Network World | Issue 154 | October 2017

ISSUE 154 / OCTOBER 2017

www.tahawultech.com

WHERE IT’S GOING PUBLICATION LICENSED BY DUBAI PRODUCTION CITY, DCCA

SUPPLEMENT

Trade in your best for far better

Your DTX* has served you well for years. The only way we’d ask you to replace it is if we had something better.

And we have something far better.

By upgrading to Versiv you will have instruments that earn you money every time you use them. On top of that we especially value our Gold Customers and we’ll prove it to you.

We will give you incredible trade-in deals to swap out your DTX devices for our new DSX models part of the Versiv Cable Certification System. Our best just got better, and your work output and profits will, too.

Trade in your tester and save up to $4,500 To discover the details of the offer, simply download the promotional flyer at www.flukenetworks.com/promo-EN-USD

With LinkWare Live SaaS you manage certification jobs anytime, anywhere, with anyone on any device.

*Long-term support for the DTX-1200/1800 Series is ending on June 30th, 2018.

CONTENTS

ISSUE 154 OCTOBER 2017

20 Beware of the legacy

Riverbed’s Future of Networking survey finds legacy networks holding back cloud and digital transformation

26 Transforming data centres

4

8

The hardware components in modern data centres helps companies tread the path to hyperconvergence.

28 On the wire

What SDN is and where it’s going

Curt Carlson, Transition Networks, on how IT teams can maximise the use of existing cabling to save time, money and headaches.

The SDN market has emerged from early adopter to early mainstream, and in doing so its use cases have expanded.

The next big thing in Wi-Fi The 802.11ax specification brings a Wi-Fi standard to the network that supports wireless LANs.

12 Five myths about the IoT

Paddy Srinivasan, LogMeIn, writes about how we will get the most value of IoT.

14 Walking on wires

32 Virtual advantage

18 Flexible connectivity

34 Products

New technologies and increasing bandwidth demands are forcing enterprises to rethink data centre cabling.

Tarek Helmy, Nexans Cabling Solutions, talks about the new trends in data centre cabling.

Ranga Rajagopalan, Avi Networks, discusses the emergence of software-defined application delivery technology.

Riverbed launches Xirrus wireless access point.

FOUNDER, CPI MEDIA GROUP Dominic De Sousa (1959-2015)

Published by

EDITORIAL Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9129

PRODUCTION AND DESIGN Production Manager James P Tharian james.tharian@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5673

Editor James Dartnell james.dartnell@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9153

Senior Designer Analou Balbero analou.balbero@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5680

Sales Manager Merle Carrasco merle.carrasco@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9147

Online Editor Adelle Geronimo adelle.geronimo@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9135

Designer Neha Kalvani neha.kalvani@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9159

CIRCULATION Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh.nair@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9119

Deputy Editor Glesni Holland glesni.holland@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9134

Operations Manager Shweta Santosh shweta.santosh@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9107

Publishing Director Natasha Pendleton natasha.pendleton@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9139 ADVERTISING Group Sales Director Kausar Syed kausar.syed@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9138

DIGITAL SERVICES Web Developer Jefferson de Joya Abbas Madh Photographers Charls Thomas Maksym Poriechkin webmaster@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9100 Publication licensed by Dubai Production City, DCCA PO Box 13700 Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 4 440 9100 Fax: +971 4 447 2409

Regional partner of

Printed by Printwell Printing Press © Copyright 2017 CPI All rights reserved While the publishers have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors therein.

COVER STORY • SDN

What SDN is and where it’s going The SDN market has emerged from early adopter to early mainstream, and in doing so its use cases have expanded.

4

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

www.tahawultech.com

S

DN – which is an architecture approach, not a specific product - has traditionally been thought of as virtualising data centre networks. This typically means separating the management of the control plane of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic. Using a software-defined system to control this disaggregation brings many benefits, including increased network management flexibility and being able to more easily implement fine-grained security policies.

There’s been an evolution in the SDN market in recent years, driven by increased demands on the network.

SDN emerged in the early 2010s out of necessity, says IDC networking analysts Rohit Mehra and Brad Casemore. Many networks of today were designed for client-server applications running on non-virtualised infrastructure. “Virtualisation, cloud, mobility, and now the Internet of Things (IoT) have exposed the limitations of traditional network architectures and operational models,” Mehra and Casemore wrote in their SDN Forecast published in 2016. “By now, SDN has advanced beyond its adolescence and early euphoria and has settled into early adulthood as something of a known commodity. It’s not so much the next big thing on the networking horison as much as it is a reality and inevitability for enterprises and service providers worldwide, even for those who’ve yet to embrace it.”

VMware’s 2013 purchase of Nicira was considered a seminal moment in the SDN industry and launched the virtualisation giant into becoming a networking vendor. Today, VMware’s NSX SDN product is based off that

www.tahawultech.com

“Our SDN based innovations for both enterprise and service provider type of networks on a global scale are providing some significant measurable benefits to originations in different market verticals.”

MOHANNAD ABUISSA, CISCO MIDDLE EAST

technology. Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure is the basis for its SDN offering. Many other companies, such as Juniper and Arista have their own SDN offerings too.

IDC estimates the SDN market has grown from a $406 million industry in 2013 to more than a $6.6 billion market in 2017. IDC predicts the SDN market will continue to grow at a 25.4% compound annual growth rate to $13.8 billion by 2021. IDC estimates that SDN is emerging out of the early adopter and into the early mainstream stage of its development.

Is SDN a mainstream technology now?

“Generally speaking, although SDN is considered relatively a new approach in architecting and operating networks, today, our SDN based innovations for both enterprise and service provider type of networks on a global scale are providing some significant measurable benefits to originations in different market verticals. However, we still see a variation in the level of adopting SDN solutions based on the region. For instance, in the Middle

East region, SDN adoption is growing dramatically, especially within the last two years. However, we cannot say it has become a mainstream technology when compared to western European and North American regions,” says Mohannad Abuissa, Head of Sales Engineering - East Region, Cisco Middle East.

Mark Hosing, Data Center and Virtualisation Leader, Middle East and Africa, Juniper Networks, says SDN is becoming increasingly popular as it gives enterprises new ways to build their networks. It delivers a wide array of business benefits. One of them is increased flexibility and quicker timeto-market for new applications, enabled by the separation of the control and transport layers in the network. Another one is the ability to respond to issues and outages more swiftly, improving network availability. Additionally, programmability makes it easier for IT organisations to automate network functions and reduce operating costs.

IDC has identified a handful of leading use cases for SDN today.

Network World Middle East

OCTOBER 2017

5

COVER STORY • SDN

“By leveraging SDN, the service providers are creating virtualised platforms that can either deliver network functions on customer premises, or centralise these functions closer to the SP core on virtualised multi-tenant platforms.”

MARK HOSING, JUNIPER NETWORKS

Maximising investments in server virtualisation and private cloud - Mehra and Casemore say that too often the network prevents organisations from realising the maximum value of an advanced server virtualisation or private-cloud deployment. If an organisation can automatically create, provision, migrate and decommission VMs, having a manually controlled network that needs to set up virtual local area networks (VLANS) or other network settings will become a bottleneck.

Enabling network programmability - Some forward-leaning organisations are embracing the opportunity to programmatically control network resources, which vendors are increasingly enabling in their products.

Using a management platform through a command line interface (CLI) or application program interfaces (APIs) enables increased automation of network management tasks such as creating and deprovisioning of networks and coordinating security and use policies. Having centralised SDN-control software manage the network can also help with network

6

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

visibility and analytics because it has a view into the entire network environment.

Security -One of the major benefits of an SDN implementation is that it allows software-based security tools to be installed and managed more easily on “east-west” server-to-server traffic within a data center. In an SDN environment, network administrators can more easily install virtual firewalls, encryption tools and network monitoring services to protect this intra-data center traffic.

Hosing from Juniper says some of the leading uses for SDN technology focus on network access control and micro-segmentation. Network access control allows organisations to determine suitable privileges for users or devices accessing the network among other features which becomes increasingly complex when IT infrastructure, including networks and network functions, become “Software Defined” and virtualised.

Micro-segmentation addresses the challenge of defining and enforcing security policies within the virtualisation layer that sits on top

of physical infrastructure within data centres. Micro-segmentation integrates security directly into virtualised workloads deep inside a data center, using a virtualised, software-only approach, without requiring hardwarebased firewalls. This enables security policies to be synchronised within virtual networks, virtual machines (VM) or other virtual devices, as well as moving with VMs or workloads. This is becoming increasingly important as we see more and more dynamic provisioning and migration of virtual workloads in, and between, data centres.

“We are also seeing use cases for SDN emerge around data center optimisation and virtual customer edge scenarios for service providers. By leveraging SDN, the service providers are creating virtualised platforms that can either deliver network functions on customer premises, or centralise these functions closer to the SP core on virtualised multi-tenant platforms,” says Hosing.

Another future use case is Softwaredefined Wide Are Networking (SDWAN), which is the use of a software management platform to control access to an organisation’s remote or branch offices. Typically in the past customers would have a single connection to their branch offices, but SD-WAN enables companies to aggregate multiple types of network connections into a branch office and have a software management platform that enables high availability and can automatically prioritise traffic.

SD-WANs can save on a customer’s capital expense of installing expensive customised WAN acceleration hardware by allowing them to run a software overlay on less-expensive commodity hardware. IDC expects SDWAN could become a $6 billion market by 2020.

www.tahawultech.com

DATA CENTER SOLUTIONS

siemon.com/wheelhouse

ADVANCED DATA CENTER SOLUTIONS Siemon’s WheelHouse® advanced data center solutions, are a complete end-to-end product portfolio. Aligning the company’s established line of cable and connectivity systems, cabinets, cable management and power distribution with an array of new product innovations, WheelHouse delivers a comprehensive range of quality, standards exceeding solutions to support any size and type of data center, from large, highperformance computing environments and colocations, to small-to-mid size enterprise data centers.

www.siemon.com/wheelhouse CONNECTING THE WORLD TO A HIGHER STANDARD

Siemon’s WheelHouse portfolio includes end-to end copper cabling systems, advanced fibre cabling, high speed interconnect assemblies, data center cabinets - including preconfigured cabinets - racks, cable management and accessories, power distribution and infrastructure management. Siemon also provides comprehensive data center design services, with a global team of dedicated experts ready to guide you through the process of selecting, designing and deploying the businesscritical cabling infrastructure upon which your entire data center will rely.

Regional Headquarters India / Middle East / SAARC Dubai, United Arab Emirates Phone (971) 4 3689743 info_me@siemon.com

FEATURE • 802.11AX

The next big thing in Wi-Fi The 802.11ax specification finally brings a Wi-Fi standard to the network that supports everything we want to do with our wireless LANs.

8

02.11 ax is the next-generation Wi-Fi stand that focuses primarily on expanding network capacity and making better use of spectrums to maintain excellent connectivity in more complex environments.

Though it is still in very early stage of development, the new standard is predicted to have a top speed of around 10 Gbps and will operate in the already existing 2.4Ghz and 5 Ghz spectrums.

8

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

802.11 ax is being engineered for the world we live in where everything is connected and there is an assumption that upload and download traffic will be equivalents. Previous generations of Wi-Fi assumed more casual use and that there would be far more downloading of information than uploading, says Zues Kerravala, found and principal analyst of ZK Research.

The problem with Wi-Fi isn’t always the speed of the system. 802.11ac wave 2 gets us to or over the Gigabit

barrier, which should be plenty of bandwidth for most people. The bigger problem with Wi-Fi is congestion and how current Wi-Fi handles lots of people trying to do wireless things and overcrowding the network. The ax standard solves these problems and others by completely redesigning how Wi-Fi works and taking some best practices from LTE. “Capacity– not peak speed – has become the most important measure of a network’s ability to handle the

www.tahawultech.com

.

FEATURE • 802.11AX

“The transformative features of our 802.11ax solutions are designed to enable our customers to meet these demands, ensuring ample WiFi capacity for richer connected experiences.”

RAHUL PATEL, QUALCOMM TECHNOLOGIES

ever-increasing demands of today’s diverse mix of application and services,” says Rahul Patel, senior vice president & general manager, connectivity, Qualcomm Technologies. “We were the first to commercialise capacity utilisation-focused solutions, such as MU-MIMO, Wi-Fi SON and 802.11ad, and are now on the front lines of 11ax innovation that will propel the Wi-Fi industry into the next phase of highcapacity, high-efficiency networks. The transformative features of our 802.11ax solutions are designed to enable our customers to meet these demands, ensuring ample Wi-Fi capacity for richer connected experiences.”

The main benefit is the capacity, especially the upload speed. it will be 10x of the 802.11ac standard. “With MUMIMO on upload and download, 802.11ax provides ultra high capacity, which can guarantee the throughput requirement in different network scenarios. the network congestion will be terminated. the power consumption of clients that support 802.11ax will be smaller than client that support 802.11ax only, so the battery life can be improved,” says August Chen, Director, Global Sales, AXILSPOT. Kerravala says ax will be anywhere

10

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

from 4x to 10x faster than existing Wi-Fi, but the wider and multiple channels greatly increase throughput.

For example, if one assumes the speed is increased by 4x with 160 MHz channels, the speed of a single 802.11ax stream will be 3.5Gbps. The equivalent 802.11ac connection will be 866 Mbps.

A 4x4 MIMO environment would result in a total capacity of about 14 Gbps.

A client device that supported two or three streams would easily top 1 Gbps or much more.

If one knocked the channel width down to 40 MHz, which could happen in crowded areas like stadiums or college dorms, a single .11ax stream would be about 800 Mbps for a total capacity of 3.2 Gbps. Regardless of the channel size, 802.11ax will provide a huge boost in speed and total capacity.

802.11ax will be less congested One of the big advancements in LTE is something called orthogonal frequency division multiple access (ODMFA), which is an alphabet soup way of saying it does frequency division multiplexing. With previous versions of Wi-Fi, channels were held open until the data transmission had finished.

Think of a line at a bank with only one teller where people have to queue up.

MU-MIMO means there can be four tellers and four lines, but the people still need to wait for the transaction ahead of them is complete.

With OFDMA, each channel is chopped up into hundreds of smaller sub-channels, each with a different frequency. The signals are then turned orthogonally (at right angles) so they can be stacked on top of each other and de-multiplexed. With the bank analogy, imagine a teller being able to handle multiple customers when they are free. So customer one hands the teller a check and while that person is signing the check, the teller deals with the next customer, etc. The use of OFDMA means up to 30 clients can share each channel instead of having to take turns broadcasting and listening on each.

“From a user perspective, the network will seem much less congested than with 802.11ac. Another benefit is that the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands can be combined creating even more channels for data. The ax specification also includes something called QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) encoding, which allows for more data to be transmitted per packet,” says Kerravala.

Any new Wi-Fi standard will improve battery life, since the range is typically further and data is transmitted faster so the client does not need to work as hard. However, ax has a new feature called wake time scheduling. This enables APs to tell clients when to go to sleep and provides a schedule of when to wake.

These are very short periods of time, but being able to sleep a bunch of short times will make a big difference on battery life.

www.tahawultech.com

OPINION • INTERNET OF THINGS

5 myths about the

Internet of Things Paddy Srinivasan, VP and General Manager of IoT, LogMeIn, writes about how we will get the most value of IoT.

F

or all the hype, the Internet of Things (IoT) is also very real and will impact how we work, live and play. In working with customers to develop connected businesses, we’ve learned a thing or two about the IoT. Some of the most impactful lessons we learned helped reshape how we look at the IoT. Here are a few of the myths we’ve successfully debunked: 1. It is a connected world. When talking about IoT, one of the first questions I ask people is whether or not they believe we currently live in a connected world. Most people answer, “Of course it is – I’m connected through my phone,

12

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

tablet, laptop. I can’t escape if I try.” But I would argue the opposite is true. It’s really not a connected world – at least not yet. While today the average household has five Internetconnected devices -- a number that is expected to skyrocket to over 500, according to Gartner -- chances are those devices don’t really talk to each other. The true vision of IoT is when literally everything is connected – when your lightening system can talk to your security system which can talk to your garage door opener, which you control with one singular app. And of course the promise of IoT extends way

beyond connected smart homes to healthcare, manufacturing and everything in between.

So why aren’t we connected today? Mostly because fulfilling this potential means overcoming immense challenges, such as scalability, interoperability, bandwidth and security. While we as an industry are getting better at all of these things, we’re just scratching the surface.

2. The Internet of thingsis all about the “things”. The true innovation of IoT comes not from simply connecting products, but rather from what we do with the data the “things” create. The companies

www.tahawultech.com

that really come out on top will leverage this data, developing strategies around what this new connectivity allows them to do, from enhancing customer experiences to optimising business processes and product development.

Why is this so important?

Believe it or not, most companies have no idea who their customers are. A garage door manufacturer, for example, might sell product to Lowes or Home Depot and once that product is out the door they have no idea who actually purchases it.

IoT will fundamentally change this scenario by providing the manufacturer with the ability to connect directly to the person who uses the product to provide a personalised customer experience, support and service offerings. IoT will give products a voice and will help manufacturers have a direct link to their customers to better understand who is using their products and how.

3. It’s all about creating new products. Despite all the new gadgets we saw coming out of CES this year, innovation won’t be about invention but about re-invention. Taking products that already exist and connecting them for a new approach to an old business or market. While there will always be room for the inventors, it’s the “re-imaginers” that will make the biggest business impact, as companies across categories re-imagine legacy products through the lens of connectivity.

4. It’s all about time to market.

The days of “ship-it and forget it”

www.tahawultech.com

products are over. In addition to learning who your customers are and how they use your product, you can also take the data from your product to continually make improvements.

We experience this phenomenon every day with our smartphones

This distinction is more than a semantic nuance. Being a SaaS company means focusing on things like uptime, security and customer support. It means having a robust cloud infrastructure and customerfacing helpdesks. It means focusing not just on the device and

“While there will always be room for the inventors, it’s the “re-imaginers” that will make the biggest business impact, as companies across categories re-imagine legacy products through the lens of connectivity.” where we regularly receive operating system and application updates that take care of bug fixes and add new features all in an effort to evolve the product. The “constant improvement” model will hold true for any connected product company and those that make the effort will find that time in market yields more essential feedback than pre-launch focus groups ever could.

5. The IoT will turn every company into a software company. We’ve all heard the idea that every company will become a software company. Tech luminaries have been saying that for years. While that is definitely true, I’d argue that IoT will actually turn every company into a software as a service company.

software, but also on the service(s) they deliver.

As a SaaS company, a lighting systems manufacturer can also become a service provider with all the inherent business upside (recurring revenue, new revenue streams, customer relationships) and demands that entails. In this way, the IoT can help existing manufacturers of consumer and industrial products accelerate their growth and create more value for shareholders.

We have learned countless lessons through our work in IoT and I’m sure there will be many more to come. However, if there is a single, broad takeaway so far, it’s that IoT fundamentally disrupts every aspect of product research, development, manufacturing, service and support. It won’t be ignored and it shouldn’t be.

Network World Middle East

OCTOBER 2017

13

FEATURE • DATA CENTRE CABLING

Walking on wires New technologies and increasing bandwidth demands are forcing enterprises to rethink data centre cabling.

14

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

www.tahawultech.com

T

hough cloud is gaining traction in the middle east, organisations continue to invest in on-premise data centres as there are some workloads that never will move to the cloud. As much as Amazon and Microsoft peddle the pure cloud plays, it is unlikely to happen for the majority of businesses in the region, and they will need something on premises. The question is how much.

After all, you need a data centre with a strong network infrastructure to connect to the cloud to begin with.

What is for certain is that the face of data centre is changing. We see continuing and rapid data centre consolidation across many industries, and emerging technologies put strains on the infrastructure. This changing landscape has a big impact on the physical layer as well.

“Increasing data traffic, especially machine-generated data from IoT devices, is driving the need for more and faster servers, core network devices and network cabling. In the data centre specifically, Ethernet speeds are now migrating from 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s. It is critical for data centre cabling infrastructure to be correctly specified, designed, and administered for best support of networking and storage equipment connections,” says Narender Vasandani, RCDD, technical manager Middle East & India at Siemon Alfred Tharwat, Head of Training & Data Center consultancy, R&M Middle East, Turkey & Africa, offers another perspective on the key trends influencing data centre cabling design: “Perhaps the most influential IT trend for businesses these last two years has been digital transformation.

While digital transformation will and should look different to each organisation, broadly speaking, it involves the overhaul of a number of IT systems including mobile apps, cloud, business continuity and disaster recovery, upgrade of legacy system, cyber security, and even IoT. What

www.tahawultech.com

“It is no secret that structured cabling provides the fastest and most reliable connectivity and of course fibre optics enable the highest speeds.”

ALFRED THARWAT, R&M MIDDLE EAST, TURKEY & AFRICA

all this leads to is a sharp increase in the amount of bandwidth that enterprises now require to smoothly run their operations. It is no secret that structured cabling provides the fastest and most reliable connectivity and of course fibre optics enable the highest speeds.”

Another key trend is the advent of software-defined networking (SDN), which is a technology that allows the quick provisioning of local area and wide area networks via central control system. These trends created a need for new switch fabric architectures - most commonly leaf and spine fabrics. “SDN’s and the switch fabrics necessary to provide the flexibility that they require, have more connections between switches than the classic three-tier architecture and require much more bandwidth for the connections to ensure that the fabric is non-blocking,” says Jonathan Jew, president of J&M Consultants and co-chair of BICSI data centre subcommittee.

For businesses, the ability to migrate from 10G to 25 or 40G Ethernet hinges on the data centre backbone. This means investing in higher performing, higher value cabling systems for optimal support. Such systems include Cat 8 cabling which was developed because of the extended bandwidth needed to support 25 and 40G. “These cabling

solutions are characterised to 2 GHz and supports 30 meter cabling channels that contain no more than 2 connectors.

Data centre designers that can arrange their rack and cabinet layouts to support maximum 30-metre channel connections at these locations today will be wellpositioned to migrate to 25G/40GBASE-T when the technology becomes available,” says Vasandani from Siemon.

Vendors say as we move to faster Ethernet technologies, fibre systems are the way forward as it facilitates the set up of a high-density cabling systems for data networks especially with paralleloptical connection technology.

“Copper is still a good option for horizontal links (10G) and with the new Cat.8, it will be able to provide 40G for 30 meters. So, it remains sufficient for small distances mainly for data centre horizontal links. All new application speeds tend to start with (several) fibre optic options, moving then to Direct Access technologies (e.g. QSFP) and finally ending with the Base-T version as the most economical way for data transmission,” says Tharwat from R&M. Though it’s old news that fibre is the most ideal medium for supporting increasing bandwidth needs, the problem in most data centres is the lack of certification and documents about the physical state of the network.

Network World Middle East

OCTOBER 2017

15

FEATURE • DATA CENTRE CABLING

“As far as fibre is concerned, customers need to check their certification reports to ensure the installed fibre has the margins to run the technologies they need. If they did not certify and document, they should be doing it now. What we learn from experience is that Data Center technicians very often use an OTDR for troubleshooting, which is ok. But they forget then to check and verify if the fibre is still within the limits as defined by the standards, so they mostly forget to re-certify the fibre links,” says Werner Heeren, regional sales director of Fluke Networks.

For fibre, certify it to both Tier 1 (OLTS) and Tier 2 (OTDR). This will ensure not only that the link is acceptable, but that each component of the link is within the specified limits as well. Very often, although the whole fibre link is within the limits, there could still be components outside the limit. Hence a Tier 2 testing will identify the weak points to improve. Also recommended is to document the inspection results. That way, in case of failures, you can quickly determine root cause.

Make sure the team is in the habit of cleaning and inspecting every time they make a fibre connection. Many data centers install a cleaning tool on every rack so there’s no excuse not to clean. Remember, contamination

“These cabling solutions are characterised to 2 GHz and supports 30 meter cabling channels that contain no more than 2 connectors.”

NARENDER VASANDANI, SIEMON

is the leading cause of fibre failure, says Heeren.

It is equally important to follow standards when it comes to data centre cabling design. |We only recommend to use international known standards both TIA & ISO, e.g. TIA-942-B and 568, ISO 11801 and ISO 24764. In order to align with the respective Ethernet application requirements, one should refer to IEEE 802.3,” says Tharwat from R&M. Tarek Helmy , regional director of Nexans Cabling Solutions, says of particular relevance are the new CENELEC EN 50600 series standards which will impact on data centres and buildings that house data centres. The series is separated into practices in terms of building construction, power distribution, environmental control,

“It is no secret that structured cabling provides the fastest and most reliable connectivity and of course fibre optics enable the highest speeds.”

WERNER HEEREN, FLUKE NETWORKS

16

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

telecommunications cabling and security systems, as well as the management and operational systems that oversee all of these. It specifies a classification based around risks including availability, security and energy efficiency. Four telecommunication cabling classes have been developed.

“The EN 50600 standard is important since it creates a Class system for redundancy in network cabling. This applies a standard to the network topology not just to the component products (cables, switches, connectors) where the standards have largely been concerned with performance, technical specification and not risk,” he adds.

BICSI offers 500 plus page comprehensive standard that provides best practices for data centre design on a wide range of subjects including cabling system design. It also includes information on best practices for design of other data centre systems (e.g., electrical, mechanical, security, architectural). “BICSI-002 is intended to be used with the applicable national standard for data center telecommunications cabling design. In the US and Canada, the national data center cabling standard is ANSI/TIA942-B. In Europe, it is CENELEC EN 50173-5. In many other parts of the world it is ISO/IEC 24764 or the soon to be published ISO/IEC 11801-5, which will replace it,” says Jew from BISCI.

www.tahawultech.com

INTERVIEW • NEXANS

Flexible connectivity Tarek Helmy, Regional Director, Gulf and Middle East, South & East Africa of Nexans Cabling Solutions, talks about the new trends in data centre cabling.

W

hat are the major trends/shifts you have seen in terms of data centre investments in the region from structured cabling point of view?

The pace of innovation in data centre infrastructure is increasing with more innovation in the past five years than in the previous 15 years. With the everincreasing number of mobile devices and IoT (Internet of Things), data has also grown and increased exponentially.

Data centres today need higher speeds, greater design flexibility and a costeffective migration path.

There are a lot of changes going on in data centres such as centralisation of sites and growth of cloud based solutions. They also require greater design flexibility and a cost-effective migration path. The trend in data centres is towards more data and bandwidth.

How is the need for high bandwidth data connections is driving the trends in data centre investments?

The ever-increasing flow of traffic from the cloud in particular - is putting pressure on conventional network architectures, particularly in terms of ensuring business continuity. These developments affecting the data centre environment place a new series of demands on the network at the level of cabling infrastructure, and are

18

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

changing data centre design from the ground level up.

It has become more imperative than ever for data centre infrastructure managers to carefully consider their network architecture. In today’s competitive business environment, there is a need to implement the most cost-effective, future-proof connectivity infrastructure quickly and efficiently.

Server virtualisation is one of the trends in increasing the efficiency of data centres; however, it can lead to stresses in the supporting connectivity infrastructure.

Data centres have a different approach in design and implementation when compared to a LAN infrastructure in an office. In data centres, the main requirements are high-speed links with condensed number or terminations (fibre & copper). The high-speed links require either fibre links, which are usually preterminated fibre cables to support switchto-switch connectivity or high-end copper technology such as Cat6A, Cat7A or Cat8 to support server-to-switch connectivity.

How is cabling keeping pace with demand for high speed connections?

Cabling needs to support the increasing need for high speed and bandwidth.

Looking at bandwidth needs in data centres, we have to split data centre connectivity into two segments: “switchto-switch” vs. “server-to switch” links.

Switch-to-switch connections is fibre

rich, while in server-to-switch more copper solutions are used. Parallel optics enables us to achieve up to 100GB today with multimode fibres (OM3 & OM4).

Two-lane singlemode is also possible but will be much more expensive because of higher transceiver costs. Upcoming copper standard of 25Gb/s over copper (25GBASE-T) will also enable us to see more copper ports to support high speed server-to-switch connectivity.

Optimum set ups include a mixture of copper and fibre cabling. Copper cabling should support migration paths to connect servers running from 1G to eventually 25G and possibly 40G whereas fibre cabling should connect network switches running from 10G to eventually 100G. Good quality cabling and careful design help to minimise disruptions.

The primary role of dAata centre cabling is to facilitate and enable this unprecedented growth in data and bandwidth while at the same time maximising data centres’ up-time. To date network speeds as high as 200Gb/s are being discussed. Fibre is best placed to support such high network speeds.

Nexans provides the right products for dependable Data centre infrastructures that meet key operational, economic, energy saving and future growth requirements. Nexans LANmark cabling minimises data centre disruptions, reduces recurring costs and ensures greater continuity for better business vitality.

www.tahawultech.com

INSIGHT • RIVERBED TECHNOLOGY

Beware of the legacy Riverbed’s Future of Networking survey finds legacy networks holding back cloud and digital transformation JERRY M. KENNELLY RIVERBED TECHNOLOGY

R

iverbed Technology has announced the results of the Riverbed Future of Networking Global Survey 2017, which explores the impact both legacy infrastructure and nextgeneration networks have on cloud adoption and digital transformation.

The global survey, which includes responses from 1,000 IT decision makers across nine countries, revealed an incredible level of agreement that legacy infrastructures are holding back their cloud and digital strategies.

Nearly all respondents (97%) agree that legacy network infrastructure will have difficulty keeping pace with the changing demands of the cloud and hybrid networks. Conversely, 91% of respondents say their organisation’s cloud strategy will only reach its full potential with a next-generation network, and 98% agree that a nextgen network is critical to keep up with the needs of their business and end users.

The survey also found there is a current gap in the adoption of

20

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

next-generation technology such as SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking) that will accelerate the cloud and digital transformation, however a tipping point is near. Of the IT decision makers surveyed, 93% plan to migrate to SD-WAN within the next four years, up from just 4% today.

“This survey and the resulting data reveal the tremendous pressure that IT decision makers are under to execute their cloud strategies, achieve digital transformation and keep pace with the speed of innovation that is the norm in today’s hypercompetitive markets,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, co-founder and CEO, Riverbed Technology. “It was almost unanimous that to have a successful cloud strategy, organisations must adopt next-gen software-defined networking immediately to support it.

Riverbed is dedicated to ensuring this transformation is successful and that organisations are able to achieve the operational agility needed to thrive through the use of SD-WAN for cloud networking.”

Legacy networks are a barrier to cloud and digital success Currently, performance pains experienced by businesses are glaring, as 58% report that they experience cloud-related network issues specifically caused by their legacy infrastructure a few times a month or more; and 93% said it impacts their business at least monthly. Unfortunately, 85% of these same decision makers say they are still several years away from reaching the full potential of digital transformation, in part due to their legacy infrastructure. This gap between realisation and actual deployment is consistent from companies across verticals such as financial, manufacturing, retail, energy and utilities, communications and media, and IT services, and could threaten their competitive positions in their respective markets.

The inability of these networks to support cloud-centric applications and workloads and just as importantly, provide end-to-end

www.tahawultech.com

visibility into their performance is viewed as a real challenge to cloud success. 69% of respondents stated both legacy networking infrastructure and lack of visibility into the cloud are a barrier to their cloud strategy reaching its full potential.

The survey also found that decision makers do not enjoy dealing with the limitations of their existing legacy networks and would be willing to sacrifice quite a lot if it meant their teams no longer needed to spend as much time to get the network to perform at an adequate level. In fact, 54% would endure a longer commute to work; 53% would take shorter lunch breaks; 51% would handwrite all of their email correspondence; and 42% would actually stop drinking coffee.

Companies are struggling with legacy networks, which are not suited to meet the demands of today’s cloud-based applications and their accompanying workloads.

Simply put, legacy networks are dysfunctional for the business.

Factors driving businesses to nextgeneration networks Decision makers display a very high level of understanding that meeting their digital and business challenges means moving to a next-generation, software-defined network is critical. As organisations are turning to a cloud-centric or cloud-first strategy, there is a major gap between what their current hardware-centric infrastructure offers and what they need to realise the benefits of the cloud.

In the survey, 57% of respondents acknowledge that achieving operational agility is critical to the success of a modern enterprise, and next-generation networks as well as the technology to support them are key to reaching this goal. Other top factors driving the move to next-generation networking technology: • 56% – successfully achieving digital transformation initiatives • 55% – a strategic move to the cloud and hybrid networks • 51% – growing demand for mobility • 51% – rising customer and end user expectations • 45% – support for IoT devices

“This survey and the resulting data reveal the tremendous pressure that IT decision makers are under to execute their cloud strategies, achieve digital transformation and keep pace with the speed of innovation that is the norm in today’s hypercompetitive markets.”

www.tahawultech.com

Next-generation cloud networking and SD-WAN While a current gap exists in the adoption of next-gen technology to support cloud and digital transformation in the enterprise, this is changing quickly. Of those surveyed, 98% agree that within two years SD-WAN technology will be critical in next-generation networks to manage cloud and hybrid. And while only 4% of those surveyed are currently benefitting from SD-WAN today, within two years 52% plan to migrate to SD-WAN, and 93% within four years.

Global IT decision makers see a variety of benefits for SD-WAN, each ranking fairly close: • Increase application performance (44%) • Network automation and ability to prioritise apps (44%) • Unified connectivity across entire network (43%) • Network visibility and monitoring (42%) • Simplicity/ease of management (42%) • Increased network security (42%) • Integration with WAN optimisation (40%) • Instant cloud connectivity to AWS and Azure (39%) • Decreased costs (38%) Updating legacy networks and anchoring next-gen networking with technology such as SD-WAN will have many positive outcomes for the enterprises according to IT decision makers including: greater efficiency due to better use of bandwidth (48%); increased productivity (47%); greater opportunities for expansion (46%); increased revenue (45%); greater agility (44%); and improvement on digital initiatives (44%).

Network World Middle East

OCTOBER 2017

21

OPINION • INTERNET OF THINGS

IoT: The best is yet to come BY: MORTEN ILLUM, VP OF EMEA, ARUBA, A HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE COMPANY

T

he Internet of Things (IoT) is a term that’s been bandied about for a long time and we’re finally at a stage where it’s coming more into the forefront, in terms of the technology and consumer adoption.

IoT is starting to make a difference to many areas of our lives.

Connected smart meters wirelessly track our domestic energy usage, while smart watches and smart cars are playing a small but influential role in the wider IoT movement. And this is even before we get started on connected home technologies, ranging from security sensors to connected light bulbs and even smart toasters.

However, one question is still in the back of my mind: “When will the Internet of Things really hit the big time?”

If we accept that IoT’s moment is indeed yet to come, then I’m glad to say we can put a date on it at last. In our new international study, ‘The Internet of Things, Today and Tomorrow’ we asked 3,100 execs from 20 countries about IoT. The research found a whole range of

22

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

interesting ideas and attitudes, but it also told us that 2019 will be IoT’s breakthrough year. In fact 85% of businesses plan to start using IoT technologies by 2019. So put a note in your diary.

What else did the study find? Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly: • IoT is over-delivering. Yes, you heard correctly—our survey discovered an ‘expectations dividend’: the real-world benefits gained from IoT are exceeding original expectations in all areas. In other words, believe the hype (and how many times can you say that about a new technology?).

• ROI is looking good, very good.

Four-fifths of companies that use IoT

“85% of businesses plan to start using IoT technologies by 2019.”

technology report seeing an increase in business efficiency, while the average return on investment from an IoT deployment is 34%.

• A lot of people claim to know what IoT means. But few really know.

A massive 98% of those surveyed think they have the true definition, but there’s no consensus. Keep reading: we’ll come back to this in a moment.

• IoT has some hurdles to clear. IoT has proven its value, but barriers still exist. Cost of implementation (50%), maintenance (44%) and integration of legacy technologies (43%) are the top three. But there is hope: technologies are already available that both cut infrastructure costs and smooth the integration process.

• IoT brings incredible opportunities, but also credible threats. Alarmingly, 84% of organisations that use IoT have experienced an IoT-related security breach. As IoT continues to grow, businesses need to take steps to protect their networks and devices.

Without gaining visibility of IoT activities, organisations are leaving themselves open to attack.

www.tahawultech.com

REDEFINING technology transformation

+971 4 440 9100

@TahawulTech

info@cpimediagroup.com

www.tahawultech.com

facebook.com/tahawultech

Media City, Building 4 Office G-08, Dubai, UAE, PO Box 13700

twitter.com/tahawultech

linkedin.com/in/tahawultech

OPINION • INTERNET OF THINGS

Things vary across regions Arguably Europe and the wider EMEA region have a more conservative approach towards IoT today. Europe, the Middle East and Africa showing a 50% take up of IoT technology, compared to 60% in APAC and 66% in the Americas. This could be from a lack of preparedness and a lack of willingness to explore IoT’s benefits: Currently, 17% of EMEA respondents claim their IT infrastructure isn’t ready to support IoT yet—nearly double that of the Americas— but 82% of EMEA companies plan to adopt IoT technologies by 2019. So there’s still a little way to go yet to take full advantage of IoT. IoT has already made its mark We’ve already seen some fantastic examples this year showing the impact IoT is making on the world.

From Ford’s ten-million selling in-car SYNC system, featuring an automated emergency services link in the event of a crash, to the flood of healthcare applications such as Boston Children’s Hospital’s revolutionary use of smartphones to help detect and fight respiratory disease, IoT isn’t just for the tech geeks, looking for a way to be constantly connected to the internet via data sharing. It’s revolutionising how businesses and public sector companies alike operate to make a real difference.

This means business Talking about IoT’s achievements brings us neatly to what IoT means.

You’ll remember from our survey that a single, coherent definition of IoT has so far eluded companies across the world, so who better to give the final word than Kevin Ashton. A renowned tech pioneer, Ashton coined the

24

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

“IoT isn’t just for the tech geeks, looking for a way to be constantly connected to the internet via data sharing. It’s revolutionising how businesses and public sector companies alike operate to make a real difference.” phrase ‘Internet of Things’ back in 1999. Little did he know how his new phrase would be used and abused.

In his new eBook ‘Making Sense of IoT’, commissioned by Aruba, Ashton offers this as a definition: “What is the Internet of Things? It is not connecting everyday objects like toasters and refrigerators to the Internet. Products like these exist, but it is hard to see why… What

defines the Internet of Things is data capture… The ‘Internet of Things’ means sensors connected to the Internet and behaving in an Internet-like way by making open, ad hoc connections, sharing data freely and allowing unexpected applications.”

In short, IoT is now serious stuff.

Just spare a thought for those poor smart toasters.

www.tahawultech.com

24th October 2017 | Dubai UAE

WHO

For sponsorship enquiries Natasha Pendleton Publishing Director natasha.pendleton@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9139 / +971 56 787 4778

C-level, VPs, Directors of marketing, operations, finance, technology and innovation

Kausar Syed Group Sales Director kausar.syed@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9130 / +971 50 758 6672

WHY Learn how digital and new technologies are disrupting companies and industries. Explore how your organisation can progress to the next phase of digital transformation with significant, measurable business impact.

Merle Carrasco Sales Manager merle.carrasco@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9147 / +971 55 118 1730

Hear from industry luminaries about how they solved complex business challenges with effective approaches and technologies

OFFICIAL TECHNOLOGY PARTNER

SOFTWARE TESTING PARTNER

Youssef Hariz Business Development Manager youssef.Hariz@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9111 / +971 56 665 8683

STRATEGIC VAD PARTNER

EVENT PARTNERS

SILVER PARTNER BY

Register at www.tahawultech.com/evolve-forum/2017 OFFICIAL PUBLICATION

HOSTED BY

INTERVIEW • NUTANIX

Transforming data centres The hardware components in modern data centres can be pure software and infra is eminently programmable, says Dheeraj Pandey, Co-founder & CEO, Nutanix, which helps companies tread the path to hyperconvergence.

T

ech OEMs, big or small, end-to-end or niche, are all hitching a ride on the hyperconverged Infra bandwagon.

How do you demystify `hyperconverged’ for enterprises?

Half a decade ago, tech OEMs jumped onto mobile world introducing tablets and phones to beat Apple. HP bought Palm, Cisco launched tablets to name a few. They couldn’t fathom Apple dominating enterprise mobile space.

OEMs have the tendency to jump onto the next big paradigm shift. Within a few years; HP, Dell, Cisco exited mobile device domain. Three years ago, all OEMs latched to cloud but many also shut their cloud business a year ago.

Hyper-converged today is hype as the word by itself means nothing.

Organisations want to elevate themselves away from infra silos to make multiple components of a data centre invisible to an extent.

There is an undeniable shift in the data centre because all hardware components can be pure software and the infra is eminently programmable. You can spin

26

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

up a firewall or storage array by writing a piece of code as opposed to buying hardware for humans to ‘rack and stack’ it. This leads to a human-less data centre in some sense. The silos managed by different teams -- storage, networking, virtualisation - will converge into the cloud team.

Increase of automated processes in data centre means more job losses in the tech industry?

No. With virtualisation, the industry expected sale of fewer servers but that didn’t happen. That was because people had more expectations which they could execute at a faster rate.

With digitisation in the nineties and even today one expects same kind of automation from the workforce. The velocity and agility with this kind of efficiency creates more demand and much more is possible with a ‘40 hour per week’ employee than in the past.

Tech Industry has been a hunting ground for M&A and PE firms in 2016.

Did Nutanix choose the alternate IPO

route to create bigger expectations for its shareholders?

IPO is a milestone in the journey of any growing company. There are hardly one or two very successful private technology companies today. All of them went public at some stage. Many went private because they stopped innovating and instead acquired companies. The dearth of innovation invokes the public investors to question a company’s top line, fast growth, and profitability.

It was a natural course for Nutanix to go deeper in Global 2000 which calls for fast evolving brands and transparent financial books. I like the quote ‘Stock market in short term is a voting machine but a weighing machine in the long term’.

The stock market does reward good companies that continue to innovate, disrupt, cannibalise themselves and be at the leading edge of the tech curve to dominate the market.

Does Nutanix going public means more acquisitions would be on the radar?

We will always look at smaller acquisitions and not the big ones. A great company

www.tahawultech.com

needs to innovate continuously which is not about acquiring customer base, but acquiring great teams and great technology to build great products. We would introspect meaningful acquisition of great teams which unfortunately could not find a great target market.

Do you seriously believe the days of silos in IT infra are numbered for companies to pursue a platform approach?

The most successful platform companies had a single code base for all workloads - be it Linux, VMware, Oracle, Windows.

Rather than one box for one workload that creates silos, we are aiming for all the components in DC or cloud environment that can be addressed with a single OS and one code base for that OS. Consumption of Apps does not mean just compute and storage. OS should cater to the capabilities of every service in DC whether it is containers, virtual machines on compute side, storage, or networking or security.

Nutanix competes and co-operates with infra and cloud providers like VMware,

“Hyper-converged today is hype as the word by itself means nothing.

Organisations want to elevate themselves away from infra silos to make multiple components of a data centre invisible to an extent.”

AWS which often weighs heavy on CIOs and their legacy infra. Is co-opetition the way to go moving forward?

It’s always been the case. Apple competes with Microsoft and Google, but all MS products and Google Apps are available on App Store. Oracle and Microsoft compete in various ways but they have shaken hands. Similarly for many enterprise tech OEMs too.

One of the advisors said -- ‘Beyond a certain scale, you have to act like a country which has no perfect friends and there are no perfect enemies. You

always deal with frenemies.’ With all our technology partners, we maximise the overlap of interest and that potential minimises the conflict of interest.

Have CIOs lost their influencing power to chief digital officer, chief cloud evangelist, CMO and other C-Suite peers in digital era?

Most CIOs focus on keeping the lights on and hence have little time to innovate and be at pace with the demands from LOBs. They need to focus on net promoter score to charm their end users. Most IT leaders have never treated the LOB as their customer. Once IT team realise that the company’s different departments expect value and delight from the shared service called IT, I think good things can happen to reinvigorate CIO’s positon.

What would be your tech bets for 2017 and beyond?

Hyperconvergence by itself will turn into this froth wherein a lot of consolidation will happen over the next 18 months.

Many of ‘me-too’ hyper converged companies will be forced to sell as they failed to build sustainable independent business with customers over time.

There will be the emergence of one or two platform companies that would have to be honest about networking, security, identity management.

www.tahawultech.com

Network World Middle East

OCTOBER 2017

27

INSIGHT • TRANSITION NETWORKS

On the wire Curt Carlson, product manager, Transition Networks, shares

insights on how IT teams can maximise the use of existing cabling to save time, money and headaches.

N

etwork advances often require cable upgrades, but rewiring takes time and money. Often the existing cable can be leveraged, or the extent of the upgrade minimised, using media converters, one of the least glamorous yet most common and perhaps most versatile tools in a network manager’s toolbox.

New media converters and extenders are available that support Power-over-Ethernet (PoE and PoE+) and legacy cabling types such as coax and 2-wire. These devices enable increased utilisation of existing network cabling while upgrading network performance.

Let’s look at some of the most popular cabling types with regard to when cabling should be replaced versus when changes can be minimised with the use of media converters.

• Coax. Many organisations (such as schools or businesses) that were once pioneers in video conferencing or were early adopters of analog security systems may still have this cable in the walls. If the coax is no longer being used for these systems, it is typically

28

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

abandoned but not removed because the cost and disruption makes it easier to just leave it in place. By using a coax-Ethernet media converter offering PoE/PoE+, it’s possible to resurrect this old cable for re-use with up to 1Gbps Ethernet connections.

Generally, this makes it more cost effective to upgrade analog security cameras to IP-based digital cameras or to connect a conference room to a backbone network.

• CAT3 and other 2-wire cabling.

The IP telephony revolution has left many organisations with a lot of unused copper phone cable and early 10Base-T Ethernet network cable.

But it could be re-used to provide Ethernet connectivity to remote areas of the building via media converters and extenders. Similarly, in outdoor applications where 2-wire cable may have been used for call boxes or other applications, it could now be used to power IP-devices like wireless access points or security cameras. * CAT5/CAT5e UTP. Category 5/5e UTP cabling (CAT5) is commonplace as it was predominantly used in structured

cabling for computer networks before the advent of CAT6. CAT5/5e cabling is rated at 100MHz and easily supports Fast Ethernet for up to 100 meters.

While newer CAT5e cabling can reach gigabit speeds for shorter distances, supporting new NBase-T (2.5Gbps or 5Gbps) will be difficult. But the use of media converters allows network managers to extend the distance of a Gigabit Ethernet connection over CAT5, upgrade certain links to CAT6 or even to fibre-optic cable if necessary to support the bandwidth or distance needs.

• CAT6 UTP. Category 6 unshielded twisted pair (CAT6 UTP) is primarily used in greenfield network implementations or in newer cable upgrade projects. CAT6 can handle up to 1 Gigabit per second of data, with maximum transmission distance of 100 meters. CAT6A, however, can maintain 10Gbps speeds across the same distance. Only in the event of a very long cable run or when upgrading to 10/40Gbps Ethernet would it make sense to upgrade from CAT6 to fibre-optic cabling. In this application, copper to fibre media converters

www.tahawultech.com

make sense if only a few connections need to be upgraded for distance or bandwidth needs. This makes it possible keep the existing switches in place while upgrading only the minimum required links.

• Multimode fibre. Multimode fibre is often used in campus backbone networks where data must travel distances longer than 100 meters, but doesn’t justify the installation of single mode fibre. With data speeds continuing to increase, multimode fibre is starting to reach distance limitations. At 10Gbps, for example, data can travel up to a maximum of 300 meters on multimode cable. However, even up to 40Gbps, it isn’t necessary to replace multimode fibre because media converters or optical repeaters can re-amplify, reshape and retime (3R) the light signals, allowing data to be repeated for much longer distances.

www.tahawultech.com

“In outdoor applications where 2-wire cable may have been used for call boxes or other applications, it could now be used to power IPdevices like wireless access points or security cameras.”

• Single mode fibre. Single mode fibre is often used for backbone networks and is the longest distance, highest bandwidth cable type on the market, capable of data transmissions of up to 30 kilometers.

Although single mode fibre is expensive, it is the highest quality media available, thus there are very few applications where a network is better off with another cable type.

Replacing cabling is sometimes required to support network changes, but it always adds cost and time to the upgrade. When deciding between upgrading the cabling infrastructure or trying to leverage existing cabling by using media converters or repeaters, it is most important to know what is already installed, what’s currently in use and, if possible, where the cabling is located.

Network World Middle East

OCTOBER 2017

29

OPINION • SDN

The game changer for networks Software-defined networking (SDN) opens up closed network platforms, allowing for greater oversight and more rapid provisioning of new services, writes Ravi Mali, director of regional sales, Ciena.

T

oday’s network managers grapple with a myriad of challenges: finding and resolving problems and bottlenecks, improving application performance, and being able to roll out new applications and services quickly.

Couple all this with the ongoing pressure to keep costs down while continuing to innovate and evolve.

These challenges are only going to grow in magnitude, as more ICT services move into the cloud and more and more ‘things’ connect to the internet and start generating reams of data. Based on current projections, there will be four billion connected people, 40 billion ‘things’ to track and 20 billion connected devices just by 2020.

Today’s organisations need a new kind of network, one that is more flexible and agile, where new services can be added quickly, where problems can be identified and resolved more easily and there is greater inter-operability between vendor solutions. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a bold new approach to network architecture that enables the network to be intelligently and centrally controlled, or ‘programmed’, using software applications. This enables management of the entire network, regardless of the underlying network technology.

SDN enables the programming of network behaviour in a centrally controlled manner through software

30

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

applications using open APIs. By opening up traditionally closed network platforms and implementing a common SDN control layer, operators can manage the entire network and its devices consistently, regardless of the complexity of the underlying network technology.

Ciena has identified four critical areas in which SDN technology can make a difference to organisations.

One is programmability. SDN enables network behaviour to be controlled by the software that resides beyond the networking devices that provide physical connectivity.

As a result, network operators can tailor the behaviour of their networks to support new services, and even individual customers. By decoupling the hardware from the software, operators can introduce innovative, differentiated new services rapidly, free from the constraints of closed and proprietary platforms.

A further benefit of SDN is logically centralised network topologies, which enable the intelligent control and management of network resources. In traditional networks, control methods are distributed and devices function autonomously with limited awareness of the state of the network. With the kind of centralisation facilitated by SDN, organisations gain a more complete view of the network. As a result, bandwidth management, restoration, security and

policies can be highly intelligent and optimised.

A third benefit of SDN is abstraction of the network. Services and applications running on a software-defined network are abstracted from the underlying technologies and hardware that provide physical connectivity from network control. Applications will interact with the network through APIs, instead of management interfaces tightly coupled to the hardware.

The final key benefit we have identified is openness. SDN finally allows us to have multi-vendor interoperability in the network and makes the vendor-neutral ecosystem a reality. The open APIs used in SDN support a wide range of applications, including cloud orchestration, OSS/BSS, SaaS, and business-critical networked apps. Intelligent software can control hardware from multiple vendors with open programmatic interfaces like OpenFlow. Within the SDN, intelligent network services and applications can run within a common software environment.

These four key benefits of SDN can translate into some very tangible everyday gains. The clearer view of the network that SDN provides allows operators to more easily identify and troubleshoot problems, prioritise traffic and allocate bandwidth more easily to certain applications and users. Multiple physical networks can now be virtualised into fewer, virtual networks.

New services can be added more quickly.

Of course, SDN is not a ‘silver bullet’, but a strategy that requires a long-term vision, systematic execution, and coordination across multiple organisational teams. Furthermore, SDN works best in combination with other technologies such as Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Cloud Computing, by utilising orchestration to simplify end-to-end service automation across multiple domains and reduce OPEX/CAPEX. Implemented effectively, however, the software defined-network is more flexible, more agile and, ultimately, easier to manage.

www.tahawultech.com

Dubai’s BIGGEST Events Are Now Accessible On Your Smart Phone Devices

Access to latest events

Search using the Browse chronologically key name, calendar or map

INSIGHT • TRANSITION NETWORKS

Virtual advantage Ranga Rajagopalan, CTO, Avi Networks, discusses the emergence of software-defined application

delivery technology and what it can do for your network.

T

he flexibility of the cloud has driven IT to look closely at opportunities to replicate that agility in their own infrastructure and operations.

Automation initiatives have optimised many layers of the computing stack, but application delivery services remain a last-mile problem as network teams find themselves hamstrung by inflexible legacy architectures.

While virtual appliances for load balancing, long thought of as the answer for software-driven infrastructure, have existed since the

32

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

advent of virtualisation, they inherit most of the architectural challenges of legacy solutions, including limited scalability, lack of central management and orchestration, and performance limitations. Instead, what is needed is an application delivery architecture based on software-defined principles that logically separates the control plane from the data plane delivering the application services.

This model, with a central controller managing a distributed pool of software load balancers located across the data centre and even multiple

cloud environments, can offer many advantages: • Both the control and data planes can run on commodity Intel architecture servers providing cost-efficient network services.

• The data plane can be deployed on physical servers, VMs, or containers, enabling consistent application deployments across multiple cloud environments.

• Since virtual services are no longer confined to an appliance, they can be distributed on the data plane load balancers close to individual

www.tahawultech.com

applications for easy isolation and horizontal scaling.

• The data plane can also gather application telemetry continuously, to send to the controller for analysis and to get a real-time view of application performance and end user experience, effectively using the strategic location of load balancers (in the path of application traffic) to derive meaningful application insights.

Given the importance of data-driven development for application teams and fast troubleshooting of network issues for operations teams, these granular application insights can help IT decision makers create or alter services. For example, an online retailer can use the system to generate a business dashboard for the CIO after Black Friday or Cyber Monday, providing a snapshot of how their web application performed, including average and peak number of transactions, average transaction throughput, number of shopping cart abandonments, most common client device types accessing the application, total number of end users by region, and much more. In this way, the architecture expands the services possible, beyond load balancing to a complete suite of application services. Let us explore these application services in the context of modern applications.

The new application delivery architecture As enterprises become more appcentric, they are devising strategies to roll out applications and updates faster using architectures such as microservices. Container technology facilitates the creation of microservicesbased applications by giving developers the ability to break what were once large, monolithic apps into smaller pieces. Each microservice – the catalog, payment, inventory management or security, for example – that belongs

www.tahawultech.com

“As businesses become more app-centric, IT teams are under pressure to meet aggressive application deployment goals and time-to-market considerations.” to the larger app may run on multiple containers and each of those containers is effectively a network endpoint that must be managed and deployed.

Containers enable a new level of development speed and agility, but they greatly complicate the network challenge of delivering and provisioning apps and updates.

With tens or hundreds of containers to be managed across clouds, you need an elastic, software-defined approach to distribute load balancing and proxy services across the microservices cluster. Placing a proxy on each host or server enables you to monitor and direct interactions between microservices, giving application developers visibility into application components and the ability to debug applications.

The granular control and visibility to application interactions also enables the creation of security policies for microsegmentation of services to meet compliance requirements. In addition, the centrally managed proxy service can provide service discovery as new services and updates are introduced to apps – a new payment system, for instance – by providing DNS services to container based applications since the controller can integrate using APIs with container cluster management frameworks such as Kubernetes or Mesos.

The software-defined application delivery architecture consolidates many L4-L7 services, complementing and in many cases eliminating multiple point solutions to handle IPAM, DNS, application performance monitoring, microsegmentation and East-West firewalls. More importantly, the architecture can handle most network functions available as REST APIs, enabling programmable application services and configurations that automate common network management tasks that delay the provisioning of applications and updates.

Flexible infrastructure choices and application architectures are changing the way that modern enterprises run computing. As businesses become more app-centric, IT teams are under pressure to meet aggressive application deployment goals and time-to-market considerations. Traditional application delivery mechanisms don’t address the needs of modern cloud-native applications that span private data centres and cloud platforms.

The new realities have spawned software-defined application delivery architectures, which can deliver the flexibility, scalability, performance monitoring and the automation of routine IT tasks that enterprises require to address those new and expanding challenges.

Network World Middle East

OCTOBER 2017

33

PRODUCTS

Synology introduces DiskStation DS418j

Synology has launched the new DiskStation DS418j, a budget-friendly 4-bay NAS server designed to help home and individual users to manage, protect and share data effectively, said the firm.

DS418j is powered by a brandnew 64-bit dual-core CPU and delivers an outstanding encrypted file transfer performance at over 112 MB/s reading and 87 MB/s writing under a RAID 5 configuration in a Windows environment. Equipped with a 1GB DDR4 memory, which is twice the size of its predecessor, and over 40TB single volume raw capacity support, DS418j brings flexible storage management with excellent operation experience.

Designed with user experience and energy efficiency in mind, DS418j is equipped with adjustable front LED indicators, allowing users to precisely control and schedule the brightness in four levels, said the firm. In addition, the model consumes only 21.22 watts in full operation and as little as 8.97 watts in HDD hibernation.

DS418j runs on DiskStation Manager (DSM), one of the most advanced and intuitive operating systems for network-attached storage devices which offers a wide range of applications from backup to multimedia for home and personal use, according to the company.

34

OCTOBER 2017

Network World Middle East

Riverbed launches Xirrus wireless access point Riverbed has launched its first Wireless Access Point, post its acquisition of Xirrus earlier this year in April. The new Xirrus AP (Model XD2-230) is an 802.11ac Wave 2 Wireless Access Point.

The device comes with a number of key features. It features 3.9Gbps total Wi-Fi bandwidth. The 802.11ac AP can be managed from the cloud or on premise. The AP is designed with a powerful integrated controller, providing layer 7 application visibility to help businesses keep up with the demands that applications are putting on Wi-Fi, according to the company.

Management and control is provided by the cloud or an on-premise based Xirrus Management System (XMS), enabling complete visibility and control for all devices and applications from a single console.

The onboard controller enables application-based policy control, integrated location services, and software-defined radios directly at the network edge, eliminating the cost and complexity of additional controllers and service appliances, and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) by 30 percent or more, said the firm.

With 3 radios, including Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), the XD2-230 model provides secure access for Wi-Fi users and Internet of Things (IoT) devices with an easy-to-use SaaS solution, while helping enterprises scale and adapt to evolving demands.

Linksys unveils gaming-focused router for Middle East market Linksys and Rivet Networks has announced the upcoming availability of the new Linksys WRT gaming edition router – the WRT32X. According to both companies, the partnership is the first of its kind collaboration.

Linksys and Rivet Networks teamed to incorporate the Killer Prioritization Engine (KPE) to provide serious online gamers the only router optimised for high-speed gaming for users with Killerenabled gaming PCs. The KPE optimises traffic for low latency and less lag and ensures that the Killer-enabled PC’s gaming, audio, and video is fast and smooth, while simultaneously managing other online traffic in the home to ensure

other devices and activities are not compromised. The new firmware and graphical user interface (GUI) was also custom-built from the ground up with a focus on monitoring and controlling gaming network traffic.

The WRT32X Wi-Fi Gaming Router is equipped with 1.8 GHz Dual-Core ARM CPU, 802.11ac Wave 2 Dual-band 3×3 wireless radio, 256MB Flash and 512MB of DDR3 Memory, and 5-port SOHO-grade Gigabit Ethernet switch with TCAM.

www.tahawultech.com

Network Transformation It's time for lime

The world’s greatest network revolutions all began for one reason: People wanted less complexity.

When you set out to ignite business revolutions, the last thing on your mind is MPO polarity management. We made it the first thing on ours to simplify your network. R&M OM5 solutions support duplex transmission up to 200G – so you don’t have to struggle with MPO polarity.

LANmark-8

Save money. Be two steps ahead.

40G 25G

rk-8

ma

LAN

10G

A rk-7

ma

LAN

LA

A

rk-6

a Nm

4

OM

4

OM

3

OM

LANmark-7A and LANmark-8 can be installed in cost effective End- or Middle of Row configurations and offer an easy migration path for 2 performance steps ahead of today.

Built around the GG45 connector with a 2GHz interface, Nexans LANmark-8 system supports both 40G and 25GBase-T whilst LANmark-7A accommodates 25GBase-T. Ideal for data centres which currently use 1 or 10Gbps at server ports today.

www.nexans.com/LANsystems

Save money with smart migration path in End- or Middle of Row architecture

1G

10G

25G

40G

LANmark-8

p

p

p

p

LANmark-7A

p

p

p

LANmark-6A

p

p