Value plus october 2015

the

Redington Value is a value added distributor for the following brands in parts of Middle East & Africa:

BUSINESSPARTNER

REDEFINESIMPLICITYAGILE. SCALABLE. TRUSTED.

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OCTOBER 2015 / The Value Plus / 3

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CONTENTS

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I would like to congratulate the Redington Value team on its 10th year of suc-cessful operations and I hope that they continue

with their double-digit growth streak. Looking back, it gives me immense pleasure to see the division scale up so fast and become an integral part of Redington Gulf. From just three employees in its initial year, it has grown to a 200 staff-strong division. Looking at the success that the division has achieved since its inception, the last dec-ade can justifiably be regarded as a decade of dominance for value distribution.

Right partnerships and technology focus has helped the division to grow by leaps and bounds across the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region. It goes without saying that a correct team combination as well as a knack to capitalise on market opportunities has acted as a catalyst in its success.

The IT landscape has become more dynamic with more dis-ruptive technologies coming into play, which complicates decision making. Strategic investments need to be made in order to enhance the skills of those involved in order to mini-mise the risk while selecting

these technologies. Most of the established companies invest in technologies that help them meet their current customers’ needs. The failure lies in miss-ing out on solutions for future customer needs, which might be addressed by upcoming tech-nologies. The ability to spot the next generation technologies that address future needs is the key for survival in a disruptive industry.

FROM THE DIRECTOR

Raj ShankarManaging Director, Redington Gulf

PUBLISHED BY

The Evolving Enterprise Servers and Storage Space

Converged Infrastructure: A Game Changer!

Digital Transformation: A New Era

Software and Security Landscape Update

4 / The Value Plus / OCTOBER 2015


A DECADE OF DOMINANCE

A DECADE OF DOMINANCERamkumar Balakrishnan, President, Redington Value Distribution, takes a walk down the memory lane and talks candidly about the story of Redington Value Distribution – from its inception, through the formative years to when it became one of the most successful value added distributor in Middle East and Africa.




Redington Value celebrates its 10th year of operation this year. When you started this division, did you think about what it would grow up to be in 10 years?I don’t think I had a 10 year

view at that time, the first milestone was to make this concept work which took almost three to four years. A lot of people did not believe that Redington can transform itself from a pure volume player to a significant player in the value added distribution busi-ness. So to answer your question, no I did not imagine what it would be in ten years at the inception of value distribution as the first key step was to establish this as a brand and to prove that the concept behind Value Distri-bution can work.

Tell us something about the start, how many people were a part of your team, the first contracts and some of the initial challenges you faced.Well, we started off with a small team of four people. Our first contract was Sonic-WALL in UAE and 3COM in Saudi Arabia. One of the biggest challenge initially was to convince people internally and externally that there is real substance in the idea behind Value Distribution. It was difficult to sell the ideology to the vendors and I believe it took 15-16 meetings with a certain vendor to get the right message across to the right person because at that time when you said ‘Reding-ton’ people automatically associated you with Volume Distribution. The biggest challenge was to remain committed to the cause with firm conviction in the concept.

There have been many milestones through-out the journey. What do you regard as the first?I believe the first milestone that I would consider is when we won the contract for

Cisco in Nigeria. The reason for this is that the moment you have a Cisco logo associated with your brand, the context with which you are perceived in the market begins to change.

How did it feel to cross a revenue of 100 Mil-lion for the first time?I still remember the moment when I found out, of course it was very special. I remember it was in February 2010 and I was travelling at the time and when I landed, I had some 15-20 missed calls. It was an amazing feeling to cross 100M for the first time and the fact that something that you started from scratch has come so far, gave me an enormous amount of satisfaction. Even the team, everyone as-sociated with the project was overjoyed and there was a feeling that they had achieved something worthwhile.

How have you tailored the four business units within Redington Value to ensure that they maximize the opportunities

“A LOT OF PEOPLE DID NOT BELIEVE THAT REDINGTON CAN TRANSFORM ITSELF FROM A PURE VOLUME PLAYER TO A SIGNIFICANT COMPETITOR IN THE VALUE ADDED DISTRIBUTION BUSINESS.”

available in the marketThe four Business Units have been created keeping in mind the specialization required to handle the specific technologies under each portfolio. The portfolio should include complimenting brand offerings and there should be a strategic fit between the vendors. Partner profile and fulfilling their go to mar-ket requirements have also been kept in mind to better serve the channel community.

What do you think is the reason for this team’s success, the driving factor behind where Value Distribution is now?I think the driving factor is the vision that everyone shares - to see Value Distribution reach new heights. Also there is an owner-ship driven culture here, anyone who joins is given ownership of a project he or she needs to handle and then they are left to it. It is up to them to complete the project in their own way, which I believe helps them grow and also tests their mettle and also for the company, it throws up new, innovative ways of getting something done.

The team what you started with and the team that is there today, what makes them unique?In the beginning every dollar was a struggle. Now the Redington Value brand has become

?




“THE DRIVING FACTOR IS THE VISION THAT EVERYONE SHARES - TO SEE VALUE DISTRIBUTION REACH NEW HEIGHTS. ALSO THERE IS AN OWNERSHIP DRIVEN CULTURE HERE, ANYONE WHO JOINS IS GIVEN OWNERSHIP OF A PROJECT HE OR SHE NEEDS TO HANDLE AND THEN THEY ARE LEFT TO IT.”

quite significant, and our rich bouquet of products attracts a lot of business on its own. But in terms of the quality of people and what we feel they bring to the table, I think that the team we have today, is very similar to the team we had in the beginning. I honestly believe we have been able to retain the cul-ture and the new faces coming in are able to contribute to that. The people who are with us are very passionate about what they do and this passion is represented by the success story of Redington Value.

Describe one moment where you felt ex-tremely proud of Value Distribution?Well I can’t choose just one here, there have been several throughout the journey and I believe there will be many more in the years to come as well. Our employees put in a huge amount of hard work into driving business and when their efforts are recognized by the industry experts, it makes me feel very proud. Also, when we have won a contract under severe competition it has been a moment of immense pride because it tells us that we are better than everyone else in the market and it brings a great amount of satisfaction.

What can you tell us about the business in the current year and the opportunity for growth and expansion of Redington Value?The business in 2015 has been strong in spite of difficult market conditions. Redington value division has managed to grow 25% YOY till date in 2015. The business conditions in Africa have come under a lot of pressure due to forex issues and falling commodity prices including oil. The business in ME has been strong but there are early signs of slowing down in the sales cycle of the government sector.

In terms of growth areas, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Africa markets hold huge potential and we expect to capitalize on that. In terms of technologies we will focus on security, hyper-converged infrastructure and cloud to drive the business forward.There are some regions in Southern Africa and French-speaking Africa where Reding-ton Value will look to expand in 2016.

enablement point of view. We are enhancing our ability to create an incremental pipeline partnering closely with the customers and generating end user demand. We are also focused on building a “converged infrastruc-ture” specialty in value division. One of our strategic objectives – to strengthen Value Distribution’s security portfolio is reinforced by the addition of Fortinet for the Middle East region.

What can your vendors and reseller partners expect from Redington Value going forward in terms of technology additions?Redington Value is a part of GITEX Technol-ogy Week 2015 and will use the platform to launch RedCloud – Redington Value’s cloud program. We will also be focusing on EMC VSPEX Blue: Hyper-Converged infrastructure from Redington as well as advanced solu-

GOING FORWARD WE CAN EXPECT A LOT MORE FROM THE VALUE DIVISION ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES TO:• Ability to showcase solutions from our

facilities (Solution centers)• POC on many different technologies• Authorized training center for key technol-

ogy vendors – training opportunities for partners

• Joint marketing initiatives with partners to generate demand

• Specialized Partner Programs

What are Redington Value’s main business focus areas for the upcoming years?Main focus for value division is in enhanc-ing our ability and offerings in the channel from a product offering point of view and

tions from the software and security division.

REDINGTON GULF TOPS THE ITP POWER LIST

the



INSIGHT - MIDDLE EAST BUSINESS UPDATE

I believe the Middle East Channel in today’s scenario is quite blessed in terms of tal-ent as there is an abundance of resource inflow from neighbouring countries wanting to expand their horizons. Key

in these markets, are still keen to look at con-tinuing genuine progressive investments and keeping the momentum running for the rest of this year and for the next year as well.

The channel in developed markets like US, Europe have to necessarily operate at immense levels of efficiencies only to just survive, leave alone growth and progress. The ME Channel will soon start to experience the pressure and the pain which comes along with it in terms of large scale consolidation, building efficiencies in operations in order to get the extra juice out, professionalism in deliverables and so forth. The ones who really will survive this change are the ones who will,

The IT channel community has matured more in the KSA region since last few years as majority of the partners are focussed on Mid Market segment but we do see

some of them targeting the SMB segment. As new disruptive technologies are entering the market and changing the business landscape, the channel community has realized the im-portance of having the right technical skillset and the ability to market them.

While there are major differences in the way the channels operate across the GCC countries, the interesting drivers for growth and recogni-tion would be more or less the same. As more business opportunities get commoditised, the major driver for actually enhancing profit-ability will come from the intangibles; service, consultancy, training and support.

There is a dearth of quality services in the KSA, one who provides them will always win business. It is up to a partner to identify the

the three key thoughts – ‘Innovation’, ‘Value-Add’ and ‘Speed’ are no longer a luxury.

As UAE and KSA contribute to and hold the biggest share of business in the GCC, the strongest channel is bound to exist in these two countries. Channel will need to specialize – develop skill sets internally and

right opportunity and capitalize on it.With almost everything becoming soft-

ware defined, the channel definitely needs to enhance their skill in such technologies in order to survive into the future. Training and support are most of the times outsourced to vendors who in-turn look at distributors to provide that support to resellers. If the neces-sary technical skills are acquired, partners can provide these as a value add and can enhance customer loyalty. The partners who do not scale up on these aspects will suddenly find themselves irrelevant and would not know how to manage the market. Redington Value distribution using its extensive technical work force engages with key partners to make sure that they are vendor certified and provide support to them in terms of pre-sales, POCs and Demo activities which can help them close deals.

Technologies like Virtualisation, Converged Systems and Software defined solutions will

treat these as assets rather than expenses. To address larger opportunities the channel needs to find out ways and means to consoli-date their finances and secure the ability to

skills to cross sell, enhancing technical offer-

distributors to promote some niche offerings where margins can be protected is becoming increasingly important.

While we as distributors continue to evolve, our focus has always been on visualising what’s ahead and gearing up for change. This methodology has helped us stay ahead in the game and we continue to scale up in order to provide the necessary support and enable-ment to the partners for them to see their business grow. We are very keen to hear from our partners of their growth plans and would like to evaluate how we can be instrumental in their growth strategies and ride the wave together.

will see a lot of investments from customers who are looking out for technology refresh. While this is also almost getting commod-itised, it has opened up opportunities for partners to work on optimising virtualised environments.

MIDDLE EAST MARKET OUTLOOK AND UPDATE

Rajesh Mathrani, General Manager, Middle East Sales & Director Operations, Redington Value Distribution.

Rashad Baradie, General Manager – Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Redington Value Distribution.

work on larger projects. Developing sales

ings around the same and partnering with

sooner than the others, accept the fact that

governments, who are the major stakeholders

continue to capture market share in KSA and

INSIGHT - VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND CONVERGED SYSTEMS GROUP



Virtualization is possibly the most impactful innovation which has changed and continues to change the IT consumption model. Several years ago virtualization

technologies were used mainly to test servers and use resources more effectively. When VMWARE released the hypervisor very few vendors actually supported Virtual environ-ments. But the Administrators soon realized the massive wastage of server resources and virtualization was the way to curtail that. With growing pressure from users, vendors were forced to support virtualized states. It soon became the de facto standard for Data centers and sparked innovations all around the central concept of virtualization.

Now – we’ve entered the next frontier. We’re way beyond simple server virtual-ization and are exploring new avenues to make virtualization an even more power-ful platform. Today the technology has expanded to Application Delivery, Hosted/Virtual/Cloud Desktops: There is a re-surgence of VDI and delivery of complete

The concept of converged in-frastructure has of late gained momentum with the growing need for reduced operational costs, enhanced productivity, agil-

ity and data centre flexibility. Its advantages have been fully embraced in the region and channel partners are benefitting from this increased demand.

It is an approach to data centre manage-ment that relies on a specific vendor and provides pre-configured bundles of hardware and software in a single block. VCE is built on best of the breed hardware of Cisco unified computing, networking and EMC storage and brings converged infrastructure with low TCO, low Risk, enhanced agility and high availability with single point for support.

VCE has redefined converged infrastruc-

virtual desktops, Network Virtualization also known as software defined networks (SDN), Security Abstraction, User Virtual-ization and Storage Virtualization.

The biggest challenge the resellers face today is the rapid pace of change in the IT industry. One has to constantly invest and adapt to the changing models. We have a

ture with their Vblocks range and reformed the IT sector by introducing hyper converged solution with VMWare EVO RACK archi-tecture. It allows the customers to look at deploying modern applications on a very large scale. This can simplify IT operations and permit IT organisations to respond faster to changing business demands.

Not many resellers are able to match the rapid pace of changing trends in IT. There is continuous need for partner enablement to impart new and necessary skills. The partner enablement process is simply too long due to resource scarcity, reluctance to spend on skills and lack of long term vision, hence heavy dependences on vendor or distribu-tion community. Channel development and enablement are one of key focus & differenti-ating factor for us in the MEA region.

highly qualified work force who are con-stantly striving to help our partners at differ-ent stages of the Sales Cycle. We have made significant investments on people, in POCs and demo equipment to help the sales cycle, trainings and certification of partners to help them get up to speed quickly and help them adapt to the changes better.

The demand for converged and hyper-converged systems is only going to grow in the near future. We will continue to expand the channel to manage the supply side. On virtualization we will see more and more adaption on the Network and Storage side and move towards a true Software Defined Data Centre. We have made serious invest-ment in a build facility for EMC VSPEX Blue, EMC’s hyper-converged offering which uses VMWARE EVO RAIL architecture, the only integration facility in the MEA region. We will continue to focus and build on our con-verged system practices mainly with VCE. From Virtualization perspective the focus will be on VDI, NSX, and VSAN, basically a Software Defined Data Centre.

CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE: A GAME CHANGER!

Sayantan Dev, Vice President – Virtual Infrastructure & Con-verged Systems Group, Redington Value Distribution.

Kosgalage Dharshana , General Manager – Virtual Infrastructure & Converged Systems Group, Redington Value Distribution.

EMC



EMC Corporation, a global lead-er in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service is looking forward to a busy period ahead as the market for converged infra-

structure continues to grow and evolve.According to IDC, the converged infra-

structure segment grew 68.5 percent from 2012 to a US$1.4 billion market opportunity

IT infrastructure solutions provider, EMC discusses its latest product, VSPEX BLUE and the unprecedented growth in the hyper-converged infrastructure market.

EMC REDEFINES SIMPLICITY

years due to a shift in the way customers are consuming IT. Customers are increasingly looking for systems that are simple to man-age and easy to scale, provide elasticity, don’t require advanced forecasting, and deliver on the promise of software-defined everything.

To tap into this growing market, EMC earlier this year, announced VSPEX BLUE, its hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA). VSPEX BLUE redefines simplicity by delivering virtualisation, compute, and storage in an agile, scalable, easy-to-manage, HCIA. Available as a single, all-inclusive product for easy ordering, EMC VPEX BLUE accelerates time to market by enabling customers to go from power-on to virtual machine creation within 15 minutes.

Forrester Research has noted that the transformation of virtual computing envi-ronments into fully software-defined data centres (SDDC) is disrupting the archi-tecture of IT infrastructure. The recent wave of converged infrastructure products targeting purely virtualised environments takes a markedly different approach from

in 2013. This market is predicted to expand to US$17.8 billion in 2016. In addition to the established Integrated Systems and Inte-grated Reference Architectures, the emerg-ing converged infrastructure market segment defined as hyper-converged is gaining pace, and presenting considerable opportunities to EMC and its channel partners.

EMC estimates the available market for hyper-converged infrastructure to grow at an annual rate of 39 percent over the coming

EMC



the previous generation. These new sys-tems, which Forrester calls storage-centric virtualised infrastructure, are designed from a storage-centric perspective that integrates Intel x86 server and storage. Several vendors are taking a major architectural departure for the supporting physical infrastructure, transforming IT.

The VSPEX BLUE hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) product is a next-generation converged infrastructure built with SDDC building blocks on Intel Xeon processor-based x86 servers. It com-bines compute, storage, network, virtualisa-tion, and management into a single appliance designed to address the unique needs of midmarket and enterprise customers, and aligns with EMC’s future growth strategy. VSPEX BLUE’s architecture is a distributed system consisting of common modular SDDC building blocks that scale linearly from one to four 2U/4 node appliances.

The VSPEX BLUE approach is suitable for virtualisation of a private-hybrid cloud, remote office-branch office (ROBO), test-dev, and virtual desktops in midmarket, enterprise, and managed services environ-ments. The target customer profile includes line of business owners, application owners, IT directors or generalists, and ROBOs, as well as test and development teams in a mid-market and enterprise IT environ-ments. In addition, EMC VSPEX BLUE could be leveraged by managed service pro-viders either on premise, in a co-location, or their own data centres.

VSPEX BLUE provides great opportunity to EMC’s partners to position a complete infrastructure solution that is simple to buy, install, manage, and scale. VSPEX BLUE redefines simplicity by delivering virtualisa-tion, compute, storage, networking, and pro-tection in an agile, scalable, easy-to-manage hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. Available as an all-inclusive product for easy

ordering, VSPEX BLUE accelerates time-to-value by enabling customers to go from pow-er-on to VM creation in 15 minutes through integrated software powered by EMC and VMware EVO:RAIL. Designed for simplicity, fully orchestrated installation, management, patching, and upgrading, VSPEX BLUE pro-vides linear scaling capability that grows or contracts based on business needs.

Unlike traditional VSPEX in which part-ners choose the components based on EMC guidance, VSPEX BLUE is a complete EMC design with EMC-specified components, EMC value-add software, and EMC support, and since this product is all EMC, it was aptly named VSPEX BLUE.

EMC expects many value added resellers to have interest in extending their current converged infrastructure practice with VSPEX BLUE and leveraging their existing demand generation vehicles and marketing initiatives around VSPEX reference architec-tures with VSPEX BLUE.

VSPEX BLUE will also enable VARs to stand out from the crowd of other EVO:RAIL OEM partners because it brings unique dif-ferentiators with the VSPEX BLUE appli-ance by integrating EMC’s own software, support and other leading solutions to pro-vide a complete, all-in-one, Intel-powered, hyper-converged infrastructure appliance.

EMC VSPEX BLUE MANAGEREMC VSPEX BLUE Manager integrates with VMware’s EVO:RAIL user interface and lev-erages the same design principles to provide a seamless and harmonious experience that embodies the simplicity and ease-of-use functionality that customers expect. From the VSPEX BLUE Manager interface, users can also conveniently access electronic ser-vices (such as EMC Knowledgebase articles), access a wealth of community-sourced on-line and real-time information, and familiar-ise themselves with EMC best practices for

“VSPEX BLUE DELIVERS COMPUTE, STORAGE, NETWORKING AND MANAGEMENT IN AN AGILE, SCALABLE, TRUSTED AND EASY TO MANAGE HY-PER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE APPLIANCE.”

optimal appliance operations. VSPEX BLUE Manager provides deeper

hardware awareness than is available in the native product alone and is the vehicle by which alerts and notifications are displayed to the user in a simple and easily under-stood manner. The VSPEX BLUE Manager leverages the underlying VMware Log Insight product in EVO:RAIL to capture events and to provide up-to-the-minute holistic notifications about the state of their virtual applications, virtual machines, and appliance hardware.

VSPEX BLUE Manager also provides link and download capabilities whereby users can choose pre-filtered, appliance-compatible EMC software titles that will enhance their IT capabilities and experience. It simpli-fies IT management by delivering patch and software update notification that can be automatically installed without interruption or downtime so that the appliance software is always up-to-date, and by enabling EMC Secure Remote Services (ESRS).

EMC CLOUDARRAYEMC recognises that many VSPEX BLUE customers will want to expand their stor-age capacity beyond their VSPEX BLUE appliance and leverage third-party cloud providers. VSPEX BLUE Manager’s link and download capability includes access to EMC CloudArray, which enables this capability quickly and easily.

EMC CloudArray software provides scal-able, cloud-based storage with a customer’s choice of cloud providers, enabling limitless network-attached storage, offsite backup and disaster recovery, and the ability to support both Block and File simply. Each VSPEX BLUE appliance is offered with a free 1 TB of local caching storage, which allows up to 10 TB of total storage when connected to a public cloud provider. CloudArray provides a simple solution to cloud storage with a sophisticated bandwidth scheduler and data reduction technology that minimises net-work impact and keeps your VSPEX BLUE running optimally.

Starting in March, EMC VSPEX BLUE has been made available globally and although it is an EMC product, it is brought to market by selected distribution partners.

VMWARE



Cloud and virtualisation solutions provider, VMware discusses the company’s latest product and its unique value proposition.

REDEFINING VIRTUAL STORAGE

VMware’s software defined storage vision and strategy is to drive transformation through the hypervisor, bringing to storage the same operational efficien-cy that server virtualisa-

tion brought to compute. As the abstraction between applications and

available resources, the hypervisor can balance all IT resources, compute, memory, storage and networking, needed by an application. With server virtualisation as the de facto platform to run enterprise applications. VMware is uniquely positioned to deliver software defined storage utilising the pervasiveness of this software tier.

By transitioning from the legacy storage model to software defined storage with vir-

tual SAN, customers will gain benefits such as automation of storage class of service at scale, self service capabilities which empower appli-cation administrators with cloud automation tool integration, simple change management using policies, finer control of storage class of service, effective monitoring and safeguard existing investment.

The goal of software defined storage is to introduce a new approach that enables a more efficient and flexible operational model for storage in virtual environments. This is accomplished by abstracting the underly-ing hardware into logical, pools of capac-ity that can be more flexibly consumed and managed in a virtual machine centric fashion. The abstraction of the data plane enables ad-ditional functions that an array may provide to be offered as data services for consumption

on a per virtual machine basis. Data Services can provide functionality such as compression, replication, snapshots, de-duplication, avail-ability, migration and data mobility, perfor-mance capabilities, disaster recovery, and other capabilities.

Another method is Implementing an auto-mation layer that enables dynamic control and monitoring of storage services levels to individual virtual machines across hetero-geneous devices, VMware refers to this as the policy driven control plane.

DATA PLANE The data plane is responsible for both, storing data and applying data services such as snapshots, replication, and caching. While data services may be provided by a physical array or implemented in software,

VMWARE



the virtual data plan abstracts the services and will present them to the policy driven control plane for consumption and applies the resultant policy to the objects in the virtual data store.

In today’s model, the data plane operates on rigid infrastructure centric constructs that typically are static allocations of storage service levels independently defined from applications.

In the VMware software defined stor-age model, the data plane is virtualised by abstracting physical hardware resources and aggregating them into logical pools of capac-ity that can be more flexibly consumed and managed. Additionally, to simplify the delivery of storage service levels for individual applications, the Data Plane makes the virtual disk the fundamental unit of management around which all storage operations are controlled. As a result, exact combinations of data services can be instanti-ated and controlled independently for each virtual machines.

For each virtual machine that is deployed, the data services offered can be applied indi-vidually. Each application can have its own unique storage service level and capabilities assigned to it at its time of creation. This allows for per application storage policies, ensuring both simpler yet individualised management of applications without the requirement of mapping applications to broad infrastructure concepts like a physical data store.

POLICY DRIVEN CONTROL PLANE In the VMware software defined storage model, the control plane acts as the bridge be-tween applications and storage infrastructure. The control plane provides a standardised management framework for provision-ing and consuming storage across all tiers, whether on external arrays, x86 server storage or cloud storage.

The policy driven control plane is the management layer responsible for controlling and monitoring storage operations. In today’s model, the control plane is typically, tied to each storage device, each array is oper-ated in a different way . and implements a bottom up array centric approach in which storage service levels are aggregated into

physical tiers or classes of services, which are static pre allocations of resources and data services tied to the infrastructure.

Upon provisioning, an application is rigidly mapped to these pre-configured storage con-tainers. These storage containers are rarely aligned to precise application boundaries, and their capabilities need to be defined broadly to encompass the requirements of a broad set of applications.

This restricts the ability of a storage container to be focused specifically on the business requirements of an individual ap-plication. To circumvent this problem, storage administrators may be asked to create numer-ous purpose built data stores, increasing the management overhead and complexity associ-ated with storage.

HYPER CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE A new approach to the software defined data centre, called hyper convergence, is emerg-ing. HCI leverages the hypervisor to deliver compute, networking and shared storage from a single x86 server platform. The software driven architecture allows the convergence of physical storage onto commodity x86 servers, enabling a building block approach with scale out capabilities. The use of commodity x86 server and storage hardware allows data cen-tres to operate with agility on a highly scalable, cost effective infrastructure.

The foundational components of VMware’s hyper converged infrastructure solution are VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN. Together they allow the convergence of com-pute, storage and networking onto a single, integrated layer of software that, can run on any commodity x86 infrastructure.

VMware vSphere abstracts and aggregates compute and memory resources into logical pools of compute capacity while Virtual SAN, embedded in vSphere, pools server attached storage to create a high performance, shared data store for virtual machine storage.

Customers can further extend vSphere to achieve the convergence of networking using VMware NSX which decouples network re-sources from underlying hardware and brings the operational model of a virtual machine to the data centre network.

VMWARE VIRTUAL SAN (VSAN)

Virtual SAN is VMware’s enterprise class storage software defined solution for hyper converged infrastructure. It is seamlessly embedded in the hypervisor, designed to deliver enterprise class, elastically scalable, high performance shared storage for vSphere Virtual Machines that is radically simple to consume and manage Virtual SAN pools server attached magnetic and flash devices to create a distributed shared data store that abstracts the storage hardware and provides a hyper converged compute, storage, and network opti-mised solution for virtual machines.

VMware customers can benefit from the many unique values delivered by this trans-formational technology through easy deploy-ment, elastic scalability, high performance and lower TCO.

From setup to ongoing management, Virtual SAN is radically simple; it is embedded directly in the hypervisor and does not require any ad-ditional software to be installed, it can simply be enabled in a few clicks.

By virtue of being software defined and delivered from the hypervisor, Virtual SAN is completely hardware independent and works with any x.86 vSphere compatible server al-lowing customers to continue leveraging their server vendor of choice.

Now in its 3rd release, Virtual SAN has been already adopted by a large number of VMware customers in just a few months. Customers of all industries and sizes, trust Virtual SAN to run their most mission critical applications.

Virtual SAN 6.1 adds greater abilities around availability and management that can perform in the most demanding storage environments. In this new release VMware continues to focus on delivering high performance and increased scale to provide enterprise class storage for vir-tualised workloads, including Tier.1 production and business critical applications.

VMware is expanding the capabilities of Vir-tual SAN as a platform and is introducing higher levels of enterprise availability and data protec-tion by enhancing the replication capabilities of the solution as well as providing fault tolerance support for multi processors virtual machines.

A critical aspect of Virtual SAN is ensuring that data is never lost. Virtual SAN 6.1 stretched clusters further enable the ability for no inter-ruption in operations even in the event of a complete site failure.

For more information or to place an order on VMware,please write to [email protected]

IT Agility Delivered:

Cisco Unified Computing System

For more information or to place an order on Cisco,please write to [email protected]



SYMANTEC

Symantec is a global leader in providing security, stor-age and systems management

solutions to help its custom-ers, from consumers and small businesses to the largest global organisations, secure and manage their information against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently than any other IT security vendor.

In its core businesses, consumer, end-point security, storage management and backup, Symantec utilises its market leadership positions to accelerate new growth opportunities. As the IT secu-rity industry matures, Symantec pairs new technologies with its core solutions to deliver integrated solutions that address evolving customer needs.

Since its inception in 1982, Symantec has grown into a Fortune 500 company through a combination of internal development, strategic acquisitions and partnering with industry leaders. It has over the years expanded its footprint in the Middle East and Africa (MEA), with Redington Gulf as the regional value-added distributor (VAD) for its products in Africa.

As the IT threat landscape evolves and customers shift to adapt to new technologies and technology consumption, Symantec is investing in future growth areas such as mobility, virtualisa-tion and SaaS, that will help to reduce cost and complexity for its customers. The company leverages internal R&D, acquisitions and partnerships to accelerate its long-term strategy.

With Symantec, customers can protect more of their informa-tion and its technology infrastructure, in greater depth, wherever information is stored or used. From securing a consumer’s online identity and interactions to protecting an organisation’s mission-critical data, Symantec offers the leading and best-of-breed security, backup and recovery, data availability and data loss prevention products and solutions in the Middle East and globally.

As a platform-independent software company without bias to an individual operating system or hardware environment, Symantec

helps customers manage more technologies with greater efficiency, on more platforms, even in virtual environments than any other IT security company in the market today.

Securing information

Tackling security threats

Since inception in 1982, Symantec has grown into a Fortune 500 company.

RSA, the security division of EMC, is the premier provid-er of intelligence-driven security

solutions. The company helps the world’s leading organisa-tions solve their most complex and sensitive security chal-lenges: managing organisation-al risks, safeguarding mobile access and collaboration, preventing online fraud, and defending against advanced threats. RSA delivers agile controls for identity assur-ance, fraud detection, and data protection; robust Security Analytics and industry-leading GRC capabilities; and expert consulting and advisory ser-vices.

RSA’s intelligence driven security solutions help or-ganisations reduce the risks of operating in a digital world. Through visibility, analysis, and action, RSA solutions give customers the ability to detect, investigate and respond to advanced threats; confirm and manage identities; and ulti-mately, prevent IP theft, fraud and cybercrime.

RSA Security aims to bring clarity to information driven security with an advanced big data security analytics archi-tecture and the introduction of RSA Security Analytics 10.4 and RSA ECAT 4.0 recognises

that secu-rity teams need help attain-ing the right

level of visibility, analysing mountains of data and turning these activities into immediate action.

RSA put a lot of effort into understanding security ana-lysts’ job responsibility and instrumented RSA Security Analytics 10.4 and RSA ECAT 4.0 with features and func-tionality to help them improve and au-tomate processes. For example, RSA redesigned the GUI and dashboards to help analysts focus their investiga-tions on suspicious activities first.

Aside from the products themselves, RSA is also com-mitted to a modular security analytics architec-ture. RSA products such as RSA ECAT, RSA Security Analytics and RSA Security Operations Man-agement can deliver value on their own, integrate with third party products like SIEMs or work together to form a com-prehensive big data security analytics architecture. In this way, CISOs can work with RSA to ad-dress pressing require-ments as they develop and execute a two to three year security modernisation plan for their enterprise.

Its products in the Mid-dle East are distributed by Redington Gulf, a leading VAD in MEA.

RSA makes the public key infrastructure (PKI) encryp-tion standards by which much of the Internet’s secure com-munications are run.

RSA SECURITY

PERNIXDATA



Virtual storage solutions provider, PernixData explains powerful attributes of its trending storage software, PernixData FVP.

NEW ERA IN SERVER STORAGE

PernixData FVP is the lead-ing software platform for server-side, scale-out storage acceleration. It was founded in 2012 and its main product is PernixData FVP, which is software for virtualising

server-side flash memory and Random Ac-cess Memory (RAM).

PernixData FVP software is a fault tolerant platform for scale-out server-side storage acceleration. By putting storage intelligence into high-speed server media, FVP minimises VM latency and provides storage performance that predictably scales with compute resources.

With FVP software, storage reads and writes are handled inside hosts using high speed server media, like flash and RAM. This eliminates storage array bottlenecks and maximises the performance of all vir-tualised applications. At the same time, FVP lets you use any shared storage hardware for capacity. This avoids rip-and-replace head-

PERNIXDATA



aches, minimises storage upgrade costs, and ensures that whatever storage you have will always be the fastest.

Any shared storage platform can be used for capacity, creating a decoupled storage ar-chitecture that maximises design flexibility and minimises storage hardware costs.

Increasing storage performance with FVP software is as simple as clustering more high speed server resources. This enables storage performance to easily and predict-ably scale with compute, and to cost effec-tively grow with the needs of your business. 100% non-disruptive

FVP software integrates seamlessly with existing servers, storage, hypervisors and VMs, eliminating the need to rip and replace existing infrastructure. This includes all variants of server flash (PCIe and SSD) and RAM, as well as any file (NFS), block (iSCSI, fibre channel, FCoE), or direct attached storage device.

Deployment of FVP software takes less than 10 minutes, with no reboots or changes required to VMs. Once installed, IT admin-istrators simply create FVP clusters and assign the VMs to each pool of resources. As a VMware certified solution, PernixData FVP software resides within the hypervi-sor, avoiding performance and management challenges that come with virtual storage appliances (VSAs) and guest agents.

Compatible with all VMware operations PernixData FVP software uses patent-pend-ing FVP Cluster™ technology to allow a VM resident on any host to remotely access the flash or RAM on a different host within the cluster. This enables FVP software to seamlessly support all VMware features and products (such as vMotion, HA and DRS) without requiring changes to workflows or impacting application, network or storage performance.

PernixData FVP is the first in the industry to accelerate write operations using both server flash and RAM (in Write Back mode)

in addition to read acceleration (with Write Through). To ensure that FVP can support all workloads, including mission-critical applications, data can be synchronously rep-licated to 1 or 2 other hosts in an FVP cluster for fault tolerance.

This is especially useful when accel-erating writes using RAM, where FVP’s Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory (DFTM) feature prevents data loss even in the event of host, device, or network failure.

With PernixData FVP software, custom-ers can finally decouple storage perfor-mance from capacity to build the storage ar-chitecture they need, in the way they want. PernixData Architect is a comprehensive software platform for data centre design, deployment, operations and optimisation.

It combines best-in-class user experi-ence with robust descriptive, prescriptive and predictive analytics to deliver unprec-edented visibility and control of virtualised applications and the underlying infrastruc-ture. Design issues are avoided before they happen, maximising VM performance while minimising troubleshooting costs.

With Architect, the data centre is always performing at its peak, with every aspect of the IT lifecycle efficiently designed and managed from a single intuitive platform.

FVP software puts storage performance into high speed server media, while ena-bling the customer to use any shared storage for capacity. This decoupled storage archi-tecture provides numerous advantages such as fastest virtualised applications, minimal storage costs, extended life span of existing SAN/NAS and ability to add new hardware wherever and whenever it is needed.

Architect ensures the success of strategic projects by avoiding unexpected perfor-mance issues when rolling out new applica-tions or upgrading existing applications. It allows users to proactively manage their data centre by avoiding VM and storage performance issues before they occur.

Architect aids in the design, deployment, operations and optimisation phases of the IT life cycle, which obviates the need for separate, standalone software platforms for managing these individual functions.

PernixData FVP software’s DFTM-Z feature transparently reduces the data foot-print required when utilising RAM to ac-celerate virtualised applications. Leveraging compression with minimal CPU overhead, DFTM-Z offers the performance of RAM at the price of flash with no user intervention needed.

Similarly, Adaptive Network Compression detects bandwidth-limited conditions and transparently compresses write data before transmitting. This enables the benefits of FVP software to be realised without the need for a costly network upgrade.

Intelligent I/O profiling helps identify workloads that are not good candidates for acceleration and allows it to be auto-matically bypassed to prevent server-side resource pollution.

By ensuring that the more performance sensitive data remains server side, applica-tions are guaranteed excellent and predict-able performance.

Using topology-aware Write Back ac-celeration with fault domains, the Pernix-Data FVP server-side storage intelligence platform can be aligned with existing data centre architecture and best practices (including various clustering options). FVP also features built-in fault tolerance that allows a decoupled storage deployment to withstand any kind of outage, be it a host, server device, or network. In addition, PernixData FVP is VM-aware, allowing you to configure, manage, and monitor VMs in an unprecedented way with sophisticated resource management.

PernixData FVP is supported on various server platforms that include Cisco UCS se-ries, Dell PowerEdge series, HP DL and BL series, IBM xSeries platforms, and any other server platform on VMware HCL.

It is also supported on the following flash devices; Cisco, Dell, HP, and IBM SSD, HGST Enterprise SS, Intel DC Series SSD, Kingston SSDNow Enterprise SSD, Micron Enterprise SSD, and any other flash device on VMware HCL.

“BY ENSURING THAT THE MORE PERFORMANCE SENSITIVE DATA REMAINS ON SERVER SIDE, APPLICATIONS ARE GUARANTEED EXCELLENT AND PREDICTABLE PERFORMANCE.”

For more information or to place an order on VCE,please write to [email protected]



INSIGHT – SERVERS AND STORAGE

K. S. Venkatraman, General Manager – Servers & Storage, Redington Value Distribution, talks about current changes within the Enterprise Servers and Storage (ESS) regional market, and how resellers can improve their margins by offering holistic end-to-end solutions.

THE EVOLVING ENTERPRISE SERVERS & STORAGE SPACE

ESS space is evolving glob-ally and is under threat from disruptive technologies. Serv-ers and Storage are the most basic components of an IT

infrastructure. This is an extremely mature product set. Channel and customers are knowledgeable, the GTM models are well defined and vendors are fully engaged. The main challenge facing this segment is the existence of already established suppliers, commoditization of the products leading to low margins and difficulty in establishing a USP.

Disruptive technologies are shaking up this space and in a way proving to be both a boon and a bane, as suppliers have to compete with a completely differentiated solution instead of a product. Hence there is a need to focus on selling solutions emerging in the landscape. ESS products need to be seen as part of a larger solution and the re-seller needs to build his portfolio of services which can help him address the complete customer requirement.

As a VAD, we are focusing on channel community and providing them with the know-how and means to come up with solu-tions for the end customers. Our guidance to resellers is to look for emerging busi-ness segments like CCTV solutions which may benefit from their expertise or move to an altogether new area such as Hyper-converged solutions where current market knowledge / skillsets are all relatively low. Traditional IT deployments will continue in the SMB space, however use of technologies like Virtualization will see per deployment revenue shrink.

We are looking to develop solutions for specialized segments and obtain reference accounts for newer approaches such as Hyper-convergence and build the practice

based on this. Being a multi-vendor division, we are better equipped to provide alternative solutions to the channel. This will help us in growing opportunities for the channel.

“DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES ARE SHAKING UP THIS SPACE AND IN A WAY PROVING TO BE BOTH A BOON AND A BANE, AS SUPPLIERS HAVE TO COM-PETE WITH A COMPLETELY DIFFERENTIATED SOLU-TION INSTEAD OF A PRODUCT. HENCE THERE IS A NEED TO FOCUS ON SELLING SOLUTIONS EMERG-ING IN THE LANDSCAPE. ESS PRODUCTS NEED TO BE SEEN AS PART OF A LARGER SOLUTION AND THE RESELLER NEEDS TO BUILD HIS PORTFOLIO OF SERVICES WHICH CAN HELP HIM ADDRESS THE COMPLETE CUSTOMER REQUIREMENT.”



HP ENTERPRISE

Global business and technology services provider, HP Enterprise discusses new digital trends for enterprises and its expertise to bridge the gap between old and new.

DIGITAL IS THE NEW STYLE OF DOING BUSINESS

As technology continues to change at a rapid pace and digitisation pushes both IT and business boundaries, your IT infrastructure, op-erations, and organisation must change. HP believes

that successful enterprises with traditional IT systems now need to navigate a way to evolve their infrastructure and operations in order to enable growth, increase agility, and boost innovation.

In a recent HP survey, 81 percent of IT respondents and 84 percent of line of busi-ness respondents, said they believe that the IT function is proactive at bringing new ideas to the business for it to leverage and seek ideas to meet its changing needs.

IT is no longer viewed as just a cost centre but now has a seat at the table to influence the direction of the business. HP sees this as



HP ENTERPRISE

a turning point and believes that IT must use that influence to help the business meet its goals of introducing not just technology, but the processes and workflows to help enable growth, improve profitability, increase agility, boost productivity, improve the customer expe-rience, increase innovation and reduce risk.

Leading companies are moving to the new style of business, using new digital technolo-gies such as: mobility, cloud, big data analytics, and security, to meet their business goals.

CLOUD: RAPIDLY DEVELOP AND DELIVER APPLICATIONS AND SERVICESMoving to the cloud helps organisations become more agile and better cope with the pace of change. In the same survey, 85 percent of IT groups in organisations identified as digi-tal leaders are more effective than external IT service providers in keeping up with the pace of change, while only 48 percent of laggards are.

HP has seen that moving to a hybrid infrastructure and DevOps principles, helps organisations better engage with customers, employees, and supply chains by delivering applications faster and more efficiently.

“Many start-ups today don’t own data centres or infrastructure and do everything through a public cloud, which lets them scale up or down quickly. This helps them leapfrog competitors who are bogged down dealing with legacy infrastructure. But even if you can’t start from scratch like a start-up, moving to the cloud can still bring significant gains in agility, productivity, and customer satisfaction,” said Mark Linesch, vice president, strategy and operations, Enterprise group CTO office at HP.

MOBILITY: ENABLE EMPLOYEES, CUS-TOMERS AND DATAMobility is a revolution that started with con-sumers and is now expanding rapidly within the enterprise. Consumers increasingly use their mobile phones to accomplish tasks such as banking, depositing a cheque, for instance, by taking a picture of it with their phone, rather

than visiting an ATM or a bank branch. That means, the mobile device is often the first face of the enterprise to a customer and therefore a critical part of the overall customer experience.

HP has seen that traditional enterprise applications such as CRM tend to handle many operations, while mobile apps, such as a “find a customer” app, tend to be specific to a particular task. To enable your organisation through mobility, focus on the business processes that matter most to the success of the organisation and move them to a platform that is dynamic, scalable, and accessible through mobile technology.

BIG DATA: DATA DRIVEN TO GENERATE REAL-TIME PREDICTIVE INSIGHTSBig data analytics are fundamentally chang-ing the way organisations do business. Colin Mahony, senior vice president and general manager, Big Data group, HP Software, stated: “New companies are reinventing industries by leveraging analytics to drive their business models. Others are using big data to better understand their customers, supply chains, or operations to lower costs or generate additional revenue.”

Entertainment companies are ingesting and constantly evaluating massive amounts of information about their content or events to improve the customer experience. Telecommunications companies gather and analyse thousands of pieces of data about the performance of every call to assure quality. Financial services companies are taking data from the stock ticker in real time back testing it against historical data to gain insights to make better trades.

SECURITY: PROACTIVE IN THE FACE OF THREATS, FAILURE AND RISKHP cautions that when moving to a new environment for the new style of IT, organi-sations must take security into account up front and build it into the environment in a holistic fashion, with people, process and

“MANY START-UPS TODAY DON’T OWN DATA CENTRES OR INFRASTRUCTURE AND DO EVERYTHING THROUGH A PUBLIC CLOUD, WHICH LETS THEM SCALE UP OR DOWN QUICKLY.”

technology considerations.In the past, security was very much about

protecting the perimeter of the data centre, but today with mobility, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT), a perimeter no longer exists. Security in this environment should move be-yond firewalls and take a wider IT perspective.

According to Lois Boliek, CISM, CISO, global portfolio strategist, IT Assurance and Security, Technology Services Consulting, HP, said: “Security practitioners need to under-stand from an architectural level how to embed security into every aspect of the environment. And beyond their technical skills, they must have an innate curiosity to help understand an adversary that is constantly changing and becoming increasingly unpredictable.”

As recently as five years ago, IT was meas-ured on how well it delivered a base level of service for the lowest cost. Today, HP sees a new imperative: align people, processes, and technology for rapid service delivery to make the entire organisation more agile. In terms of infrastructure, which provides the founda-tion for all the technology changes, HP sees IT moving from physical, general purpose ele-ments to a converged, software-defined, hybrid delivered infrastructure that becomes an agile, flexible service.

But with converged infrastructure comes the need for a converged organisation made up of people with converged skills. Jan De Clercq, senior architect, Technology Services Consult-ing at HP, said: “Software-defined infrastruc-ture will require new skills around automation, orchestration, programming, and scripting, as well as a better understanding of the business, because instead of focusing on just the nuts and bolts of technology, IT staff will need to focus on the rules, the policies, and the business logic behind how the infrastructure configures itself.”

Clearly, IT is at the heart of business, and IT needs to transform to generate greater business outcomes. IT needs to be more exploratory and experimental and must be able to pivot quickly when it discovers that something is not work-ing. HP provides modern architectures and solutions built to provide organisations with that level of agility. It provides workshops to help organisations discover the art of the possi-ble and can help them move to the New Style of Business to speed the delivery of value to their businesses.

The right compute:HP ProLiant Gen9 ServersWhatever the workload, HP ProLiant servers deliver the rightcompute for the right workload at the right economics…every time.

HP ProLiant has been the#1 server brand for73 consecutive quarters—that’s over 18 years.1

50%of IT budgets are spent supporting

operations2

$9.5 billion total addressable market (TAM) opportunity for new and refreshHP ProLiant server sales through FY164

$100,000sin lost opportunities result from slowIT project turnaround time3

HP ProLiant Gen9 Servers:your compute advantage

In the compute era, processing is not

and silos. HP ProLiant Gen9 Serversare designed for this new era, driving:

Lower costs

Faster time

Higher value of service delivery

Intelligent HP ProLiant Gen9 ServersHP ProLiant servers are built for any sizebusiness, for any size workload, in anyenvironment, with:

per watt than Gen8 Servers with previous generation processors5

acquisition costs6

automation, saving admin time and reducing errors from manual steps7

performance so customers can get to their data faster8

1

2

3

4Internal HP estimate. 5

6HP internal analysis. Virtualization includes the cost of vSphere. Performance numbers calculated internally from public benchmarks. Number of servers in brackets compared to 64 ProLiant Gen8 Servers; downtime costs included. Includes

7

8

Triple compute capacity while reducing cost of ownership

Compute that deliversservice in seconds

host of features to drive down the cost of IT service while providing more compute capacity to run core applications. With more processing capacity, more storage,

networking, and power—all coupled with

consumption—you get more capacity and a lower cost of IT service.

can clone virtual machines in seconds and speed infrastructure provisioning by up to

7 It’s IT service delivery at the speed of cloud.

HP ProLiant Gen9 Servers do more than provide a service—they speed up the applications that run the business and help fuel growth. Faster workloads allow core business applications to keep pace with business mandates to grow revenue, margin, and customer satisfaction. ProLiant Gen9 performance boosts span

Boosts workloadperformance by up to 4X2

HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Learn more at hp.com/go/proliantgen9

How HP ProLiant stacks up against the competition

Blade server (BL)

Rackserver (DL)

Towerserver (ML)

Densityoptimized(BL)

Software-

servers(Moonshot)

Rack-scalecomputing/HPC(Apollo)

Dell

IBM

Lenovo

Cisco

Limited pochoices compared to HP

For more information or to place an order on HP,please write to [email protected]

FUJITSU



Building data centre infrastructures is increasingly complex, error-prone, time-consuming, risky and expensive. FUJITSU Integrated System PRIMEFLEX reduces complexity and risk, shortens time to value and reduces cost.

SCALING WITH PRIMEFLEX

The job of an IT manager is not easy, management expects maximum flexibility from corporate IT in order to respond quickly and effectively to ever changing business demands. This

often requires adjustments to existing IT services or even fast delivery of new services. At the same time, financial managers are looking for more efficiency. This includes less complexity and lower costs, in addition to more cost transparency and predictability, minimised risks and full compliance with IT directives and legislation. End users on the other hand expect highest service levels as a prerequisite for highest levels of productivity and satisfaction.

One of the tasks IT managers are faced with again and again is building IT infrastructures for their data centre, which often proves to be complex. When building the infrastructure in a do-it-yourself (DIY)approach, you first of all need to select the right components from a myriad

of possibilities, procure and configure them, before you integrate the individual components onsite.

All these activities are time-consuming and expensive, while presenting businesses with multiple risks. A deep knowledge of all components involved is required, and an understanding of their various dependencies on each other.

In other words, a DIY approach can cause serious headaches, which in turn is certainly in conflict with the business requirements previously discussed.

This is exactly what integrated systems is about. An integrated system is a pre-defined, pre-integrated and pre-tested combination of data centre components, such as servers, storage, network connectivity and software. Integrated systems relieve you from all possible pain caused by building data centre infrastructures on your own, because they help reduce complexity, time and risk, while increasing operational efficiency.

Fujitsu Integrated System PRIMEFLEX is one of the broadest portfolios of integrated

systems. Together with its add-ons, you get all you need for fast time to value, and more. PRIMEFLEX covers all areas that are relevant for Fujitsu clients, be it server virtualisation or desktop virtualisation, private cloud or high availability including disaster recovery, big data and analytics or HPC, or SAP and Microsoft environments. Thus, PRIMEFLEX currently represents one of the broadest portfolios of integrated systems in the market.

The PRIMEFLEX line-up comprises traditional integrated systems and hyper-converged systems. PRIMEFLEX includes both delivery options, ready-to-run systems for highest speed and reference architecture for high flexibility, and even a combination of both, due to its staging centre capabilities. For reference architectures, installation and configuration guidelines are available as a standard.

Fujitsu Integrated Systems PRIMEFLEX are built from best-in-class components, either from Fujitsu or leading technology partners, and they are based on best practices and extensive project experience.

Fujitsu provides supplementing, flexible services such as consulting, deployment, integration into the production environment, lifecycle management and solution support, as well as data centre services and financial services.

Fujitsu’s technology and services vision is about the human-centric intelligent society. To achieve this vision, there are three main activities that relate to people, information and ICT. These are creating innovation through people, powering business and society with information, and optimising ICT systems from end to end.

FUJITSU Integrated System PRIMFLEX significantly contributes to optimising ICT systems from end to end, thus clearly supporting Fujitsu’s vision.



LENOVO

Global technology giant, Lenovo discusses the latest trends in the devices market and its future strategies to maintain its edge in the saturated market.

DRIVING THE DEVICE ERA

Lenovo is one of the world’s leading personal technol-ogy companies, producing innovative PCs and mobile internet devices. The com-pany currently ranks 286 on the fortune 500 list, and is the

world’s largest PC vendor and fourth largest smartphone company.

While the Lenovo brand came into exist-ence in 2004, a spin-off of Legend Holdings, which was created in 1984 in a guard house in China with US$25,000, today, Lenovo is a US$39 billion personal technology company with more than 54,000 employees in more than 60 countries serving customers in more than 160 countries. Lenovo is incorporated and headquartered in Hong Kong, with operational centres around the world, the largest ones being in Beijing and Morrisville.

The company has grown faster than the market for more than four years owing to the growing superiority of its products.

Lenovo’s customers use innovation to bring progress to the world, and therefore it designs and builds its products with this in mind, taking inspiration from the drive and imagination of the people who make things happen.

Lenovo’s technology is helping those who do, do better. Whether a PC, smartphone, tablet, smart TV, server, workstation or storage, Lenovo makes the products that customers need, from smart connected to infrastructure devices. Lenovo is creating real differentiation from the competition, thanks to its vertically integrated end-to-end business model. This model is unique among major technology companies and is a significant source of competitive advan-tage, enabling it to bring more innovation to market, more efficiently, and aggressively embrace the PC plus opportunity.

Lenovo has strongly invested in various markets across the globe and it most recent-ly increased its footprint in the Middle East

and other parts of the African continent, hiring teams of skilled local experts to better serve this growing, yet diversified market.

What this means for local businesses, education and the private and public sector is that they now have a single technol-ogy partner, who is locally present and fully committed to cover a full enterprise hardware portfolio. While Lenovo’s main competitors are in the process of dividing, Lenovo is growing closer together to offer a true end-to-end top class solution in the commercial space.

With the acquisition of IBM’s x86 Server division last year, Lenovo has significantly increased its commercial offering for customers in Middle East and Africa, now ranging from PCs, Tablets, Servers, Storage, Networking to Service and Support Solu-tions. Lenovo is driven by a desire to provide the best possible solution, while working closely with the world’s leading software providers including Intel, Microsoft, SAP, VMware and more.

A proof point of this is the fact that Leno-vo has maintained the number 1 position in PCs since 2013, and has reached number 3 in servers worldwide being recently acknowl-edged by Technology Business Researcher (TBR). Lenovo has ranked top in reliability and customer satisfaction for the last four out of five quarters.

Lenovo is striving to be seen as the one-stop technology partner for all businesses, with products catering to the different needs and preferences of a wide-range of custom-ers, allowing all clients to have a smooth tech environment where devices seamlessly work together.

As Lenovo expands globally, it is establish-ing even deeper roots in each major market, investing not only in sales and distribution, but also in local domestic manufacturing, R&D and other high-value functions.

For more information or to place an order on Dell,please write to [email protected]



INSIGHT - CONVERGENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Cherian John, General Manager – Convergence and Infrastructure, Redington Value Distribution, on the digital transformation that is taking place in the workplace and enterprise across the MEA region.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION: A NEW ERA

The adoption of Internet in our daily lives especially in the way we communicate, collaborate and conduct business has led to digitization of the workplace.

We are witnessing an increasing adoption of trends such as “BYOD in the workplace” and “Apps for everything”, by organizations of all sizes. These trends are primarily driven by a highly mo-bile workforce working in an extremely demand-ing digital world, using mobile convergence tech-nologies, that enables them to communicate and collaborate seamlessly through various platforms, devices, channels, and from different locations.

Some of the leading vendors for premise-based convergence solutions have been trying to differ-entiate themselves through enhanced offerings, in terms of types of devices, features, and applica-tions. However, they are being challenged by a new breed of “born-in-the-cloud” convergence vendors, who are offering cloud-based communi-cations and collaboration solutions. These vendors cover the full range of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) portfolio that supports audio, video and web conferencing; VoIP Telephony including mobility support; presence and instant messaging (IM); email with voicemail and uni-fied messaging; and some have come out with complete communications-enabled applications such as integrated collaboration and customer experience management applications.

As a distributor for some of the leading conver-gence vendors, the challenge in front of us today is to get a share of the UCaaS business and carry our existing relationships into this new digital frontier, transitioning from on-premise to the cloud. In the months ahead, we will be investing in setting up cloud solution centers across the region, to show-case a hybrid model of the cloud infrastructure,

“SOME OF THE LEADING VENDORS FOR PREMISE-BASED CONVERGENCE SOLUTIONS HAVE BEEN TRYING TO DIFFERENTIATE THEMSELVES THROUGH ENHANCED OFFERINGS, IN TERMS OF TYPES OF DEVICES, FEATURES, AND APPLICATIONS.”

Another challenge facing the organizations today due to the digitization happening across the globe is the need to cope with an increasing demand

for compute and storage capabilities. Organi-zations have to simplify their IT management and meet business commitments, while reduc-ing costs, improving operations and increasing focus on innovative apps and services.

Oracle’s engineered systems combine best-of-breed hardware and software components with game-changing technical innovations. Designed, engineered, and tested to work together, Oracle’s engineered systems cut IT complexity, reduce costly maintenance, inte-gration and testing tasks—and power real-time

decision making with extreme performance.Trends such as the “Internet of Things”,

“Big Data” etc. are about collecting and managing the massive amounts of data from a rapidly growing network of devices and sensors, processing that data, and then sharing it with other connected things. Oracle’s com-prehensive portfolio of products and services provides the platform needed for businesses at every part of the Internet of Things lifecycle: from acquiring and managing data, to securing and integrating data, to analyzing data and acting on it.

Through our portfolio of brands and technologies we look forward to taking you to this new era where the digital world blurs the physical boundaries.

“AS A DISTRIBUTOR FOR SOME OF THE LEADING CONVERGENCE VEN-DORS, THE CHALLENGE IN FRONT OF US TODAY IS TO GET A SHARE OF THE UCAAS BUSINESS AND CARRY OUR EXISTING AL-LIANCES INTO THIS NEW DIGITAL FRONTIER.”

including Private and Public Cloud offerings.

ORACLE



ORACLE

With the pace of change in today’s business environ-ment accelerating so rapidly, datacen-tre agility and flex-ibility have become

business critical. To succeed, modern busi-nesses must be able to deploy innovative new applications and react to changes in market conditions at a moment’s notice.

Technology giant, Oracle talks about its latest offering, Oracle Private Cloud Appliance and the shifting trends in the converged IT infrastructure market.

THE ORACLE SILVER LINING

a general-purpose design means they must support a wide range of workloads with dif-ferent performance profiles.

Gartner’s definition refers to integrated systems and integrated infrastructure sys-tems as a class of data centre systems that deliver a combination of servers, storage, and network devices in a pre-integrated and pre-optimised stack.

Oracle Engineered Systems are a super set of both Gartner and IDC’s definitions of converged infrastructure. They consist of pre-engineered and pre-assembled hardware and software bundles to simplify data centre operations, drive down costs, and accelerate business innovation. Oracle has been at the forefront of the converged infrastructure market with engineered systems since 2008.

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance, formerly Virtual Compute Appliance, is expanding the role of engineered systems to virtually any customer workload. “With the Private Cloud Appliance, Oracle is competitive in both the rapidly evolving integrated systems market-place by extending its red stack of hardware

Because of this, an increasing number of companies are realising the value of shifting to a converged IT infrastructure, which can deliver high levels of performance, increase automa-tion, and simplify support in a fully optimised system that is engineered to reduce costs.

IDC describes converged infrastructures as converged systems and integrated infrastruc-ture systems that consist of multiple pre-inte-grated subsystems such as server, networking, and storage sold as a single product. However,

ORACLE



and software assets to enterprise and service provider customers via a packaged solution that is consistent from a deployment, management, and provisioning perspective. This initiative is furthering the industry’s focus on designing/evaluating systems based on an integrated sys-tems model,” says Matthew Eastwood, senior vice president of IDC’s Enterprise Infrastruc-ture and Data centre Group.

GAINING FASTER DEPLOYMENTS AND GREATER FLEXIBILITY WITH ORACLE PRIVATE CLOUD APPLIANCEThe Oracle Private Cloud Appliance, formerly Virtual Compute Appliance, is an integrated system designed for rapid application and cloud deployment. In addition to providing a single point of contact for support of the complete full stack, integrated solution, Oracle Private Cloud Appliance offers the flexibility of a general-pur-pose machine, the elasticity of cloud comput-ing, and the ease of deployment and use of an integrated system.

The Oracle Private Cloud Appliance also ac-celerates application stack deployment through support for Oracle VM Templates pre-config-ured applications, middleware, and databases packaged as ready-to-run VMs.

The result is an unparalleled ability to go from a “bare metal” infrastructure to logging-in to a newly-deployed, running application within hours, instead of weeks or months. Oracle Private Compute Appliance delivers a complete stack solution integrating Oracle or third-party operating systems, converged infrastructure con-trol for rapid configuration, management, and provisioning of all server, network, and storage resources, a unified, software-defined network fabric allowing new networks to be dynamically added and existing networks to be modified without the need to manually modify cabling.

It also delivers support for a wide variety of guest operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris, support for customer provided storage from Oracle or existing storage from other vendors, and uni-fied, secure management with browser-based, at-a-glance visibility of all hardware compo-nents and secure, encrypted remote access.

SIMPLIFYING THE JOURNEY TO CLOUDOracle Private Cloud Appliance is engineered to provide the ideal platform for building,

managing, and deploying clouds, with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c to make cloud de-ployments faster and simpler to manage.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c provides complete control of the entire cloud lifecycle from planning, building, and deployment, to management, monitoring, and optimisation.

When paired with the advanced virtualisa-tion capabilities of Oracle VM, this delivers a holistic cloud deployment and management solution across the entire enterprise.

Self-service provisioning and manage-ment of VMs, storage, and network resources makes Oracle Private Cloud Appliance per-fect for delivering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). With policy-driven scaling, metering and chargeback, guided cloud setup, and advanced monitoring and management tools, you and your users have the highest level of control over IaaS deployments.

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance is fully equipped for IaaS straight out of the box, delivering performance and availability monitoring, fault detection and management, configuration and change management, gold-image based provisioning, and policies for regulatory compliance and monitoring.

SOLUTION BUILT ON PROVEN TECHNOLOGIES AND BEST PRACTICESOracle Private Cloud Appliance is built from innovative Oracle products that are proven and tested for enterprise deploy-ments through multiple product genera-tions, making it easy to use and implement in any environment. These proven solu-tions come together to form the building blocks of Oracle Private Cloud Appliance.

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Control-ler software enables rapid infrastructure provisioning. The Controller software allows users to manage and monitor the systems hardware, perform software up-grades, create and manage virtual resourc-

“ORACLE PRIVATE CLOUD APPLIANCE OFFERS THE FLEXIBILITY OF A GENERAL-PURPOSE MACHINE, THE ELASTICITY OF CLOUD COMPUTING, AND THE EASE OF DEPLOYMENT AND USE OF AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM.”

es and monitor utilisation of all system resources in real-time.

Oracle Virtual Networking including Oracle Fabric Interconnect hardware and Oracle SDN software simplifies complex data centre deployments with a wire-once solution and simple software-defined net-work configurations, resulting in reduced infrastructure complexity by up to 70%, extremely low latency and high bandwidth and provisioning new services and recon-figuring resources in minutes.

Oracle VM is the virtualisation tech-nology that powers more than 100,000 VMs for Oracle internal development and serves thousands of customers across a wide range of Oracle Cloud services.

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance fea-tures a fully integrated, enterprise-grade Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance for centrally storing the management environment as well as providing data storage for VMs. Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is designed to be fully redundant for maximum fault tolerance and serviceability in produc-tion. This storage subsystem is also loaded with high-performance DIMM and flash memory for optimal read/write perfor-mance under the most demanding file storage workloads.

Managing and maintaining a data centre that meets the ever-changing business re-quirements can be extremely challenging. These solutions must be co-engineered and fully integrated to deliver the highest possible levels of performance, efficiency, speed, and reliability. Oracle Private Cloud Appliance is specifically designed with this in mind. It delivers a complete converged infrastructure solution from a single ven-dor, comprised of proven hardware and software technologies that can help your organisation move applications into the cloud, and your business into the future.

97% of IT professionals expect software-defined networking

(SDN) to solve their most persistent problems, from application

performance to network management.* And those are two key

components that make it possible to deploy a rich mobile

application with Networking OnAvaya™.

Claim of single-day app deployment from Dynamic Markets, Fabric

Connect Customer Experience Survey 2015

*Source: SDN Expectations, 2015

For more information or to place an order on Avaya,please write to [email protected]

LIFESIZE



Cloud video conferencing solutions provider, Lifesize discusses the growing importance of cloud based video collaboration tools as organisations increasingly hire remote staff. How can they make the most of out of it?

VIDEO CONFERENCING REINVENTED

How we communicate in the business world today is rap-idly changing as businesses increasingly employ remote workers. Whether working remote full-time, part -time or just traveling for business,

these workers rely heavily on their own mobile devices to stay connected to their teams, as well as to participate in meetings. Now more than ever, remote workers want and expect face-to-face interaction, and they want a seat at the meeting. There’s a strong demand for video conferencing solutions that can provide a simple and instant connected experience from

the office to the home and on the go. For companies that prefer not to invest in

infrastructure, cloud-based video conferenc-ing solutions make cost-effective and scalable meetings possible. There are tremendous benefits to companies when deploying video conferencing in conjunction with a cloud-based service. Starting or moving your com-pany’s video conferencing solution to the cloud is quick and easy, with minimal investments of time and money.

Typically, a cloud-based video conferencing implementation is more affordable as there is no expensive infrastructure to deploy. Cloud-based video conferencing is faster to deploy,

manage and use. It has very little impact on the IT team because anyone can set it up.

The primary reason companies adopt cloud applications is to reduce cost and complexity. Cloud-based video conferencing services re-move the expense of purchasing or upgrading video conferencing infrastructure, maintain-ing expensive support contracts, plus increas-ing and training IT staff.

Any video conferencing service must sup-port flexible subscriptions, which lets a com-pany grow video conferencing at a predictable pace by adding users as needed. There are two features organisations should look for that help nurture and grow video conferencing in any

LIFESIZE



setup. First, does the cloud-based video confer-encing service offer a free trial? This is impor-tant to help your organisation test features and gain acceptance before purchasing. Second, does the provider permit temporary over usage without penalty? Again, this is helpful in grow-ing new users within an organisation without having to invest up front. This provides flex-ibility to bring new users into any account to meet the organisation’s needs without having to project its growth and prebuy licences.

In order to make the meeting room seam-less as well, there is need to consider whether the cloud-based video conferencing service provides pairing of the cloud-based video conferencing system with the service. Video systems that support the cloud-based video conferencing service and automatically prompt users to pair themselves with it should be pre-ferred. These video systems can be deployed as an independent meeting room, or in some instances, they can be added to the list of sup-ported devices of an individual user. Therefore, when called, the video system would behave just like their mobile devices and ring.

A very important feature of any cloud-based video conferencing service provider is automatic software updates. This is expected with any mobile device, from laptops to smart-phones, but it must also apply to room-based video systems. A provider who integrates video systems and provides automatic software up-dates can have a huge impact on the efficiency of any team by eliminating the maintenance burden of these devices. This will lead to greater service reliability as video systems, like software apps on Macs or PCs and mobile devices, will always have the latest software version needed for optimal performance.

The cloud-based video conferencing service must connect multiple types of devices into a cohesive solution. This removes a tremen-dous burden from customers who are trying

to standardise devices across their organisa-tions. Furthermore, it allows greater flexibility for users choosing their preferred devices. Therefore, it is critical that the service provider support the latest laptop and mobile devices, Mac- and Windows-based laptops as well as tablets and smartphones, including android-based, such as Samsung, HTC, Google, Dell, Motorola, Acer and Amazon; and iOS-based, such as iPad and iPhone.

Many companies have questions about using cloud-based services for their business applica-tions. The cloud-based video conferencing ser-vice provider must provide a secure, encrypted cloud experience for customers, even those using other vendors’ devices, letting customers conduct their meetings with confidence.

When investigating a service, an organisa-tion has to make certain it supports devices deployed behind firewalls. Traversal through firewalls must lead to an authenticated server managed in a cloud-based solution only. Another helpful security feature is the ability to have an optional passcode, or security PIN, on each meeting. This provides an added level of security for gaining entrance to a meeting. Last, the service provider must sup-port state-of-the-art encryption using a 128-bit AES algorithm, enabling peace of mind for secure communications.

The measure of quality is different depend-ing on which device is connected to the cloud based video conferencing service. Most impor-tant is that the service provider should provide the highest quality to any device. This should be maintained in point-to-point calls as well as multi-party calls.

Meeting room video systems should support 720p60. Ideally, a video conferencing solution should support up to 60 frames per second (fps) for the best possible motion handling. If users are sharing data, which includes presentations, spreadsheets, videos or web pages, these should

“THE CLOUD-BASED VIDEO CONFERENCING SERVICE PROVIDER MUST PROVIDE A SECURE, ENCRYPTED CLOUD EXPERIENCE FOR CUSTOMERS, EVEN THOSE USING OTHER VENDORS’ DEVICES, LETTING CUSTOMERS CONDUCT THEIR MEETINGS WITH CONFIDENCE.”

be transmitted with the highest possible qual-ity. The frame rates can range from 5 to 30, depending on whether full motion is detected in the stream for instance YouTube video. For mobile apps the resolutions may range from 360p (640x360) to 720p (1280x720).

Lifesize Cloud video conferencing is well fully equipped to provide all features that suit organisations of any size by letting everyone simply and instantly have real-life meetings. Only Lifesize provides an award-winning video system with best-in-class mobile apps combined with a cloud-based video confer-encing service so that everyone gets a con-nected experience from the meeting room to the office and on the go.

Lifesize Cloud is designed to work the way you work; from group video calls to document sharing and even audio calls. A user can call anyone instantly for an impromptu call, or jump into a scheduled meeting by selecting a virtual meeting room. By simply scrolling through the shared search-based company directory and with one quick click, they are in a video call. They can keep adding people to have a group video call and can also pick up the call on any device. Lifesize Cloud helps users to work smart by working the way they always work.

Connecting a Lifesize Icon and Lifesize Cloud provides an unparalleled meeting room experience:. Lifesize Icon comes with the Lifesize, Cloud software preloaded so it works right out of the box by plugging it into any IP outlet and go. A user’s directory is auto-populated and immediately every user is in the network has instant access to every user and custom-named meeting room. Lifesize Cloud pushes software updates automatically so one can never have to update their device.

Lifesize Cloud also offers the highest quality video, audio and presentation in a room video system and mobile apps designed for the most robust business applications. Lifesize Cloud works the way one works; from group video calls to document sharing and even audio calls.

Simply have real-life meetings, no matter where people happen to be by connectin over the highest quality video on any chosen device and meet with teams and outside guests. Lifesize Cloud links Lifesize Icon room video systems to laptops, tablets and smartphones so one can enjoy a connected experience no mat-ter where you are.

The average person works

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© 2015 Lifesize, a division of Logitech. All rights reserved. Information contained in this document is subject to

change without notice. Lifesize is the registered trademark or trademark of Logitech. All other trademarks are the

property of their respective owners.

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For more information or to place an order on Lifesize,please write to [email protected]

TRIPP LITE



Alexander Khalaev, Vice President for Sales at UPS and power management solutions vendor Tripp Lite shares his expertise on how to develop an IT infrastructure that can stand the test of time.

SOLUTIONS FOR FUTURE DATA CENTRE CHALLENGES

The construction of data centres in the Middle East is booming, but the demand for 100% availability, combined with trends like virtualisa-tion, cloud computing, and converged infrastructure are

changing the face of the industry. Storage needs are growing at exponential rates, meaning higher density data centres with higher energy demands. More than ever before, it is essential for data centres to be equipped with reliable, efficient, and intelli-gent infrastructure. Tripp Lite can provide a complete infrastructure solution that meets today’s challenges and prepares data centres for future growth.

A major trend driving innovation in the IT infrastructure market is the increased demand for availability. IT managers want

TRIPP LITE



“BECAUSE OF EXPONENTIALLY INCREASING STORAGE AND COMPUTING NEEDS, IT MANAGERS WANT TO ENSURE THAT THEIR INFRASTRUCTURE IS FLEXIBLE AND ABLE TO ACCOMMODATE FUTURE GROWTH.”

to eliminate downtime and ensure that their critical systems are constantly running. “Uptime is essential for the continuity of any business,” said Alexander Khalaev, Tripp Lite’s vice president for sales – MENA, CIS and Baltics. “Tripp Lite is uniquely posi-tioned to meet the highest availability de-mands, thanks to the hot-swap capabilities of our enterprise-grade UPS systems,” he continued. Tripp Lite’s hot-swappable UPS systems have built-in PDU bypass switches that allow for service or battery replacement without interrupting the power supply to connected equipment, therefore eliminating maintenance downtime.”

The increasing density of data centres also presents new trials for today’s IT managers. As the amount of equipment in a single rack increases, it becomes more challenging to power each device. “The PDU is a funda-mental building block of any data centre. It transforms high-capacity raw power feeds to lower-capacity outlets and ensures that every server, switch, and other rack-mount-ed device receives clean, reliable power,” Khalaev added.

PDUs can also improve the manageability of a data centre. Khalaev pointed out that networked PDUs enhance monitoring ca-pabilities, which helps to prevent potential overloads. They also shed unnecessary loads in order to save battery power and allow IT managers to reboot blocked systems remote-ly, which prevents costly service calls. “The increased monitoring and administration capabilities that smart power solutions pro-vide mean a more powerful, secure power protection system. Tripp Lite leads the in-dustry with its PDU offering, which includes metered, monitored, switched, three-phase, and automatic transfer switch models that provide anywhere from four to 48 outlets for rackmount power distribution,” he said.

The high density trend is also driving an

increased demand for energy efficiency. Even though energy costs in the GCC are low compared with the rest of the world, IT managers still feel pressure from their organisations to lower operating costs, and data centre power consumption accounts for about 25 percent of those costs.

Efficiency is becoming a top priority in the region with regards to cooling, for two main reasons. First of all, as the density of a data centre increases, the equipment inside produces more heat, and there is less room for ventilation. “Data centre cooling has become more challenging and more expen-sive, and standalone systems are no longer sufficient. Over the past few years, we have seen a critical need for supplemental cooling units like our SRXCOOL12K to remove hot spots,” said Khalaev. Secondly, cooling costs are usually elevated in the Middle East due to high temperatures, so efficient and precise cooling solutions are even more important here than in other parts of the world. The SRXCOOL33K, Tripp Lite in-row cooling unit, can reduce energy consumption by up to 33 percent, thanks to its variable-speed

compressor and microprocessor-controlled electronic expansion valve, which allows for precision cooling adjustments.

Scalability is another buzzword in today’s IT infrastructure market. Because of expo-nentially increasing storage and computing needs, IT managers want to insure that their infrastructure is flexible and able to accom-modate future growth. “In response to these demands, Tripp Lite offers modular UPS systems that can grow with a data centre. As more equipment is added, the UPS capacity can be expanded by adding additional power modules or connecting units in parallel,” said Khalaev.

“We understand the urgency of a rapidly growing IT installation. Our customers often come to us with a need to implement solu-tions as soon as possible. For this reason, Tripp Lite maintains ready-to-ship inventory of its full line of products in the region via a fully stocked warehouse in Dubai,” he added.

Tripp Lite recognises every customer’s unique set of needs and challenges, and its teams of experts work with customers to develop a personalised infrastructure solu-tion that ensures that a data centre operates efficiently, intelligently and reliably, and is able to accommodate future growth and expansion needs.

Tripp Lite full line of solutions, including UPS systems, PDUs, racks, cooling solutions, KVMs, connectivity products and more, is available through its partner Redington Value Distribution.

Complete Solutions for IT Infrastructure from Tripp LiteMaximize the availability, manageability and efficiency

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NEXANS



Tarek Helmy, Regional Director Gulf and Middle East, South & East Africa at Nexans Cabling Solutions, talks about how the company is helping channel partners to succeed in the regional LAN infrastructure market.

CHANNELING SUCCESS

“BEING THE EXPERTS IN THE LAN INFRASTRUCTURE INDUSTRY, THE NEXANS TEAM IS ESTABLISHING DIRECT CONTACT WITH END CUSTOMERS TO ASSIST CHANNEL PARTNERS IN PRESENTING THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY THAT MEETS TODAY’S AND TOMORROW’S NEEDS. ”

T he role of the channel is very important especially for companies like Nexans that has invested heav-ily in establishing a very

strong partner network of value added distributors (VADs) and systems integra-tors (SIs) across the Middle East region. Each of our channel partners is a market leader in networking within their local market. The market leadership of Nexans partners includes expert staffing fully certified by us, support level, end-to-end solution offerings, and last but not least their financial strength. Such a strong partner network has enabled Nexans to secure deals with global key account customers.

The channel plays a pivotal role in educating and informing customers and decision makers about our latest technolo-gies and influencing them to deploy it. They highlight what the latest products and service offerings are from the vendor they represent, do the value engineering to provide the optimum infrastructure design based on the customer needs and the allo-cated budget. The channel also has a major role in providing fully integrated solutions that involves multiple vendors’ offering.

The channel needs to present a con-vincing return on investment (ROI) model to customers detailing the short term and long term investment require-ments. With support from vendors such as Nexans, the channel can make cost comparisons of different solutions both in terms of CAPEX and in OPEX. The chan-nel needs to be involved in the design of network, for example comparing Top of Rack design versus End of Row versus Middle of Row.

End customers can always buy the best quality and the latest technology in the LAN infrastructure cabling. However, the installation of these advanced solutions re-quires experienced and certified partners in each market in the region. We ensure that our customers get proper implemen-tation support through Nexans certified partners in their market.

We have been expanding our local resources in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region in order to ensure the high-est level of support offered to the market. Nexans is also focusing on providing training programmes to major end users, integrators, consultants and installers. Our strong business relationship with major integrators across all Middle East coun-tries also helps us capitalise on business opportunities.

Being the experts in the LAN infrastruc-ture industry, the Nexans team is estab-lishing direct contact with end customers to assist channel partners in presenting the latest technology that meets today’s and tomorrow’s needs. This approach is actually complementing the channel ef-forts towards achieving the highest level of end customer satisfaction in technology and services.



INSIGHT – SOFTWARE AND SECURITY

Hishamul Hasheel, General Manager – Software & Security, Redington Value Distribution, on how

opportunities in the market.

SOFTWARE AND SECURITY LANDSCAPE UPDATE

Security has become a boardroom discussion in all leading organizations of today, it has grown beyond just IT. Recent spike in high profile attacks in

oil & gas, government and financial verticals, corporate espionage, social engineering and region geo-political dynamics have added more focus on security. The Middle East and Africa IT Security market is poised to grow up to a whopping $10 Billion by 2020.Middle East market is quite evolved when it comes to mainstream IT Security technologies and solutions. Most of the leading IT security vendors are focused on the principal tech-nologies like Network Security and Content Security but we see a big gap in terms of Vendor penetration and Channel Engagement when it comes to niche security areas like Data Security, Security Management and Compliance and Cloud Security. Security Channel Eco-system is also focused primarily on the ‘pull technologies’ and there is still lot to be done by the vendors to enable the partners to delve into emerging se-curity business arena. Africa is still an evolving market and it will take around 3-5 years for it to reach the levels of Middle East market.Coming to the software side of business, MENA accounts for only about 1.4% of global software spending, but the region has good long-term prospects for enterprise software vendors look-ing for new growth. Large organizations con-tinue to account for the lion’s share of overall spending on Enterprise Application Software solutions, with net spend by small and medium-sized businesses rising significantly but remain-ing relatively small. The next four years will present enormous opportunities for Enterprise Application Software vendors and their channel partners, particularly if they are successful in helping organizations and government depart-ments modernize their business transaction

systems. Vendors that bring vertical-focused, mobile-enabled, and cloud-ready solutions to the MENA market stand to gain market share.Redington Value brings the global best practices and provides a lot of marketing intelligence and awareness programs through a variety of vehicles such as enablement sessions, online webcasts and a plethora of events and one-on-one trainings throughout the year to help resell-ers identify the right segment for providing Software and Security solutions. The channel is limited by absence of skilled sales and technical resources, lack of focus in building a compelling business model around security and software solutions, long gestation period and sales cycle, difficulty in Management buy-in and under-standing as compared to other technologies leading to shortage of investment.Software and Security is shaping up well in the next 12 – 18 months with an expected CAGR of 14%.By the end of 2015, about 30% of infrastructure protection products will be purchased as a part of a suite offering. We believe that network security market will provide the chunk of the growth in the division.We are focused on building an emerging soft-ware and security portfolio that will add more value to our channel eco system to address end to end business opportunities. Another area of focus for our division will be to enable the channel thoroughly by a variety of initiatives. We are also keen on equipping the channel to explore cross sell and upsell opportunities by leveraging these initiatives. We are planning to have an exclusive program –

“Redington Value Software and Security Chan-nel Development Program” which will include: • Awareness activities for partners and end

customers – through Webinars, Social Media, Print Media, SMS campaigns.

• Enablement for partners through Sales and Product Enablement Sessions

• Demand Generation through User Group Forums, Telemarketing and CXO Meets

• Promotions for incentivizing sales and pre-sales professionals to get vendor certifications

• Technical trainings to enhance the skillsets of the channel community

• Proof of Concepts • We also provide tangible Value additions

in terms of authorized training center programs, and Demo Labs and extensive post-sales support.

“BY THE END OF 2015, ABOUT 30% OF INFRA-STRUCTURE PROTECTION PRODUCTS WILL BE PURCHASED AS A PART OF A SUITE OFFERING.”

Enterprise Software & Security vendors and their channel partners will benefit from enormous



CHECK POINT

IT security software vendor, Check Point, highlights the success of sandboxing technology in eliminating data threats.

FIGHTING MODERN THREATS WITH SANDBOXING TECHNOLOGY

Cybercrime has over the decades caused vast destruc-tion to both large and small companies around the world as cybercriminals become increasingly skilful. A sophis-ticated hacker ecosystem has

evolved, with tools to share known vulnera-bilities and disguise known malware to avoid detection, essentially turning old exploits into unknown threats. Typically, they focus on stealing data, sabotaging business conti-nuity, or damaging a company’s reputation.

Attackers skilfully use custom malware, social engineering, and spear-phishing tech-niques to evade detection from traditional security technology. Sophisticated hacking tools keep them one step ahead, constantly changing the threat vector, leaving many organisations struggling to keep up.

Persistent threats include Zero-day vul-nerabilities that are previously undetected flaws in the software but without a current



CHECK POINT

patch or fix. They do not have a known signature, and therefore can pass through antivirus, Intrusion Prevention Systems and other analysis technologies, allowing a window of time for malicious activity before it is detected.

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are typically launched by organisations or na-tion-states with significant funding. APTs employ multiple attack techniques in nu-merous stages and are extremely difficult to detect because they occur over days, weeks, months, or years. They are highly danger-ous to an organisation and are designed to infiltrate systems while evading detection.

With data breaches causing potentially long-lasting damage to brands and reputa-tion as well as estimated financial losses of over US$248 million, there is a growing need for a reliable solution to block all forms of threats.

Sandboxing has recently emerged as a pow-erful weapon in cyber security and rightfully so. The sandbox solution is extremely effec-tive at spotting malicious files and targeted attacks that evade traditional signature-based defences, such as antivirus technology.

Sandboxing captures an executable file or document and activates that file in a virtual machine or emulator that provides a deep analysis that antivirus or firewalls simply can’t deliver. In this controlled environ-ment, potential threats are unpacked and run to see exactly how the executing soft-ware behaves, without accessing production systems or the network.

If executing files or software prove to be malicious, they are dealt with accord-ingly. This important security technique prevents malicious files or programs from damaging your network or confiscating your information.

For detecting unknown threats, sandbox-ing is very effective and absolutely neces-

sary. As the modern threat landscape con-tinues to evolve, sandboxing will become an integral part of every organisation’s overall security arsenal.

Several cyber security companies offer sandboxing technology to analyse potential malware. However, some sandboxes detect unknown malware, but do not actually block malware, while more advanced sand-boxes share information on newly identified malware with cloud intelligence networks. This expedites the circulation of new attack data, enabling connected organisations to rapidly protect themselves.

With a plethora of new attack methods, understanding the difference between tradi-tional and advanced sandboxing is important.

The traditional approach to improving unknown and zero-day malware catch rates runs suspicious files in a sandbox outside the network, imitating a standard operat-ing system (OS) for safe observation. Using sandbox tools, you activate files in various ways to simulate an actual user opening the file. Then you watch to see if it triggers any-thing beyond what was normally expected.

Cybercriminals are smart and recognize the existence of these safeguards on some networks, they therefore implement evasion techniques. They can actually write mal-ware that knows when it is inside a sandbox and instruct the malware not to install until it knows it is outside of the sandbox and on an actual end point device.

Another common approach hacker’s use is to build sleep timers into the malware, allowing it to open minutes or even days after infection, long after the file has been marked safe. Other common techniques include malware that notices mouse move-ments, or that encrypts threats in email attachments. These evolved evasions show that the current technology in place isn’t enough. Security solutions must evolve

“THE SANDBOX SOLUTION IS EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE AT SPOTTING MALICIOUS FILES AND TARGETED ATTACKS THAT EVADE TRADITIONAL SIGNATURE-BASED DEFENCES, SUCH AS ANTIVIRUS TECHNOLOGY.”

faster in order to stay ahead of hackers.While traditional sandboxes detect at-

tacks in both executable files and data files alike, advanced sandboxes on the other hand take these capabilities, but also add the capability to detect malware in data files before it is fully deployed, by watching activity at the processor instruction level during the exploit phase, when the attack is trying to obtain unlawful execution privi-leges from the operating system.

Traditional sandboxing, combined with the power of exploit-focused sandbox-ing delivers an advanced sandbox with powerful, evasion-resistant protection that detects and blocks unknown malware.

The goal is to proactively find threats and address evasion techniques. Ad-vanced sandboxing detects the use of exploitation techniques by carefully ex-amining activity in the CPU of the sand-box host, and its execution flow at the assembly code level before the malicious payload has a chance to run. As a result, it pre-empts most, if not all, possibilities of hackers evading detection.

The speed and accuracy of detection, and the fact that the attack is detected before the malware is even downloaded to the end point device, make advanced sandboxing the best technology in detecting unknown threats. When deep OS-level and CPU-level sandbox capabilities are combined, the re-sult is a powerful next generation sandbox threat elimination.

With new advanced technology, secu-rity gaps can be addressed by enabling the detection of threats at the pre-infection stage. Once the threat has been caught, the new malware is then turned into a known and documented malware by creating a signature. Future attempts to use the same attack, will be blocked at the IPS or Antivi-rus stage.

As evasion techniques evolve and get smarter, so must the technology to keep or-ganisations secured. Sandboxes address the growing and serious problems of unknown malware, advanced persistent threats and zero-day attacks.

Essentially, sandbox solution allows you to be proactive in your approach to secu-rity, rather than reactive.

SOMETIMES,YOUR NETWORKIS FULL OFSURPRISES...Your corporate network offers access to valuable and sensitive information. Information that must never fall into the wrong hands.Can you be sure there aren’t any hidden “surprises” threatening your most precious data assets? No stealthy malware, back doors, data leaks or other security vulnerabilities?

Don’t be caught unprepared. Uncover potential risks on your enterprise network.

Sign up for an on-site

For more information or to place an order on Check Point,please write to [email protected]

TREND MICRO



Many businesses are looking to the cloud for increased IT agility and cost savings. As busi-nesses develop their cloud infrastructure, security must be part of

the groundwork to ensure that cloud serv-ers, applications, and data remain secure in a cloud environment. Often businesses use traditional physical server security in virtual and cloud infrastructure. But this can cause resource contention issues, increase manage-ment complexity, reduce virtual machine (VM) densities, and lower expected return on investment (ROI).

Virtualisation is the foundation of cloud infrastructure, requiring virtualisation-aware

Security software vendor, Trend Micro talks about the threats that face cloud computing today and its inimitable approach towards a secure cloud.

PRIORITISING CLOUD SECURITY tion environment and IT resources that are

provided through an on-demand, self-ser-vice portal.

When extending virtualisation into a pri-vate cloud infrastructure, the security used on the virtual servers can also be used in a cloud environment. Private clouds make it easy to provision new VMs, and even differ-ent departments can have resources that are all housed on the same host physical server.

Another security approach might be to route inter-VM communications to a separate physical security appliance but requiring communications to be routed off box through the separate appliance creates performance and security lags. In addition, compliance regulations may require that certain data stay isolated from other VMs and retain restricted access. To address these issues, security must be provided at the VM level.

Agentless security in a virtualisation-aware solution optimises virtualisation and cloud performance. Because private clouds are based on dedicated hardware, businesses

security to maximise protection and perfor-mance. However, moving applications and data into the cloud also introduces unique risks in all three cloud models: private, pub-lic, and hybrid. A comprehensive, adaptive, and efficient approach to cloud protection is needed regardless of which cloud model businesses deploy or how their cloud com-puting needs evolve. Trend Micro explores the three cloud models, their unique security risks, and the security solutions that best ad-dress those risks.

PRIVATE CLOUDPrivate clouds are based on dedicated hard-ware that is either located in the businesses data centre or outsourced to a third party. The underlying infrastructure is a virtualisa-

TREND MICRO



have control of the underlying hypervisors. Agentless security such as agentless antivirus and agentless file integrity monitoring uses a dedicated VM that integrates with hypervi-sor APIs to conduct security scanning.

PUBLIC CLOUDThe public cloud provides better cost savings because of the shared, multi-tenant archi-tecture which makes better use of resources and reduces vendor costs, which makes them popular. With Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) public clouds, the service provider is responsible for most of the security. But with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the customer is respon-sible for securing their VMs deployed in the public cloud.

In the multitenant environment of IaaS public clouds, businesses do not know what type of applications or data are housed next to their computing resources. In a private cloud, cybercriminals would simply need to gain access to a VM on a host machine to conduct an inter-VM attack. However, in the public cloud, cybercriminals have it even eas-ier they can purchase their own VMs within the shared infrastructure and use these to at-tack other guest VMs or even try to compro-mise the hypervisor which controls access to guest VMs. Visibility can also be an issue as companies may not be able to track who has accessed their data.

Without hypervisor control, agent-based security creates self-defending VMs in the multi-tenant environment of the public cloud, which are needed to prevent inter-VM attacks and maintain VM isolation.

HYBRID CLOUDHybrid clouds combine the onsite control of a private cloud with the scalability of the public cloud. Businesses can keep more mission-critical data and applications in

house while leveraging the cost savings of the public cloud for storage and temporary computing capacity needs. Some technolo-gies even help organisations seamlessly move resources between private and public clouds as needed.

The ideal hybrid cloud security solution combines both agentless and agent-based VM security. Agentless security optimises resources in the private cloud component and the agent-based security creates self-de-fending VMs in the public cloud. With both deployment options, data and applications are kept safe throughout the hybrid cloud.

Trend Micro Deep Security provides a sin-gle platform for server, application, and data security across physical, virtual, and cloud servers ideal for protecting private, public, and hybrid clouds. Businesses can tailor their security with any combination of agent-less and agent-based protection—including antimalware, firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, web application protection, integrity monitoring, and log inspection. The Deep Security platform includes the Anti-malware Protection, which defends against viruses, spyware, Trojans and other malware. This module detects malware in real time and incorporates clean up capabilities to help remove malicious code and repair any system damage caused by the malware.

Firewall Protection provides a bi-direc-tional firewall with centralised management of server firewall policy and includes pre-defined templates for common enterprise server types. The Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDS/IPS) shields vulnerabilities in operating systems and enterprise applica-tions until they can be patched. Intrusion detection and prevention helps enterprises achieve timely protection against known and zero-day attacks. Deep Security includes out-of-the-box vulnerability protection for over 100 applications.

“TREND MICRO DEEP SECURITY PROVIDES A SIN-GLE PLATFORM FOR SERVER, APPLICATION, AND DATA SECURITY ACROSS PHYSICAL, VIRTUAL, AND CLOUD SERVERS IDEAL FOR PROTECTING PRIVATE, PUBLIC, AND HYBRID CLOUDS.”

Web Application Protection rules defend against SQL injections attacks, cross-site scripting attacks, and other web application vulnerabilities, and shields these vulner-abilities until code fixes can be completed. Deep Security enables compliance with pay-ment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) requirement 6.6 for the protec-tion of web applications and the data that they process. Application Control rules provide increased visibility into, and control over, the applications that are accessing the network. These rules can also be used to identify malicious software accessing the network or to reduce the vulnerability exposure of your servers.

The File Integrity Monitoring inspects files, systems, and registry for changes. In-tegrity monitoring of critical operating sys-tem and application files such as directories, files, registry keys and values is necessary for detecting malicious and unexpected changes that could signal a compromise of virtual and cloud computing resources. Deep Secu-rity file integrity monitoring addresses PCI DSS Requirements 10.5.5 and 11.5 as well as other security and data privacy regulations.

The Log Inspection provides visibility into important security events captured in log files. Log inspection rules optimise the identifica-tion of important security events buried in multiple log entries from numerous sources.

These events can be aggregated and sent to a stand-alone security system or for-warded to a security information and event management (SIEM) system for correlation with other infrastructure events, reporting, and archiving.

To achieve the agentless deployment option of the above modules, Deep Secu-rity tightly leverages and integrates with VMware products and APIs. Deep Security was the first product to integrate with VM-ware vShield Endpoint APIs for agentless anti-malware and agent-less file integrity monitoring (FIM). This vShield integration enables the offloading of anti-malware and FIM processing to a dedicated, security-hardened VM. And by integrating with additional VMware APIs, Trend Micro offers other agentless protection, including HIPS, web application protection, application con-trol, and firewall.

Protection of physical and virtual assets, data, information, communication and intellectual property

Address issue of targeted attacks given pressures to do more with less

Ensure seamless integration with existing infrastructure, applications, environments and process

Deep Discovery detects and identifi es evasive threats in real time

It also provides the in-depth analysis and actionable threat intelligence that drives the Custom Defense solution. Advanced threat detection and targeted integration with other security products allows you to adapt and respond to your attackers at multiple points with comprehensive cyber security. Custom signatures and custom-defi ned sandboxes stop your attackers from taking your valuable information.

DEEP DISCOVERYTrend Micro

Targeted attack detection, in-depth analysis, and rapid response

For more information or to place an order on Trend Micro,please write to [email protected]

VEEAM



Backup and availability solutions vendor, Veeam Software discusses its latest Availability Suite designed for the modern data centre.

ALWAYS ON WITH VEEAM AVAILABILITY SUITE

Organisations are modernis-ing their data centres in or-der to provision IT services faster, strengthen security and control, lower opera-tional costs and increase business agility.

While building these modern data centres, organisations are investing in server virtu-alisation, modern storage applications and cloud-based services.

However, businesses are also facing new demands from end users, including access to data and applications 24 x 7, no patience for downtime or data loss and exponential data growth at 30-50% per year. Specifi-cally, CIOs are reporting that businesses are increasing their requirements for both minimising downtime and guaranteeing ac-cess to data.

As these availability requirements are increasing, businesses are trying to adopt an “Always-on” approach, but many are instead settling for legacy backup solutions, where they continue to face shortcomings such as lengthy RTOs and RPOs of hours and days that are respectively too long for the Always-on business as well as less than 6 percent of backups tested each quarter. Challenges also include limited visibility to detect issues before they have an operational impact.

This opens a gap between the require-ments of the always-on business and IT’s ability to effectively deliver availability. In fact, 82 percent of CIOs say that there is a gap between the level of availability they pro-vide and what end users demand, creating a need for highly qualified solutions providers.

To bridge this gap, Veeam is providing customers a new kind of availability solu-

tion which delivers recovery time and point objectives of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data. This new solution is known as the Veeam Availability Suite.

Veeam Availability Suite combines the award-winning data protection and virtu-alisation management expertise of Veeam backup and replication, and Veeam ONE for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Version 8 of the suite provides new capabili-ties that deliver availability for the Modern Data Centre, including the cutting-edge improvements in high-speed recovery and data loss avoidance.

WHAT’S NEW IN VERSION 8?Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots and Backup from Storage Snapshots for NetApp that allows users to leverage NetApp Snapshot, SnapMirror and SnapVault tech-nologies to create ultra-fast backups from storage snapshots for quick and efficient item-level recovery.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server provides fast transaction-level recovery of SQL databases and helps to restore SQL da-tabases to a precisely desired point in time.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Di-rectory allows instant recovery of individual Active Directory objects and entire contain-ers, as well as user accounts and computer passwords.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange allows you to recover hard-deleted items that you thought might have been lost forever; restore to Online Archive mailboxes and perform 1-click recoveries with the new web-based restore portal for help desk operator.

For more information or to place an order on Veeam,please write to [email protected]

FORTINET



Maya Zakhour, Channel Director, Middle East at Fortinet, outlines the company’s strategy towards channel empowerment in an ever competitive IT landscape in the Middle East.

EMPOWERING CHANNEL PARTNERS

What makes a good channel partner programme?A good channel programme should allow partners efficient access to

training tools and support in order to gain a competitive edge in today’s dynamic market-place. How do you prevent your channel pro-gramme from being too complex to join?Fortinet has divided its FortiPartner pro-gramme into areas of interest. Basically it is designed to help our partners build expertise on the full range of Fortinet’s network security products, extend service offerings and expand into new areas of the security market. A straight forward programme should allow a partner who would, for example, want to use only the training aspect, be able to easily find the

FORTINET



training tab and all related material. If its deal registration they are interested in, they can just pick a tool within the programme. Besides, the interface should be user friendly.

What are the key aspects of the channel programme that set it apart?A key aspect of the FortiPartner programme is our new network security expert certification (NSE) scheme. It is an eight level certification programme that is developed to equip partners with in-depth expertise across Fortinet’s full scope of integrated solutions and includes a wide-range of self-paced, instructor-led and practical courses for all technical profession-als. Designed to build partner knowledge and expertise in the increasingly complex network security concepts demanded in today’s business environments, the programme will help part-ners accelerate their sales, develop new services and validate advanced skills in line with the evolving cybersecurity landscape.

Describe the transitions you are seeing in technology and consumption models, and how these are impacting your partner programme?From our perspective having the right technol-ogy is crucial. Fortinet has been recognised by the NSS labs for the performance and afford-ability of our products. This in itself ensures that our customers get the best products at the best value. The network security sector is witnessing rapid growth that is directly propor-tionate to the increase in threats and increased investments being made by organisations. We are particularly witnessing demand from the public sector, telcos, and BFSI’s, and Fortinet is well equipped to address the challenges these organisations face since we have solutions that cater to every segment, from SMB’s to large organisations, as well as offer managed services. Our partner programme and NSE trainings help differentiate these offerings and allow partners to specialise in the sectors that they believe they can best demonstrate expertise. To top this, our advanced technologies give our partners

the edge, not only in providing end solutions in terms of performance and reliability, but also in terms of best value.

How is your channel programme helping partners to succeed in a highly competitive landscape in the Middle East?Our partner programme is designed to help partners better their performance by equipping them with all the necessary tools to succeed. Out end-to-end solutions NSE programme takes care of the trainings and expertise levels, while our resource centre allows partners access to sales and marketing material, case studies and analyst data and analysis. We also provide e-tools that contain technical know-how and covers sales, marketing and presales. Partners can also take advantage of Fortinet’s campaign in a box if they feel they are off target. This tool helps them with all the necessary collateral they need to grow their pipeline of business.

Does your channel programme offer specialisa-tions for partners to develop domain expertise. If so what are they?Absolutely, our partner programme offers specialisations. The programme is designed to identify and grow a reseller’s service strength and specialism, aligning with their own busi-ness goals, and provide the appropriate partner-ship level for advanced support, development and opportunity in untapped markets. The lev-els include Platinum partners, which involves proven experts that have demonstrated consist-ently high revenue and the ability to deliver the full range of Fortinet security solutions, with excellent levels of customer satisfaction and support. Gold partners level covers partners proven in selling the full range of Fortinet solu-tions on a large number of projects, recognised for customer service and support capabilities and committed to developing new adoption op-portunities for Fortinet in their served market. Silver partners deliver superior security solu-tions to small and medium-sized customers,

“OUR PARTNER PROGRAMME IS DESIGNED TO HELP PARTNERS BETTER THEIR PERFORMANCE BY EQUIPPING THEM WITH ALL THE NECESSARY TOOLS TO SUCCEED.”

and possess a working knowledge of Fortinet’s small-to-mid-range multi-threat security solu-tions. Authorised partner is the first partner level required to be part of the Fortinet channel network.

What would you cite as the biggest advantage your channel programme offers over the com-petition in the regional market?Our NSE certification is a significant highlight of our programme since one of its features is to allow partners to do a competitive analysis, and differentiate their offerings in the market. The training aspect is also important as it enables partners to become experts in terms of selling, positioning, designing and implementing solu-tions. We are also looking to revamp our deal registration tool to give partners support that could lead to increased profitability.

What does a partner stand to gain from this level of engagement with your company through the channel programme?I believe that our programme helps partners increase their profitability and create a differ-entiation in the market in terms of the product portfolio and their levels of expertise and cus-tomer support. Being part of our programme allows them access to analyst reports and docu-ments that help them with a competitive edge. Our training tools ensure that all our partners have the right levels of expertise and certifica-tions. We also have the FortiRewards aspect of our programme that provides incentives to partners when they see a particular product, this can greatly encourage them to continuously position Fortinet’s range of solutions for the best implementation methods. Our products continue to be highly recommended as evi-denced in the independent NSS lab results.

www.cyberark.com/explore

Security for the Heart of the Enterprise™

The CyberArk Privileged Account Security Solution is a new

security layer to protect your organization’s most valuable assets.

What’s your role?

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IT OPERATIONS

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Select your role and explore the CyberArk Insight Center.

For more information or to place an order on CyberArk,please write to [email protected]



ENTERPRISEDBFIDELIS CYBERSECURITY

Never miss a critical attack. Organi-zations invest millions to build secure networks

to keep highly motivated at-tackers out of their enterprises. Despite these investments, determined attackers routinely compromise seemingly secure organizations and steal their in-tellectual property, private data and financial information. Ana-lysts in security operations cent-ers (SOCs) and security teams are overwhelmed by alerts. As a result they often miss the most critical attacks or detect them long after vital data has been stolen.

Fidelis XPS™ ,one of the offering from Fidelis Cybersecurity , equips security-conscious organizations to confidently detect, in-vestigate and stop advanced attackers at every stage of the attack lifecycle. It analyzes all of your organization’s network traffic at multi-gigabit speeds and detects the tools and tactics of advanced attackers that routinely bypass other network security systems. With Fidelis XPS you get the visibility, context and speed required to identify threats and ensure data theft never happens. Detect Attacks Other Solutions Miss. In addition to advanced malware, exploits and command and control activity, Fidelis XPS identifies at-tacker behavior including lateral movement and the staging of data for exfiltration. Identify and Stop Targeted Attacks Just as they are Beginning. Quickly identify malicious behavior—includ-ing command and control activity and lateral movement—and halt data loss before it begins. Correlate Seemingly Unrelated Network Activity and Behavior. Correlate and validate threats generated by seemingly unrelated network behavior by applying automated hunting and security analytics to retrospective meta-data gathered on every network session. Reduce Time to Detect and Resolve Incidents. Quickly receive relevant information, apply threat intelligence to network data, and enable security analysts to move, within moments, from alert to investigation - all within a single interface.

“Fidelis has one of the strongest content inspection and network throughput capabilities available.” - Gartner, Inc, Magic Quadrant for Content-Aware Data Loss Prevention, January, 3, 2013.

EnterpriseDB is the worldwide leader in providing database software, support, and services for

PostgreSQL, the world’s most advanced open source data-base. It supports not only the PostgreSQL community, but also provide the Postgres Plus database server software that supplies Oracle compatibility, enhanced security, increased performance, and easier man-ageability.

EnterpriseDB’s best practices to optimize your database mix for cost savings

There are many paths to finding and applying costs sav-ings in our database portfolio including how we manage our existing volume license agree-ments. One method is moving existing and easy to migrate applications off their author-ized volume licenses to Postgres Plus Advanced Server at a much lower cost. Then recycle the volume licenses to account for growth or hardware upgrades

Preventing Cyber Attacks

Simplifying Database Management

With Fidelis XPS you get the visibility, context and speed required to identify threats and ensure data theft never happens.

PostgreSQL is the world’s most advanced open source database.

in our difficult to migrate or unqualified to migrate applica-tions. A smart re-balancing of your database mix can result in paying less in total fees with Postgres Plus Advanced Server than the current proprietary maintenance fees alone. Other strategies used by customers to deploy Postgres Plus Advanced Server include:• Building new OLTP and op-

erational applications.• Applying it to a class of ap-

plications based on specific criteria (SLAs, data size, concurrent users, etc).

• Addressing archival or read-only applications that don’t justify expensive licenses.

• Building non-mission critical applications.

• Assigning it to particular busi-ness units or departments.

• Offloading reporting tasks from a master database as an inex-pensive replication server.

AVERAGE NUMBER OF DAYS FROM INTRUSION TO CONTAINMENT OF A BREACH*

THE MEAN NUMBER OF DAYS FROM INITIAL INTRUSION TO DETECTION*

111

!! !

188

OF ORGANISATIONS IN THE STUDY WERE BREACHED DURING THE TEST PERIOD**

97% 75%OF ORGANISATIONS HAD ACTIVE COMMAND & CONTROL (C&C) COMMUNICATIONS**

VISIBILITY INTO NETWORKS HAS NEVER BEEN MORE CRITICAL...

*Trustwave Holdings, Inc. “2015 Trustwave Global Security Report.” 2015.

**FireEye. “MAGINOT REVISITED: More Real-World Results from Real-World Tests.” 2015.

See more at: www.gigamon.com/destination-gigasecure

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GigaSECURE®, the first offering of a Security Delivery Platform, provides pervasive visibility to security applications. It’s poised to transform the way security services are deployed and leveraged - making security appliances more effective, cutting security costs and reducing complexity.

SEE MORE. SECURE MORE

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See more at: www.gigamon.com/destination-gigasecure

ANNOUNCING THE INDUSTRY’SFIRST SECURITY DELIVERY PLATFORM

Modern threats demand the ability to see inside networks; unfortunately, increasing network complexity and an ad hoc approach to security appliance deployments have resulted in blind spots, extraordinary costs, security devices competing for access to traffic and too many false positives.

GigaSECURE®, the first offering of a Security Delivery Platform, provides pervasive visibility to security applications. It’s poised to transform the way security services are deployed and leveraged - making security appliances more effective, cutting security costs and reducing complexity.

SEE MORE. SECURE MOREFor more information or to place an order on Gigamon,please write to [email protected]

RED HAT



Open source solutions provider, Red Hat is enabling customers to take advantage of its technolo-gies to deliver an open hybrid IT infrastructure optimised for different workloads and with common management and storage for greater efficiency.

THE HYBRID REALITY

IT organisations are increasingly faced with demands to become more agile, deliver solutions quickly, and provide innovative capabilities that are tightly aligned with the needs of the business. These pressures have profound implica-tions for how senior IT decision makers

need to shape their vision for the immediate future. That vision must include a way to con-tinue providing traditional IT capabilities that are focused on stability and efficiency while also transitioning to include a more experi-mental, agile, and iterative approach to deliver transformational digital capabilities.

IT research firm Gartner calls this approach bimodal IT, and it predicts that by 2017, 75% of IT organisations will have a bimodal capa-bility. IDC estimates that 91% of enterprise IT decision makers will deploy hybrid cloud architectures by 2017.

Implementing a bimodal IT strategy is not a minor feat as it needs a hybrid IT infrastructure to support both traditional, stateful scale-up

applications and data, as well as new agile, stateless scale-out application models.

A truly hybrid IT infrastructure should support any and all workload types, letting applications run optimally on their own natural environments, whether bare-metal servers, scale-up virtualisation, infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), from either private or public clouds.

The Red Hat portfolio provides the open hybrid IT fabric required to seamlessly enable both traditional and new, agile, cloud-native workloads. Red Hat infrastructure solutions allow customers to work with the systems they have now as they take advantage of new technology in the future with standards-based, open, and interoperable software.

With a hybrid IT infrastructure built with open Red Hat technologies, users can innovate faster for greater competitive advantage, and deploy an interoperable, consistent, and secure platform across physical, virtual, public, and private hybrid cloud environments. A user can

“RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX IS THE WORLD’S LEADING ENTERPRISE LINUX PLATFORM, USED BY MORE THAN 90% OF FORTUNE 500 COMPANIES.”

also share platforms, tools, and skills across the entire hybrid IT environment while reducing both operating and capital expenses.

Supported by thousands of developers around the world, open source development is accelerating innovation in every key tech-nology area today, including cloud computing, mobile applications, big data, and more.

Red Hat is at the forefront of enterprise-class open software development, with a broad portfolio of products and services that support infrastructure for both traditional and new cloud-native applications. Red Hat is currently the only provider with the ability to optimally deliver an open hybrid IT infra-structure optimised for different workloads and with common management and storage for greater efficiency.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, used by more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation gives en-terprises the ideal platform on which to base largescale virtualisation initiatives, delivering record-setting performances and scalability along with unmatched consolidation ratios.

Red Hat Cloud Suite lets customers take advantage of a highly scalable, public-cloud-like infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenStack technology. Open Shift Enterprise by Red Hat is an on-premise, private PaaS solution that al-lows users to deliver apps faster and meet their enterprise’s growing application demands.

Red Hat CloudForms is a comprehensive cloud management platform that improves your traditional virtual and cloud infrastruc-tures with advanced capacity planning and resource management features.

The Red Hat storage portfolio of products provides a unified, open software-defined storage platform that scales across physical, virtual, and cloud environments and delivers a range of data services for next-generation workloads.

For more information or to place an order on Red Hat,please write to [email protected]

AMAZON WEB SERVICES



Niko Mykkanen, EMEA Partner Lead for Amazon Web Services, shares some tips for Middle Eastern system integrators preparing their business for the cloud.

A CLOUD IN THE CHANNEL

Over the past few years we have seen cloud computing becoming the new normal for companies of all sizes across the Middle East and around the world. The abil-ity to access near endless

amounts of compute, storage and other tech-nologies over the Internet on a pay as you go basis, is helping organisations to lower the overall cost of their IT and dramatically increase their agility and pace of innovation. This is leading companies of all sizes from start-ups like AirBnB, Spotify and Pinterest to enterprises like Shell, Unilever and NASA to move their technology to the cloud. Given so many organisations are moving to the cloud I wanted to share some best practices we have seen from Systems Integrator (SI) partners around the world.

THE CLOUD IS YOUR FRIENDSI partners sometimes hesitate when moving to the cloud as some think that it eliminates the need for partners. Although customers have the option to work directly with a vendor like AWS, partners are still a key part of the cloud ecosystem. Early on at AWS, we determined that the partner ecosystem was critical to the success of our customers and our business. This is because we understand partners can have relation-ships, insight and knowledge into customers that technology vendors don’t.

TRAINING IS KEYAll SIs that are successful in the cloud understand the importance of training and development of their own teams and the

teams of customers. When building a migra-tion roadmap to the cloud, training should always be the first step. Training empowers teams to use the cloud to its full potential. With the cloud there are many familiar technologies and programming languages but there are also new concepts, such as infrastructure as code and availability zones that you will need to understand in order to achieve the cloud’s full potential. Training also empowers teams to understand the business benefits of the cloud.

GO WHERE YOU KNOWOnce SIs understand the potential cloud has for their organisation, the first ques-tion most commonly asked is, where should we start first?As there is no right or wrong answer, we see many approaches. Many start off using cloud internally for their own technology infrastructure. This allows SIs to become familiar with the technologies and concepts behind the cloud before rolling it out to their cus-tomer’s businesses. Others choose to carve off their cloud division into a separate

“CLOUD IS BECOMING THE NEW NORMAL, BOTH IN THE CHANNEL AND FOR CUSTOMERS. NOT USING CLOUD IS JUST LIKE FIGHTING GRAVITY.”

business, positioning it as the innovation arm of their organisation. Others integrate cloud into all facets of their organisation and start selling it into existing accounts for new projects. This allows them to help their customers to innovate at low risk.

DON’T FIGHT GRAVITYStarting out in the cloud requires a mind-set change for SI partners. Understanding that cloud poses an opportunity for their organisation from the start helps them to unearth the full potential it has for their organisation abd business model.

Cloud is becoming the new normal, both in the channel and for customers. Not using cloud is just like fighting gravity.

Redington Value - Amazon Web Services Partner Summit held in Dubai on 14th September, 2015.



NIKSUN

NIKSUN is the recognised world leader in empowering organisations to know the unknown. Since 1997, the com-pany has been committed to delivering the most innovative solutions for securing and optimising the networks of over a thousand Fortune 500 companies, government agencies,

and service providers worldwide.NIKSUN’s industry leading suite of scalable, forensics-based cyber se-

curity and network performance monitoring products provide custom-ers with in-depth and actionable insight into security threats, perfor-mance issues, and compliance risks. Its patented real-time analysis and recording technology is the industry’s most comprehensive solution for securing and maintaining dynamic network infrastructure.

With the award-winning products and solutions, every piece of data traversing the network is simultaneously captured, inspected, mined, correlated and stored at rates through 100 Gbps.

The single biggest challenge in solving the problems associated with cyber-attacks and performance issues. With the ability to record, inspect, and analyse all network activity, NIKSUN enables customers to know the unknown, providing invaluable holistic insights to retrace incident paths and mitigate any damage done, in a fraction of the time.

NIKSUN is the only performance monitoring appliance that seam-lessly integrates all functions of packet capture, deep packet inspection, and analysis for advanced real time, network, service and appl perfor-mance monitoring and troubleshooting.

With NIKSUN, users gain insight into tiered apps, while simultane-ously addressing cyber security risks and analys-ing the performance of mission critical services and the underlying infrastructure. NIKSUN continues to revolutionise the industry with its products - NetDetector, NetVCR, NetMobility and NetOmni at more than 1000 clients in over 30 countries.

Dell Software is a mul-tinational provider of IT solutions with headquarters in Round Rock, Texas,

USA. Dell Software was created after Dell Inc, the third-largest maker of PCs and now a pri-vately held company, built out its software offerings to provide end-to-end solutions for data centre and cloud management, information management, mobile workforce management, security and data protection for organisations of all sizes.

Scalable, integrated business and enterprise software solu-tions from Dell make it easy to secure and manage networks, applications, systems, end-points, devices and data to help your business deliver on the full promise of technology.

It’s easier than ever to drive value in your organisation with innovative IT management solutions. Whether it’s manag-ing virtualisation and cloud computing, secure mobility user access governance, or the untapped potential of your data, there are dozens of ways to unlock the power of IT in your business. The best way to start: by drastically reducing com-plexity and risk.

With the software solutions offerings, opportunities abound

today for IT to drive value for enterprises. The right so-lutions can de-liver business

Knowing the unknown

Accelerate results

NIKSUN’s suite of cyber forensics tools are being used by many Fortune 500 companies.

Dell Software solutions dramatically reduce complexity and risk to unlock the power of IT.

agility and innovation for staying ahead of the market curves as well as attracting and retaining more customers than you ever imagined. But for your organisa-tion to truly fulfill the promise of IT, you have to efficiently manage its myriad pitfalls and intricacies.

Only Dell Software can deliv-er the extensive capabilities you need to tackle these challenges and thrive. The company makes it easy to securely manage and protect applications, systems, devices and data for organisa-tions of all sizes.

In the Middle East and Africa, Redington Gulf has leveraged its IT supply chain management prowess to ensure that clients get the best of Dell Software so-lutions such as data centre and cloud management, data protec-tion, information management, mobile workforce management and security.

DELL SOFTWARE



VISION SOLUTIONS

Vision Solutions is the premier provider of IT software solu-tions designed

to protect data and minimise downtime for the modern data centre. It is the only company to deliver migra-tions, high availability, disaster recovery, and data sharing across multiple oper-ating systems, on any storage platform and in any combi-nation of physical, virtual, or cloud-based servers. As a single source solution for virtually any hybrid IT environment, we provide our customers, channel partners, and cloud service providers with a competitive edge.

The company’s solutions perform near-zero downtime migra-tion of data, applications, and systems to significantly reduce time, cost, and risk whether it’s a move from physical to virtual servers, virtual to cloud, cloud to cloud, or cloud to ground. Vision Solu-tions achieves best-in-class migrations, HA, and DR performance through the use of real-time, byte level replication to prevent data loss, and fast recovery to secondary servers in the event of a planned or unplanned failure at the primary site.

Vision Solutions has been serving enterprises, channel part-ners, and managed service providers for over 25 years through its portfolio of Double-Take, MIMIX and iTERA product brands. Its hardware agnostic software meets the needs of Windows, Linux, AIX, and IBM power systems and cloud environments.

“As companies forecast IT spending in 2015 and beyond, includ-ing making decisions around talent ac-quisition, outsourcing or infrastructure changes, they must consider areas of vulnerability both known and yet unforeseen related to critical business data,” said Vision Solutions Chief Technology Officer Alan Arnold. “What we’ve uncovered with our research in the State of Resil-ience Report isthat companies are in-sufficiently prepared to provide resilience for their IT systems, particularly in light of the prevalence of hybrid data centers and the acceleration of cloud adoption.”

Vision Solutions product offerings are available in the Middle East and Africa from Redington Value Distribution.

Palo Alto Networks is leading a new era in cybersecurity by protecting thou-sands of enterprise,

government, and service provider networks from cyber threats. Founded in 2005, the company’s core products are advanced firewalls designed to provide network security, visibility and granular control of network activity based on application, user, and content identification.

As the next-generation security company, Palo Alto is enabling all applications and preventing advanced threats from achieving their objectives for tens of thousands of organi-sations around the world. It is the fastest growing security company in the market because of its deep expertise, commit-ment to innovation, and game-changing security platform focused on bringing an end to the era of breaches by uniquely integrating its Next-Generation Firewall, Advanced Endpoint Protection, and Threat Intel-ligence Cloud.

Because these capabilities are natively built into its plat-form and designed to deliver highly automated preventative measures against cyberthreats, Palo Alto ensures superior se-curity to legacy point technolo-gies such as stateful inspection firewalls, UTMs, or endpoint security products. Organisa-tions can leverage Palo Alto’s platform to pursue a digital-

Disaster RecoverySolutions

Delivering Cybersecurity

Vision Solutions delivers high availability, DR and data sharing across multiple OS platforms .

Palo Alto with its next-gen security solutions is leading a new era of cybersecurity.

first strategy as they imple-ment key technology initiatives within the cloud and increas-ingly mobile networks, while maintaining complete visibility and control, to protect their most valued data assets and critical control systems.

As the next-generation secu-rity company, Palo Alto is lead-ing a new era in cybersecurity by safely enabling all applica-tions and preventing advanced threats from achieving their objectives for thousands of or-ganisations around the world. The company is one of the fast-est growing security companies in the market because of its deep expertise, commitment to innovation, and game-changing security platform.

Palo Alto Networks is dis-tributed in the Middle East and Africa by Redington Value Distribution.

PALO ALTO NETWORKS

ACRONIS



Backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions vendor Acronis talks about its advanced backup solutions for Linux Server and how channel partners can share in on the success.

BACKUP FOR LINUX SERVER

Acronis Backup Advanced for Linux server provides data protection and disaster recov-ery (DR) of your Linux server environment. Powered by the Acronis AnyData Engine, this product leverages Acronis’

patented disk-imaging technology, letting you quickly backup and instantly recover your Linux server or selected files and folders. You can recover data to its original location, to dis-similar hardware or a virtual machine. You can also recover to bare metal in record time.

The Acronis AnyData Engine is the core suite of technology that powers all Acronis’ new generation data protection products to capture, store, recover, control, and access data in virtual, physical, cloud, and mobile environments. Fuelled by over 100 patents, its modular architecture lets you use one or more Acronis products, each individually de-signed and optimised for a specific workload. For example, Acronis Backup Advanced for Linux is designed and optimised for protect-ing your Linux servers.

The Acronis AnyData Engine also lets you add and blend additional Acronis products as your technology infrastructure evolves - with-out replacing any components. You can use the same unified console to configure, install, and maintain each product. If you have more than one Acronis product, use the Acronis Manage-ment Server (AMS). The AMS is a single pane-of-glass that lets you easily manage the backup and recovery of all data across multiple Acronis

products, including Acronis Backup Advanced for Linux.

BEST BACKUP FOR LINUXDisk Image Technology - The Acronis AnyData Engine saves complete images to a variety of backup targets including local disk, network storage, tape and cloud. You then have the abil-ity to recover the complete image or selected files, folders and applications.

Exclude Files - Exclude non-essential files and folders from your backups to save storage space and time.

Mount and Browse Backups - Mount a backup and search files and folders for specific data. Restore via a simple cp command or any other method. You can also mount disk images

BENEFITS• A powerful, yet affordable solution powered

by the Acronis AnyData Engine.• Fast, easy backups improves IT productivity.• Hybrid protection improves disaster recov-

ery and helps ensure business continuity.• Modular architecture lets you add on ad-

ditional products as your business grows.• Centralised management and reporting

eases IT administration.• Complete yet easy to install, configure, and

manage.

“THE ACRONIS ANYDATA ENGINE IS THE CORE SUITE OF TECHNOLOGY THAT POWERS ALL ACRONIS’ NEW GENERATION DATA PROTECTION PRODUCTS TO CAPTURE, STORE, RECOVER, CON-TROL AND ACCESS DATA IN VIRTUAL, PHYSICAL, CLOUD, AND MOBILE ENVIRONMENTS.”

in read-only or read / write mode.Firmware and File System Support -

Acronis provides full support for BIOS and UEFI firmware interfaces, ensuring complete Linux server recovery.

Server Migration - Easily migrate to any physical or virtual server (P2P, P2V, V2V, and V2P) in any location.

Hybrid Protection - To provide the hybrid protection you need in the event of a disaster, Acronis stores backup copies in up to five different locations locally and in the cloud – including Acronis Cloud.



ZIMBRA

Zimbra Col-laboration Server (ZCS) is an open source email

and collaboration platform that includes email, contacts, cal-endar, documents and more. It is a Web-based application suite that can be deployed as an on-premise private cloud or outsourced public cloud service.

ZCS is compatible with desktop email clients, such as Windows Outlook. It also works on Windows, Apple and Linux computers. It also performs over-the-air sync to mobile device operating sys-tems, including iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry.

ZCS is intended for enterprise deployment with the goal of integrating myriad collaboration tools. Zimbra was initially de-veloped by Zimbra, Inc, and first released in 2005. It is owned by Synacor, the trusted partner for video, internet and communica-tions providers and device manufacturers worldwide.

Since inception, Zimbra has been a community. All of Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition software, documentation and innovation has been created, tested, used, and discussed openly by people participating in the company’s Open Source Commu-nity. The contributors diagnose bugs, fix bugs, translate pro-grams, submit patches, point out deficiencies in documentation, answer community questions, submit killer applications, alert us to something that needs tweaking, and write new software. No matter how one contributes, the company always welcomes new ideas and contributions for the advancement of greater shared knowledge and a better Zimbra Collaboration product.

The software consists of both client and server components, and a desktop client. Two versions of Zimbra are available: an open-source version, and a commercially supported version (Network Edition) with closed-source components such as a proprietary Messaging Application Programming Interface connector to Outlook for calendar and contact synchroni-sation. The solution is distributed in the Middle East by

Redington Gulf, a leading IT supply chain solutions provider in MEA.

Since inception in 2005, Zimbra has been a community of collaborators.

HP is a leader in data security, safeguard-ing data throughout its entire lifecycle, at rest, in motion, in

use across the cloud, on-premise and mobile environments with continuous protection. HP Data Security drives leadership in data-centric security and encryption solutions. With over 80 patents and 51 years of expertise, HP Security protects the world’s larg-est brands and neutralises breach impact by securing sensitive data at rest, in use and in motion.

Its solutions provide advanced encryption, tokenisation and key management that protect sensitive data across enterprise applications, data processing IT, cloud, payments ecosystems, mis-sion critical transactions, storage and big data platforms. HP Data Security solves one of the indus-try’s biggest challenges, which is how to simplify the protection of sensitive data in even the most complex use cases.

From applications to in-frastructure, enterprises and governments alike face a constant barrage of digital attacks designed to steal data, cripple networks, damage brands, and perform a host of other malicious intents. HP Enterprise Security Prod-ucts (ESP) offers products and services that help organisations meet the security demands of a rapidly changing and more dangerous world. HP ESP enables businesses and institutions to take a proactive approach to security that integrates informa-

tion correlation, deep applica-tion analysis and network-level defence mechanisms, unifying the components of a complete security programme and reducing risk across the enterprise.

HP IT security services help or-ganisations implement a strategy to mitigate risk and avoid costly penalties for non-compliance. HP can detect intrusions within 12 minutes of arrival and resolve 92 percent of major incidents within 2 hours of identification.

HP security research conducts innovative research and provides industry-leading protection against the latest threats. Security research publications and regular threat briefings include regular updates on the latest threats, Ze-ro-Day initiatives and applica-tion vulnerabilities. In addition, HP does annual research into the real Cost of Cyber Crime to organizations globally, and a detailed analysis of the year’s biggest threats.

HP Security products are all ranked in the Gartner Magic Quadrant as leaders in each of their respective categories.

Enhanced collaboration

Tackling data security

HP Enterprise Security drives leadership in data-centric security and encryption solutions.

HP SECURITY

CYBERARK



Security software company, CyberArk discusses its solutions aimed at boosting the security of any organisation’s privileged accounts.

PRIVILEGED SECURITY

Privileged accounts represent the largest security vul-nerability an organisation faces today. These powerful accounts are used in nearly every cyber-attack, and they allow anyone who gains

possession of them to control organisation resources, disable security systems, and ac-cess vast amounts of sensitive data.

To protect these accounts and the criti-cal resources they provide access to, or-ganisations need comprehensive controls in place to protect, monitor, detect and

respond to all privileged account activity.CyberArk is the trusted expert in privi-

leged account security. Designed from the ground up for security, the CyberArk Privileged Account Security Solution provides the most comprehensive solu-tion for on premise, cloud and OT/SCADA environments.

This complete enterprise-ready Privi-leged Account Security Solution is tamper-proof, scalable and built for complex distributed environments to provide the utmost protection from advanced external and insider threats.

CyberArk is the only company with the ability to provide full protection from advanced and insider threats to mitigate your risks and meet high stakes compliance requirements.

CyberArk has more deployments in large-scale distributed and virtual environments, solving more privileged account security challenges than any other vendor.

CYBERARK SHARED TECH PLATFORMDigital Vault: The award-winning, patented Digital Vault is an isolated and bastion hardened server with FIPS 140-2 encryption

CYBERARK



that only responds to the vault protocols for unmatched security.

Master Policy: Master Policy is an innova-tive policy engine that enables customers to set, manage and monitor privileged account security policy in a single, simple, natural language interface.

Discovery Engine: Designed to continu-ally discover changes to your IT environ-ment, the discovery engine enables constant up-to-date protection and ensures that all privileged account activity is accounted for and secure.

Scalable, Flexible, Low-Impact Architec-ture: CyberArk’s Privileged Account Secu-rity Solution was architected for minimal impact and protects your existing invest-ment in your current IT environment.

Enterprise-Class Integration: Cyber-Ark’s Privileged Account Security Solution enables organisations to leverage existing investments with out-of-the-box support for numerous devices, networks, servers and applications, including websites and social media.

PRIVILEGED ACCOUNT SECURITY PRODUCTSEvery product in the CyberArk privileged account security solution is stand-alone and can be managed independently while still sharing resources and data from the common infrastructure. Working to-gether the products provide a complete, secure solution.

ENTERPRISE PASSWORD VAULTEnterprise Password Vault prevents mali-cious use of privileged user passwords,

and brings order and protection to vulner-able accounts. Enterprise Password Vault secures privileged passwords based on your privileged account security policy and con-trols who can access which passwords and when. Automated password rotation reduces the time-consuming and error-prone task of manually tracking and updating privileged passwords to easily meet audit and compli-ance standards.

SSH KEY MANAGERSSH Key Manager is designed to prevent unauthorised access to privileged accounts protected by SSH keys. SSH Key Man-ager securely stores and controls access to private SSH keys, manages trust relation-ships with public SSH keys on systems, and enables organisations to report on who used what keys and when. The product automati-cally rotates key pairs in accordance with security policies, enabling organisations to strengthen security without burdening the IT team.

PRIVILEGED SESSION MANAGERPrivileged Session Manager enables secu-rity teams to rapidly detect and respond to threats inside the network. Real-time monitoring enables organisations to in-stantly spot suspicious activity, and remote session termination enables security teams to disrupt attacks in process. Searchable DVR-like recordings enable security and audit teams to easily locate events without sorting through any logs. By monitoring, controlling and isolating privileged sessions, the product helps organisations strengthen security, accelerate incident response and

meet compliance requirements.

PRIVILEGED THREAT ANALYTICSAs the industry’s only targeted privileged threat analytics solution, CyberArk Privi-leged Threat Analytics identifies previously undetectable malicious privileged user activity. By applying patented algorithms to a rich set of privileged account behav-ioral data, the solution produces accurate, actionable intelligence, allowing incident responders to disrupt and directly respond to attacks.

APPLICATION IDENTITY MANAGERApplication Identity Manager eliminates hard-coded application credentials includ-ing passwords and SSH keys from applica-tions and scripts. The product meets and exceeds high-end enterprise requirements for availability and business continuity, even within complex and distributed network environments. The product eliminates embedded application accounts often with-out requiring code changes and with zero impact on application performance.

ON-DEMAND PRIVILEGES MANAGEROn-Demand Privileges Manager allows privileged users to use administrative commands from their native UNIX session while eliminating unneeded root or admin rights. This secure and enterprise ready sudo-like solution provides unified and correlated logging of all super-user activity linking it to a personal username while pro-viding the freedom needed to perform job function. The product continuously moni-tors all administrative commands super users run based on their role and task.

CyberArk DNA, (discovery and audit) is a free assessment tool that helps organisa-tions discover where privileged accounts are throughout the enterprise. With a clear accounting of all service accounts, devices, and applications, DNA can help organi-sations achieve an understanding of the size and magnitude of privileged account security risks. This tool helps organisations prioritise projects based on where they are most vulnerable, and it can be used to assist in building a business case or planning for a privileged account security project.

“BEST PRACTICES DICTATE THAT PRIVI-LEGED ACCOUNTS SHOULD BE INCORPO-RATED INTO AN ORGANISATION’S CORE SE-CURITY STRATEGY. PRIVILEGED ACCOUNTS ARE A SECURITY PROBLEM AND NEED SIN-GULAR CONTROLS PUT IN PLACE TO PRO-TECT, MONITOR, DETECT AND RESPOND TO ALL PRIVILEGED ACCOUNT ACTIVITY.”

BARRACUDA



Cloud and security solutions provider, Barracuda calls for a rethink of security deployment strategies as network threat vectors catch up with virtualisation trends.

SECURITY FOR A CONNECTED WORLD

Today’s organisations continue to struggle with providing ad-equate protection in an evolv-ing threat landscape. Modern threats are sophisticated, difficult to detect, and easily scalable. As network resources

become more interconnected, security breaches have a much greater and longer-lasting impact.

Most organisations operate with a common set of network resources that enable users, data, and applications to interact. These same resources create opportunities for threats to breach an organisation, also known as network threat vectors. The major network threat vec-

tors include the network perimeter, the email infrastructure, web applications, web browsing activity, remote access, and mobile devices. Despite the overwhelming diversity of cyber threats that exist, most attacks primarily target these threat vectors.

To complicate matters, adoption of virtuali-sation or public cloud infrastructures have led organisations to rethink their deployment strat-egies. This means that organisations not only have to protect their physical networks, but their virtual and cloud-based resources as well; thereby increasing their overall attack surface.

Unfortunately, most mid-market companies have limited resources to secure all of their

threat vectors across these different attack surfaces. Existing staff are stretched thin, often having to deal with many different product interfaces and inconsistent support experiences from multiple vendors. Limited budgets also make it difficult to acquire all of the technol-ogy necessary to provide a comprehensive security strategy. As a result, companies often leave one or more of these critical threat vectors unguarded, putting the organization at risk.

The mega IT trends; cloud, mobility and wireless have resulted in increased network dis-persion, driving organisations to re-design their architecture to optimize for highly distributed networks. The traditional hub-and-spoke net-

BARRACUDA



work model was ideal in an environment where most resources such as email, web applications and files were centrally located at headquarters or a primary data centre. However, this model has become outdated due to rapid geographic expansion of remote or branch offices, prefer-ence of using public cloud services over hosting on-premises applications, benefits of deploying infrastructure on public cloud platforms, and the growing mobile workforce that demands 24/7 access to business-critical resource.

In this paradigm, this means moving away from the traditional backhauling of traffic, and instead providing local internet breakouts for remote locations. Organisations should re-design the network architecture to maximise connec-tivity and maintain operational efficiency while managing a highly dispersed environment.

Today, administrators need to design a net-work for optimal connectivity between office locations that are geographically dispersed, employees who are constantly on the move, and a mixture of applications deployed on and off-premises. To secure this network, they should implement their security strategy along the paths where attacks occur.

Mobile devices have turned the network perimeter borderless, forcing companies to re-evaluate web filtering and VPN requirements, while a highly dispersed network of office locations, users, and applications are causing organisations to design networks with multiple internet breakouts instead of the traditional ‘backhaul’ model.

Total threat protection provides a frame-work for comprehensive, real-time protection that is the key to securing all network threat vectors, while providing flexible deployment options to cover growing attack surfaces. It also offers a consistent set of user interfaces and central management tools to improve operational efficiencies.

Barracuda next-generation firewalls are designed to protect the network perimeter,

optimise connectivity, and simplify the adminis-tration of network operations. They incorporate industry-leading centralised management capabilities with a comprehensive set of next-generation firewall technologies, including ap-plication and user awareness, intrusion preven-tion and detection, anti-malware and anti-virus scanning, web filtering and SSL inspection as well as network access control.

With Barracuda’s firewall family, organisa-tions can simplify the investment in network se-curity while improving the performance, avail-ability, and security of distributed networks.

Barracuda SSL VPN addresses today’s organisations’ needs for a flexible, reliable, and secure vehicle for connecting to internal busi-ness applications, information, and network resources from anywhere, any time and on any device. Available as a hardware or virtual appliance, the Barracuda SSL VPN provides the security and connectivity to deliver this access via a simple web browser.

Barracuda web security solutions protect organisations against exposure to web-based malware and viruses, lost user productivity, and misused bandwidth. As a comprehensive solution, they unite multiple layers of spyware, malware, and virus protection with a powerful web filtering policy and reporting engine. Ad-vanced features ensure that organisations adapt to emerging requirements like wireless security, social-network regulation, remote filtering, and visibility into SSL-encrypted traffic.

Barracuda email security solutions inspect all email traffic to protect organisations from email-borne threats and sensitive data leaks. Organisations have a variety of data loss preven-tion and encryption options, as well as granular bulk email management policies. The solution also provides email continuity through message spooling if mail servers become unavailable.

In addition to the on-premises form factors, companies looking for hosted email security can also deploy the Barracuda Email Security

“WITH BARRACUDA’S FIREWALL FAMILY, ORGANISATIONS CAN SIMPLIFY THE INVESTMENT IN NETWORK SECURITY WHILE IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE, AVAILABILITY, AND SECURITY OF DISTRIBUTED NETWORKS.”

Service, a perfect complement to organisations utilising cloud-based email services such as Office 365. Barracuda Email Security Service provides a layered approach to protecting your email investment with better spam & virus ac-curacy, real-time threat detection, and granular email management capabilities.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall provides an ideal solution for organisations looking to pro-tect their web applications from data breaches and defacement. Even without waiting for clean code or knowing how an application works, ad-ministrators can rest assured knowing that they have the proper security in place.

Barracuda total threat protection is an ideal security framework for IT professionals and organisations that contend with resource and budget constraints. Its solutions share a common, intuitive interface for a familiar and consistent user experience. This makes it easy for small and medium-sized organisations to implement and manage their security solutions with minimal overhead.

All Barracuda solutions are backed by Bar-racuda threat intelligence, a powerful security framework that combines threat data collec-tion from multiple sources around the world, advanced analysis and research, and a global operations network that supports gateway defence, end-point security, and real-time protection through the cloud. The framework is designed to provide comprehensive, timely, up-to-date threat protection across multiple threat vectors while maintaining the highest level of performance for both on-premises solutions and hosted environments.

In providing a comprehensive security ap-proach, administrators should understand the key trends that are driving the requirements in their network design. Cloud-based workloads present new challenges in providing connectiv-ity and security of users, data, and applications. Wireless networks bring challenges around implementing a uniform set of policies and workflows for both wired and wireless devices.

Once these trends are understood, admin-istrators can implement the appropriate Bar-racuda security solutions along the main threat vectors that attacks generally target. Further-more, they must consider how changes in deployment technologies may expand their attack surface from physical to virtual to cloud-based networks

Greater Heights. Greater Risks.

Office #202, Building 12,Dubai Internet City, Dubai. PO Box 73030.

In today’s continually evolving modern workplace, businesses are becoming increasingly more virtualized, more cloud enabled and more mobile. They expect more from data protection - faster recovery, always-on, anytime/anywhere access. Protecting the modern workplace requires a new way of thinking.

IT must enable and accelerate availability, productivity and collaboration, while being expected to support growth with limited resources.

Find out what else Barracuda can do for your business. Call us on +971 4 4534 664 or +971 55 1910 181, or visit www.barracuda.com.

For more information or to place an order on Barracuda,please write to [email protected]

SHAVLIK



Patch management solutions vendor Shavlik highlights the importance of effective enterprise application patch management.

ENTERPRISE APPLICATION PATCH MANAGEMENT

Five years ago enterprise security was mostly about widespread malware attacks perpetrated by mischievous young hackers out for notoriety. Today enterprises are threatened by much more insidious, targeted advanced

persistent threats (APTs) that infiltrate their networks secretly for months or years in order to steal highly valuable proprietary information.

Instead of teenagers out for a good time, today’s attackers are often far more sophisticated organ-ised crime organisations and government or ter-rorist sponsored hackers out for monetary reward.

A LAYERED APPROACH Preventing application-level attacks requires an integrated, layered approach that combines comprehensive application patch management with careful application and OS configuration management and anti-malware capabilities, all working together to thwart new attacks as they surface.

The SANS Institute has placed particular emphasis on application and operating system configuration management, ranking “secure con-figurations for hardware and software on mobile devices, laptops, workstations, and servers” Criti-cal Control 3 of its 20 Critical Security Controls.

VIRTUALISATION As if the security landscape in the physical world weren’t complicated enough, the trend towards server and storage virtualisation in the enterprise has made security management even more com-plex and unwieldy. Before virtualisation became widespread, the requesting, procuring, installing, and configuring of new servers was a highly vis-ible process and workflow that took days, weeks, or even months and almost inevitably came to the attention of IT and security teams.

Since old procurement and configuration processes have broken down in the virtual world, new servers are often deployed without the nec-essary coordination of IT security. In many cases the virtual machine templates they’ve configured to maintain security are either out of date or not used consistently. In other cases IT departments are under the illusion that protecting the virtual hypervisor is sufficient and each of the virtual machines operating under the hypervisor can run without the same protection as their physi-cal counterparts. Security vendors have also been playing catch-up, spending the past several years creating and refining products for the spe-cific requirements of the virtual environment.

“PREVENTING APPLICATION-LEVEL ATTACKS RE-QUIRES AN INTEGRATED, LAYERED APPROACH THAT COMBINES COMPREHENSIVE APPLICATION PATCH MANAGEMENT WITH CAREFUL APPLICATION AND OPERATING SYSTEM CONFIGURATION MANAGE-MENT AND ANTI-MALWARE CAPABILITIES.”

Past malware attacks could be stopped with ba-sic antivirus and operating system updates. Today, many organisations employ zero-day techniques that target app vulnerabilities rather than operat-ing system vulnerabilities.

Despite the shift to zero-day attacks and third-party app exploits, many enterprises remain unaware of the hazards of third-party application vulnerabilities. Instead, they continue to focus on operating system updates provided by Microsoft and other OS vendors. Typically it takes major organisations on average twice as long to patch vulnerabilities on the client-side as compared with patching OS vulnerabilities.

Protecting today’s enterprise takes more than just implementing

best of breed technologies in the network. Changes in the

corporate IT environment can open up new security holes. And

more complex Internet threats increasingly bypass the first line

of defense.

This evolution calls for a new approach to network security.

A holistic, end-to-end solution is crucial to ensure the protection

of the total IT infrastructure - from the desktop to the datacenter

and from the campus to the branch office - with all elements of the

solution working collaboratively.

Built for security and performance, only Fortinet can secure

the entire network, ensuring the safety and integrity of the

corporate data.

Join the more than 225,000 organizations worldwide that

have already chosen Fortinet to secure their most critical

business assets.

Secure Your Network with Fortinet

Fortinet Solutions include:A comprehensive range of high

performance firewalls to meet all

network requirements

Advanced Threat Protection

Web Application Firewall

Secure Wireless Networking

Email Security

DDoS Protection

www.fortinet.com

For more information or to place an order on Fortinet,please write to [email protected]

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Value plus october 2015

Technology

Transcript of Value plus october 2015