will be
immediately notified. If the storage latency
for a key host serving up VDI desktops
has jumped to 80 milliseconds, several
minutes is far too long to wait. Traditional
threshold crossing events should be
bolstered by recordings or other contextual
data so that VI administrators, network
engineers, and storage administrators can
collaborate on a common interface.
Give power to the users
When evaluating VDI management tools,
special consideration should be given
to solutions that directly capture user
experience. If users can trigger a DVR
recording of their activity when problems
occur, administrators can capture the
real-time load on the infrastructure, for
example CPU, memory, storage and the
activity in and out of the desktop. This rich
information eliminates the impossible task
of trying to “re-create” the problem. Load
balancers, dynamic cluster rebalancing
algorithms, and on-demand resource
schedulers ensure that this morning’s
infrastructure configuration will be
entirely different in the afternoon when
they log back in.
A recording like this gives users a
simple and proactive way to immediately
communicate with IT as soon as they
encounter performance problems —
instead of learning about them a day later
during a status meeting. By giving users
a “visual trouble ticket,” the service desk
also benefits because it has immediate,
actionable user information.
With some analysts calling 2011 the
year of VDI, it’s well worth taking the
time to understand the new management
criteria essential to succeeding with VDI.
By ensuring that your infrastructure
performance management system is up to
the task for a VDI initiative, you can meet
and exceed user expectations, increase
overall business productivity and improve
operational efficiencies.
Once configured, it is important to monitor the
infrastructure continuously for sudden bursts in network load that drown out VDI users across the WAN.
The many moving parts in a VDI
ecosystem demand an accurate, timely
and comprehensive picture, or reactive
management will be the sad reality.
Performance problems can’t be re-created
from historical logs and/or disparate
reports from a small subset of the virtual
desktop infrastructure components. A
real-time system allows you to navigate
through the infrastructure and drill
down to where the issue is happening
even while it is occurring. Administrators
should look for a single dashboard that
covers all the components - whether
physical or virtual - so that they are not
blind-sided by the fluctuations common
in complex IT systems.
Response time, also known as latency,
has a direct and immediate impact on
end-user experience. Virtual desktop
performance is highly sensitive to sudden
shifts in storage latency as well as network
latency across the WAN. If latency
shifts aren’t measured in real-time, VDI
administrators will have their phones
ringing off the hook with user complaints
while the lights in their virtualization
management systems are still green.
This puzzling situation occurs because
most management solutions poll for data
every 5 to 15 minutes, often averaging
the data over large intervals as well. A
30-second latency hit is invisible on these
intervals, but the user still complains or
chalks it up to “poor IT support.”
That is why it is essential to have a
real-time system continuously analyzing
the infrastructure and comparing
www.networkworldme.com36 Network World Middle East March 2011
www.networkworldme.com38 Network World Middle East March 2011
Gunning for data centre control
interview | F5
F5 CEO McAdam on battling Cisco, becoming arms dealer for public cloud
F5 is described as an application
delivery vendor, but that term is
nebulous to some folks and it
doesn’t really convey all of the things
that you do. You cover everything from
application acceleration, wide-area
network (WAN) optimisation, security,
policy and more. Can you crystallize F5’s
mission and what sets it apart from other
infrastructure companies?
We see our products as occupying the
strategic control points within data centers.
We see all the traffic that’s going between
applications and between servers. Because
of these strategic control points, we can
March 2011 Network World Middle East 39
network. What is it that you can do that a
Cisco can’t?
Well, in fact, they are not really at a
number of control points. I mentioned
earlier about being application fluent. To be
application fluent, you really need this full
proxy architecture and it needs to be sitting
very close to the application. Cisco actually
doesn’t have that technical approach.
They focus more on load balancing and
just effectively managing the traffic. They
do Layer 7 [switching], which means that
they can open up the packets and make
strategic decisions based on that. But it’s
very limited. Also a lot of their thrust is to
sell the Layer 4-7 solution on the switch
or on the router. From their perspective
that’s pretty good because it means they
can add value to that [device], but it’s not
the right place in the network. You really
need to be after the firewall, just before the
application is ready to take the data so that
you can encrypt the data, so that you can
massage it. They don’t really have what we
would call strategic control. Switches and
routers can be defined as strategic control
points, but not at the application-fluent
level.
What’s changing in the competitive
landscape today?
There’s not been a significant change over
the last few years. If you go back three years
ago, Cisco - in particular - was much more
competitive against us. But we have gained
significantly in market share. The best
way, in my opinion, to look at the market
is to look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
That shows you all the competitors and
the only sort of technology competitor we
have is Citrix, from when they acquired
the NetScaler solution. But we think
from a feature point of view and from a
performance point of view that we’ve
really got them outclassed as well. We’ve
enjoyed a situation over the last two
or three years where we’ve had a big
technology advantage and not much
competition. Hence the 90+% win rate I
was talking about.
We poll our customers on a quarterly basis and
we typically see scores of 9.2 to 9.6 out of 10. That’s very high.
do simple things like, historically, load
balancing or encrypting the traffic. But then
it gets much more sophisticated where we
can basically provision applications and
servers, we can look at the performance of
specific applications. Our customers can use
our products to change or add functionality
without having to change thousands of
pieces of software and different programs.
We’ve got this opportunity because of the
way data centers have been architected
and are being architected, which is this
whole concept of consolidated data centers,
typically using virtualization technology
without a product sitting in a data center
effectively controlling traffic between the
apps and between the servers and between
the network.
Talk about those control points. Did you
identify them as an opportunity early on or
is this a position in the infrastructure that
you evolved to support?
We started off with load balancing then we
added encryption. In 2004, we came out
with full proxy architecture. The reason
that’s important is that we can actually
sit at the strategic control point and the
application isn’t aware that we’re there,
the user isn’t aware. That gets you a lot of
power. Also, we can be very application
fluent. We can understand what’s
happening at a pretty granular level within
the applications, whether it’s Microsoft
SharePoint or Oracle apps. Over the last few
years we’ve been building more application
fluency into the product. Three years ago if
you were using our products, you may have
had to deal with a whitepaper that would
say, ‘OK if you’re running SharePoint, this
is what you do to improve the performance
of SharePoint’. You read the whitepaper,
you made some changes to our software.
Now we have application templates for
specific types of solutions, and we’ve got
a significant number of those actually.
These templates [are supported] within
the operating system and you tweak the
parameters to optimize [the applications],
to make them more secure, to make them
go faster.
I want to talk about how you compete
against companies like Cisco. When you
win, why do you win? And when you lose,
why do you lose?
I’ll do the ‘lose’ first because it’s an easy
one, it’s a very small proportion of the time
we lose. We’ve actually been publishing
our win rate against the competition. It’s
typically in the low- to mid-90% win rate.
Typically when we lose against Cisco it will
be because of politics, to use the phrase
used by our sales force. Cisco is a great
company that’s got a lot of loyalty within
the customer base, and some customers
basically decide they want to do one-
stop shopping. When we win is when
customers are looking at functionality
and performance. For example, I’ve talked
about application templates. Nobody
else has got that capability. I mentioned
the example of SharePoint. We have the
capability of increasing the performance
of that by as much as 10 times. The short
answer is that we win at a technology level.
We have faster technology and much more
feature-rich technology. I mentioned the
full proxy architecture, there’s nobody
that’s really got anything comparable to
that in the marketplace. Also, we’ve got
a tremendous service organization. Our
customer [satisfaction] levels are world
class. We poll our customers on a quarterly
basis and we typically see scores of 9.2
to 9.6 out of 10. That’s very high. We’ve
developed a world-class sales distribution
channel as well as service channel as well as
having the technology leadership.
So Cisco obviously is at a number of
the same control points you are in the
www.networkworldme.com40 Network World Middle East March 2011
Service Manager delivers workflow and incident response, plus self-service help desk for end users
Microsoft beefs up System Center with new module
test
(CMDB) that receives input from
Service Manager workflows, and, more
importantly, from Ops Manager and
Config Manager via ‘connectors’.
The flow of data from Ops Manager
and Config Manager is usually one-way;
they generally update the CMDB, and
register their state into Service Manager,
not the reverse.
Armed with configuration information
and alerts from Ops Manager, Service
Manager can trigger action items and
workflow activities.
When we triggered rudimentary alerts,
like disk-full warnings, the alerts popped
up almost instantly, as Ops Manager
informed Service Manager that the disk
was getting full. Ops Manager has triggers
that fit MS Exchange, SQL Server, and
other server-based applications, and also
knows a lot about Active Directory data,
along with server-based states.
Configuration Manager manages
software deployments and configuration
details for WindowsServers, clients, and
mobile devices. Its role for Service Manager
is packaging, delivery, and application
inventory/asset knowledge as a software
and configuration fulfillment manager.
The devil of details
Service Manager takes configuration,
operations and Active Directory data
and stores it in the CMDB. When we
installed Service Manager, we found
the “connector” APIs were available
immediately, and transferring already
large stores of information from Config
Manager and Ops Manager shouldn’t take
long over local networks.
The Configuration Manager and
Operations Manager connectors are a one-
way street, meaning that Service Manager
doesn’t in turn, update these two module’s
databases. Workflow in Service Manager
spawns actions, which are in turn able to
be marked as completed.
If we made a software delivery from
Manager. Without these two modules as
input sources, Service Manager is a pretty
handicapped component, which made us
wonder why, as these three modules are so
heavily intertwined, they’re sold separately.
The upside, however, is that they work well
together. They don’t mandate Microsoft
infrastructure exclusively, although the
joining of non-Microsoft apps, operating
systems, and infrastructure is no easy task.
What it does
At the heart of Service Manager is an
MS SQL Server database, called the
Configuration Management Database
Service Manager 2010 is the new
workflow and incident response
module that’s been added to
the Microsoft System Center suite of
management applications. Conceptually,
it’s a process control application with two
faces: a management console for network
managers to perform workflow operations,
and a Web-based help desk Self Service
Portal for end users.
Service Manager 2010 needs to be
purchased separately, but is heavily
dependent on two other Microsoft System
Center modules, Operations Manager
(Formerly ‘MOM’) and Configuration
March 2011 Network World Middle East 41
a simulated user request, we could
make part of the action contingent on
Configuration Manager having observed
the installation on the user’s machine.
The Service Manager help desk
function allows Active Directory users
to fill in Web forms for service, help
or downloads. On the home Web page
for the Service Manager Self Service
Portal, administrators can place systems
information notes, like servers known
to be out or applications unavailable.
Another part of the page allows users to
search pre-selected knowledgebase articles
on administratively-designated topics.
Users can make requests for software
on the Self-Service Portal, and be
presented “automagically” with the desired
product(s), or perhaps spawn an approval
process that brings in Service Manager
admins prior to the software package
being delivered by Configuration Manager.
On the console side, a library
of applications can be selected for
distribution, each with conditions placed
on the workflow. These conditions can be
a compatibility check, and perhaps a signal
from Configuration Manager that all’s
been delivered, or stipulation processes if
the software can’t be installed for some
reason within a set period of time. The
action items remained open as processes
until the details of that set were satisfied.
It’s all very orderly.
What happens as a side effect is
that Service Manager becomes a “best
practices” task master for network
admins who respond to the tasks, and in
that process, document what they’ve done
for archiving or compliance purposes.
The “best practice,” actually the
implemented task procedure, is a
function of a Service Map defined in
Service Manager. The Service Map can
have information manually entered, or be
an imported ‘trigger’ from Ops Manager.
The source of the trigger message might
also be e-mail, Self-Service Portal, or a
systems message (like those found in
TaskManager). Priorities can be assigned
for events spawned by the trigger, so that
urgent details are attended to first.
The trigger can be prioritised as
critical, warning, or informational. Once
the trigger’s conditions are met, the
network admin will see the alert inside of
the Service Manager Console.
Context for the alert (who, where
and what from the CMDB regarding the
alert) can be drilled down to provide
an administrator information needed
to deal with fixing the problem that
spawned the alert.
In practice, Ops Manager alerts
typically took about a minute to reach
the Systems Manager Console. Having the
context of the alert available usually made
short work of getting the information
needed to fix the alert. However, while
a full chain of information is available
about the alert, admins unfamiliar with
the context of the application may have
difficulty assessing what steps might be
necessary to fix a problem, and there can
still be a lot of detective work needed to
fix random problems.
Upsides
The systematic approach represented
by Service Manager was easy for us to
configure; installing connecting pipes
to Ops and Configuration Manager was
equally simple. Service Manager uses IIS to
host its Self Service Portal/SSP application,
which was also simple to configure. User
choices on the SSP are understandable, and
software downloads available via the page
were immediate or required approvals as
we had configured them.
Ops Manager alerts, while not
instantaneous, arrived assuredly and the
administrative steps that we mapped
were dealt with as though in a script.
The steps weren’t finger-snapping fast,
but good enough. Another module, Data
Protection Manager or its equivalent, is
recommended because an outage of any of
the components (console, CMDB, or other
modules) represents a break in the chain
that must be quickly be remade if help
desk production is to continue.
Downsides
For most of this to work, one needs to
have employed a fully Windows based
Active Directory network. While Ops
Manager has connections and some
monitoring for other operating systems,
it’s not nearly as rich in management and
alerting expertise as it is for Windows,
especially Windows clients. Even one Mac
or Linux box creates a significant amount
of obstacle and exception handling,
using Service Manager as a helpdesk
remediation system.
Microsoft shops won’t mind this,
but any organisation with a reasonably
heterogeneous domain will want to
eschew the really rich feature set of
controls offered by Service Manager as
they’ll need a separate-but-equal set of
applications to deal with non-Windows
devices. Once an organization has
wrapped their help/service capabilities
around the Service Manager product,
the work needed to add non-Windows
products is a huge hurdle, excluding
organizations from wanting to even think
about adding other operating system
components unless parallel functionality
can be found in them.
Service Manager takes configuration,
operations and Active Directory data and stores it in the CMDB.
fOR MORE PRODUCT REVIEWS, LOG ON TO:www.networkworldme.com
www.networkworldme.com42 Network World Middle East March 2011
HP TouchPad
Blue coat systems has rolled out a new software release for its Blue coat cacheFlow appliances. this update enables cacheFlow appliances to provide 50
percent bandwidth savings for general Web traffic and even greater bandwidth savings for dedicated large file and video caching. For mission-critical service provider deployments, this release delivers greater manageability, resiliency and scalability to support rapidly growing demand for new, rich media Web content.
Utilizing next-generation caching technology, Blue coat cacheFlow appliances scale content delivery to meet burgeoning subscriber demands. cacheFlow appliances also
provide a “shock absorber” to address traffic spikes that occur when Web sites and content become popular over a very short period of time, such as major news, sporting or political events. to provide specialized caching rules in a dynamic, automated fashion as Web content changes, the new software release provides tighter integration between cacheFlow appliances and the Blue coat cachePulse service, a cloud-based service that automatically delivers optimized caching rules and instructions to the appliances.
the new, one-click software upgrade is immediately available for download by customers currently under an existing support contract. the dc power option for cacheFlow appliances is also now available through an add-on hardware upgrade kit that can be purchased separately.
the tablet landscape just got a bit more crowded: hP has taken the wraps off its touchPad.
the specs for the touchPad are competitive, but only the processor--a dual-core 1.2-GhzQualcomm snapdragon--catches attention. Beyond that, the specs sound fairly familiar: a 9.7-inch 1024 by 768 pixel display (less than the android 3.0-based 1280 by 800 Motorola Xoom), 16GB or 32GB of storage, and a 1.3 megapixel webcam. the unit’s dimensions feel fairly standard, too--0.54-inches thick, which puts it about the same or a sliver thicker than the apple iPad and Motorola Xoom. It also weighs 1.6 pounds, same as Xoom, but 0.1-pounds more than the iPad.
the touchPad is slated for release in summer, in a Wi-Fi version; 3G and 4G versions will come thereafter. Pricing was not announced today, which is to be expected given a release date that’s months out. But the question of how the pricing will align with market-leader apple’s iPad still remains.
Blue coat enhances cacheflow
toolshed tools & gadgets
March 2011 Network World Middle East 43
34428-GTW Barter-Batch 01-Network World ME.pdf 1 1/31/11 11:59 AM
www.networkworldme.com44 Network World Middle East March 2011
Siemon debuts 4-post rack system
siemon has introduced its VersaPOd 4-Post rack, a new, adjustable-depth, 4-post rack system. rapidly deployable, the VersaPOd 4-Post rack integrates with
the same high density, space saving, Zero-U vertical patching and cable management as offered with siemon’s VersaPOd data centre cabinet.
VersaPOd 4-Post rack can be assembled on site in less than 20 minutes to provide a stable platform for mounting extended depth active equipment and efficiently managing high-density cabling in both data centres and telecommunications rooms.
the VersaPOd 4-Post rack’s headers, 45U vertical rails and depth adjustment brackets all feature symmetrical designs to eliminate orientation errors during assembly. this design also self-squares the rack, saving valuable installation time. VersaPOd 4-Post rack is compatible with siemon’s Zero U vertical patch panels (VPP) for support of copper and fibre patching, providing up to 24U of Zero-U vertical patching space between each set of bayed racks, or 16U along both sides of a single rack.
htc has released its first tablet, the htc Flyer. With a seven-inch display, 1.5Ghz processor and high-speed hsPa+ wireless capabilities, the htc Flyer combines natural touch and pen interaction.
htc also announced htc Watch, a new connected video service that will debut on htc Flyer tablet, and will collaborate with Onlive, Inc. to launch the first
cloud-based mobile gaming service on a tablet. touch interaction lights up the htc Flyer
tablet experience, but it also offers a pen experience. With the new htc scribe technology on the htc Flyer tablet, people can rediscover the natural act of writing. htc scribe technology introduces a wave of integrated digital ink innovations that make it easy and natural to take notes, sign contracts, draw pictures, or even write on a web page or photo.
HTc flyer
For sponsorship opportunities at the Reseller Middle East Awards 2011
For nomination enquiries please contact:
Richard JuddTel: +971 55 772 1519
Email: richard@cpidubai.com
please contact:
Rajashree R KumarTel: +971 50 173 9987
Email: raj@cpidubai.com
Manda BandaTel: +971 50 437 1354
Email: manda@cpidubai.com
Merle CarrascoTel: +971 50 922 5866
Email: merle@cpidubai.com
AWARDS2011
For more information please visit:
www.resellerme.com/awards2011For more information please visit:For more information please visit:
SUBMIT YOUR NOMINATIONS NOW
The Westin, Dubai10 May 2011 M Mth
on
at
March 2011 Network World Middle East 45
For sponsorship opportunities at the Reseller Middle East Awards 2011
For nomination enquiries please contact:
Richard JuddTel: +971 55 772 1519
Email: richard@cpidubai.com
please contact:
Rajashree R KumarTel: +971 50 173 9987
Email: raj@cpidubai.com
Manda BandaTel: +971 50 437 1354
Email: manda@cpidubai.com
Merle CarrascoTel: +971 50 922 5866
Email: merle@cpidubai.com
AWARDS2011
For more information please visit:
www.resellerme.com/awards2011For more information please visit:For more information please visit:
SUBMIT YOUR NOMINATIONS NOW
The Westin, Dubai10 May 2011 M Mth
on
at
www.networkworldme.com46 Network World Middle East March 2011
The master competition masters at X Prize Foundation are at it
again. The group announced the 29 international teams that will compete for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, the competition to put a robot on the moon by 2015.
To win the money, a privately-funded team must successfully place a robot on the Moon’s surface that explores at
least 500 meters and transmits high definition video and images back to Earth. The first team to do so will claim a $20 million Grand Prize, while the second team will earn a $5 million.
Teams are also eligible to win a $1 million award for stimulating diversity in the field of space exploration and as much as $4 million in bonus prizes for accomplishing additional technical tasks such as moving ten times as far, surviving the frigid lunar night, or visiting the site of a previous lunar mission, according to the X Prize folks.
internet crime high
layer 8
Want your own, sort of, personal submarine?
The FBI’s 10th annual Internet
crime report finds that complaints and money losses are at an almost all-time high with non-delivery of payment or merchandise, scams impersonating the FBI and identity theft leading to top 10 online complaint parade.
The report, which is issued through the FBI’s partner, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and the National White
Collar Crime Center (NW3C) found that in 2010, IC3 received 303,809 complaints of Internet crime, the second-highest total in IC3’s 10-year history. IC3 also reached a major milestone this year when it received its two-millionth complaint. On average, the group receives and processes 25,000 complaints per month.
Raonhaje Ego Semi Sub can help you explore undersea worlds without all that nasty diving.
You can tell by the name it’s not exactly a real submarine. The Ego Compact Semi Submarine promises to offer you and a friend an unbelievable view of the undersea world but it’s not actually submerging and neither running silent nor deeplike real submarines of yore.
Weighing in at about 7,700 lbs the two-person Raonhaje Ego pretty much looks a little like a catamaran boat with a glass (acrylic actually) cockpit hanging down in between the hulls. The 10-ft Ego is battery powered and can run for about eight hours at cruising speed, according to the company. Once down inside the submerged cockpit, an operator can direct the boat with a steering wheel and accelerator, like a car, whilst peering out into the vast murkiness.
is iT skills gap keeping companies from hiring? X Prize $30 million private
race to the moon is onThere is a disconnect between students getting high tech degrees
and what employers are looking for in those graduates.Employers agree that colleges and universities need to
provide their students with the essential skills required to run IT departments, yet only eight percent of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as “well trained, ready to go,” according to a survey of 376 organizations that are members of the IBM user group Share and Database Trends and Applications subscribers.
The study found nearly four out of 10 respondents report that their IT hires are not sufficiently preparedto perform jobs within their companies, and another 44% say, at a minimum, that there are noticeable gaps in their skills.
This skills gap apparently doesn’t doesn’t stop organizations from hiring professionals with little, if any previous experience. The survey found that nearly half of companies responding to the survey hire new IT employees straight out of school. Two-thirds of organizations do require at least some college intern experience among their hires, according to the study.
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