CONNECTIONS+ MAR/APR 2014

MARCH/APRIL 2014

+ THE MAG AZINE FOR ICT PROFESSIONALS

BREAKING

NEW GROUND ~

At WaterPark Place Phase III

Also: Update on Category 8

IBM & Watson

Digging into Big Data Formerly

Magazine

Not Your Average Connectivity Solution...

Take Another Look.

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CONTENTS 22 Fe a t u r e s 22 . . . Building Integration Support of human activity now a priority.

30 . . . Big Data Demands IT staff facing all types of new pressures.

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30

Departments

MEMBER OF:

Editor’s Note Infrastructure Systems Networks & The Cloud Mobile Movements New & Noteworthy The Back Page

4 6 14 18 34 38

I n the N ext Issue AUDITED BY:

>> Life In The Cloud >> Preparing for IPV6

www.connectionsplus.ca

March/April 2014

Connections+

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E D I TO R ’S N OT E

Greenfields and Retrofits ny doubt that ICT and building professionals need each other has been eradicated by technical advances and change in both sectors.

As an example, this issue’s cover story on Building Automation trends reveals that while new builds such as the Waterpark Place Phase III, a rendering of which appears on the cover, are clearly the focal point of the so-called Smart Building revolution, retrofits are moving closer and closer to the point where integrated IP-based networks will run these buildings in the same manner.

Once that occurs, the value of this market will soar. Caroline Cadiux, the director of marketing of Distech Controls, points out in the piece, that in most buildings today the various systems are living on their own: “There are a lot of missed opportunities for control strategies that can increase efficiency and comfort, and this can actually become a main rationale for retrofits.”

Knowing how to approach the problem, notes Tim Wilson, author of the cover story, requires having designers, architects, engineers, ICT, and HVAC and security people on the same page.

A

Take Big Data as an example, a topic that is covered at length in an accompanying feature written by Dave Webb, but examined in a sidebar entitled Big Buildings Drive Big Data. While it has yet to appear in many older buildings, societal demand, writes Wilson, means that its arrival is imminent: “Consumers and businesses will expect their buildings to be smart and connected, no matter where they are, how old they are or what they are made of. That means making investments in technology that will stand the test of time.”

This need to embrace change happens to be the primary theme of the RealComm/Intelligent Building Conference (IBcon) 2014 taking place in Las Vegas June 17-19.

“We really have all the technology we need to automate almost any task or process,” conference organizers say. “Robust mobile devices, the cloud, increasing telecommunication speeds and sophisticated applications have the capacity to radically transform any and all business processes.

“With all the tools at hand and accessible to all, the only unique differentiator remaining is the people, the individual, the department, the company. The only thing differentiating a company that changes at a faster pace is its people. You can place the same technology in front of two different organizations and get distinctly different results.

While the technology is available to all, some choose to embrace and some choose to ignore.”

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w w w. c o n n e c t i o n s p l u s . c a

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Formerly

Volume 1, Issue 2 March/April 2014

Magazine

THE MAG AZINE FOR ICT PROFESSIONALS

Editor Paul Barker 416-510-6752 pbarker@connectionsplus.ca Senior Publisher Maureen Levy 416-510-5111 mlevy@connectionsplus.ca Advertising Sales Manager Vince Naccarato 416-510-5118 vnaccarato@connectionsplus.ca Art Director Mary Peligra Production Manager Karen Samuels

Vice President Alex Papanou President Bruce Creighton Editorial Advisory Board Keith Fortune, CTech, Business Development Specialist, Western Canada Network Solutions - Leviton Manufacturing of Canada Ltd. Henry Franc, RCDD/OSP Senior Account Manager, Professional Support at Belden

Creative Advertising Services Mike Chimienti

Brantz Myers, B.Sc Math and Computing Science Director of Healthcare Business Development - Cisco Systems Canada Co.

Circulation Manager Barbara Adelt 416-442-5600 ext. 3546 badelt@bizinfogroup.ca

Peter Sharp, RCDD, AMIEE Senior Telecommunications Consultant • Giffels Associates Limited/IBI Group

Print Production Manager Phyllis Wright

Alex Smith, President • Connectivitywerx

Advertising Sales Maureen Levy www.connectionsplus.ca

Rob Stevenson, RCDD/NTS Specialist Communications Division Manager • Guild Electric Ltd.

Head Office BIG Magazines LP, a div. of Glacier BIG Holdings Company Ltd. Head office: 80 Valleybrook Drive, Toronto, ON Canada M3B 2S9 Tel: 416-442-5600 Fax:416-510-5134 Toll Free: 1-800-268-7742 ext. 3546 (CAN.) 1-800-387-0273 ext. 3546 (U.S.) Editorial purpose Connections+ targets 60,000+ individuals who purchase, design, specify, install, maintain and test structured cabling, networking and telecom products as well as facilities management specialists and senior executives who are responsible for overseeing the implementation and installation of these initiatives.

Connections+ is published by Business Information Group, a division of BIG Magazines L.P., a leading Canadian information company with interests in daily and community newspapers and business-to-business information services.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

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Foreign U.S. $73.95. Single copy in Canada $8, in USA $10 US, elsewhere $10 US. Printed in Canada All rights reserved. The contents of this publication may not be reproduced either in part or in full without the consent of the copyright owner(s).

ISSN: 2292-2202 (Print) ISSN: 2292-2210 (Online) Postal information Return undeliverable mail to Circulation Dept., Connections Plus, 80 Valleybrook Drive, Toronto, ON Canada M3B 2S9.

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From time to time we make our subscription list available to select companies and organizations whose product or service may interest you. If you do not wish your contact information to be made available, please contact us via one of the following methods. Phone: 1-800-668-2374 Fax: 416-442-2200 E-Mail: jhunter@businessinformationgroup.ca Mail to: Privacy Officer,2014 80 ValleybrookConnections+ Drive, Toronto, ON Canada M3B 2S94 Jan/Feb

2014

Come out and see how Anixter and our network of industryleading manufacturer partners can help you meet the needs of your most challenging infrastructure projects.

The Anixter Showcase will also provide you with the opportunity to network with these manufacturers to discuss the latest in technology and solutions.

MONTREAL – May 29 Montreal Airport Marriott Hotel anixter.ca/events/montrealshowcase

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Who Should Attend: • CSOs • CFOs • CIOs • Engineering managers • Electrical contractors and engineers • EPCs • Industrial automation managers • IT managers • Systems integrators • Engineers

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N E W S – I n f ras t ru c t u re S y s t e m s

Category 8 & The RJ45 Connector The two are tightly linked as specs evolve in ISO, TIA and IEEE standards development organizations B y Pau l B a rk er

Orlando, Fla. – RJ45, A connector that has been in existence since the 1980s promises to play a major role in the development of Category 8 twisted pair cabling specification, says Masood Shariff, an engineer senior principal with CommScope’s system engineering R&D group.

Shariff made the comment here at the recent 2014 BICSI Winter Conference.

“This connector that started life in 1987 with a frequency of 3 Khz has been re-invented many, many times to the point it now supports 40 Gigahertz per second with a frequency of 2,000 Mhz,” he said in a presentation entitled Category 8 Paves The Way For 40G applications.

In a blog that appears on the Connections+ Web site, entitled Technology From the 80s For Tomorrow’s Data Centres, Shariff notes that the RJ45 has not only become the universal ubiquitous user interface for data networking applications, it has also played a pivotal role in people’s lives.

“This miniature modular connector is driving the growth of LAN networks around the globe and has had a huge impact in the way we work, play and socialize with one another,” he wrote. “The magic of the RJ45 is in its ability to be re-invented to support every increasing data rate.”

In his presentation, he said Category 8 specifications are moving “full steam ahead” in what has become an extremely complicated process involving International Standard Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission, ANSI/TIA and the IEEE. Masood Shariff: Still, it appears that market realties are forcCat 8 will need help ing all standards bodies to move quickly so from BICSI. that it will arrive simultaneously with the IEEE 40GBASE-T standard, expected sometime next year or in early 2016.

At the conference , Shariff referenced the increase in mobile traffic and the growth of 40 Gig applications.

The network has to be upgraded in order to keep pace with the growth of data, mobile and Internet applications, he said.

Shariff also urged delegates to nurture Category 8 specification and grow it and “make it sustain us for the next 10 years in the way Category 6 has done for the last 10 years.

“Many experts in the industry are seeing more and more evidence supporting Category 8 cabling as the true trailblazer to 40G in the data centre,” he wrote last year on the CommScope site.

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This infographic, courtesy of CommScope, outlines the advances the RJ45 connector has gone through since its launch. In a blog that appears on the Connections+ Web site, Shariff writes this miniature modular connector is driving the growth of LAN networks around the globe and has had a huge impact in the way we work, play and socialize with one another. The magic of the RJ45 is in its ability to be re-invented to support every increasing data rates.”

“The pressure on data centre capacity has never been greater. It is now commonplace for 10 or more virtual machines to be running on the same physical server, making a high-speed uplink essential for all these applications to run without excess latency or degradation of service. As more servers are virtualized creating a data influx, the IEEE forecasts 40G uplink speeds to be a requirement for server interfaces by 2018.

In an interview following his presentation, Shariff conceded that the structured cabling industry is currently not “on board” when it comes to the promotion of Category 8: “Everyone is waiting and watching. It is a chicken-and-egg problem.

“It is going to need help from BICSI. It is not happening fast www.connectionsplus.ca

Infra s t ruct ure Sy stems – NEWS

enough. If it goes nowhere it is just a lost project.”

As an organization, BICSI can play a key role. In his inaugural speech, Michael Collins, the association’s new president said his primary goals for the next two years will involve going global, developing standards, and providing credentials, accreditation and knowledge transfer.

“We can’t lead from behind,” he said. “We will be innovative about how we do things, we will step away and divorce ourselves from that conventional wisdom of this is how we have always done it. We will put tools in our bag that will help us build this ship.”

He also commented on the expandWe will be ed show floor this year. innovative about “The refresh has lead to an increased interest by exhibitors, which how we do things, translates into an increase in revenue. we will step away It’s relevant. You walk through and you and divorce see presentations taking place on the show floor. You see vehicles. You see a ourselves from difference. It’s brighter. It’s now.”

Meanwhile, outgoing president that conventional Jerry Bowman, outlined his board’s wisdom of this accomplishments, adding that he has is how we have never believed that candour should only be used only when “things are goalways done it. ing well. I have shared with you when We will put tools things were not going well and what were going to do about it.“ in our bag that BICSI has evolved into an emerging growth organization again. Miwill help us build chael and (Brian Ensign presidentthis ship. elect) are able now to build on that. We have empowered our committees to make decisions. We have empowered collaboration among our committees and our staff. Without collaboration and without empowerment you do not have innovation.

“If there is anything that is important today for an association like BICSI for being relevant, it’s looking at the market, looking at the demands of the industry and ensuring that we innovate to meet the demands of our stakeholders.” C+

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www.connectionsplus.ca

The 2014 BICSI Winter Conference featured a larger exhibit area and extended exhibit hours. Exhibitors (from top left) included Eaton’s B-Line Business, Unique Fire Stop Products, WOW Insites, LLC which launched its WowCloud mobile cloud technology offering for the structured cable testing industry, and Panasonic with its business van equipped with vandal-resistant video surveilance cameras and unified communications systems. In the photo top right, participants in the 7th Annual Cabling Skills Challenge battle it out. Michael Collins, the new president of BICSI said “the refresh has lead to an increased interest by exhibitors, which translates into an increase in revenue. It’s relevant. You walk through and you see presentations taking place on the show floor.

You see vehicles. You see a difference. It’s brighter. It’s now.” For details on the upcoming BICSI Canada Conference taking place in Vancouver see p. 12.

March/April 2014

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N E W S – I n f ras t ru c t u re S y s t e m s

STANDARDS

EF: Controlling light power distribution

By Paul Kish

or this month’s column I wanted to provide an update on TIA TSB-4979 “Practical Considerations for Implementation of Encircled Flux Launch Conditions in the Field”. This is a relatively new document that was published in August 2013.

Encircled Flux (EF) refers to the distribution of light power that is launched into the core of the multimode fiber.

The launch conditions are specified at the launch cord output. Encircled flux launch power is specified as a function of the core radius in TIA-526-14-B. Why is it so important to control the light power distribution? One reason is measurement variability. Using a light source that is EF compliant reduces the measurement uncertainty from greater than 40% to less than 10% on a dB basis. Our own experience shows that the measurement variability could be as much as 0.5 dB when testing a 2-connector channel using two different testers that are not assured to be EF compliant. This measurement uncertainty is reduced to 0.1 dB for EF compliant sources. This can have huge implications when certifying links with a tight loss budget of 1.9 dB or less.

So why not always specify EF compliance when testing optical fiber links in the field? As pointed out in TSB-4979 there is a lot of legacy test equipment that remains in service in the field. The legacy equipment is compliant to early test standards that use a “mandrel wrap” to condition the mode power distribution launched into the optical fiber.

The dilemma is to know whether the test equipment currently being deployed in the field is overly pessimistic (overfilled launch) or optimistic (under filled launch).

There is a reluctance to do away with traditional legacy test equipment and procedures because of the cost to upgrade the equipment.

TSB-4979 describes two different ways to achieve EF compliance. Method 1 uses a universal controller

F Paul Kish is Director, Systems and Standards at Belden. The information presented is the author’s view and is not official TIA correspondence.

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March/April 2014

that works with legacy sources. This device is comprised of a “black box” with a fixed input cord and output cord. The “black box” works with any light source and redistributes the modes to provide an EF compliant launch at the output. Although it works effectively, one drawback of this method is the cost and size of the universal controller as well as the limited number of connector matings.

Most launch cords are rated for at least 500 matings before the performance is degraded causing noncompliance. Re-terminations of the output cord may be possible if a connector becomes damaged. In such cases, the universal controller needs to be recertified by the original supplier or by any supplier capable of measuring and certifying EF. TSB-4979 also describes Method 2 using a simpler matched controller implementation. The matched controller works with specific equipment.

The source is matched with a launch cord which may or may not have a “black box” controlling device.

Interoperability is achieved by matching the source model number to the launch cord model number. An advantage of this approach is that a launch cord may be replaced without requiring EF verification.

TSB-4979 provides a final word of advice for extending the life of launch cords. Launch cords are subjected to stress and will not remain EF compliant indefinitely.

The best advice is to inspect, clean and re-inspect before every connector insertion. This will extend the life of equipment and launch cords and reduce the incidence of bad test results.

In summary, more stringent optical loss requirements for high speed applications necessitate a more accurate test method for testing links in the field. Encircled flux is required for 40G and 100G testing. As a minimum, optical Loss test sets need to be calibrated/ validated with EF compliant samples.

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www.connectionsplus.ca

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I nf r a st r uc t u re S ys t e m s

a recent

Cabling in the

Great Outdoors

Deployable systems, often exposed in harsh industrial environments, come battle-tested.

By Rick Hobbs

As the utilization of fiber optics has increased within the industrial sector, so have the number of “deployable” systems used in applications from oil and gas exploration, drilling and distribution to mining.

As opposed to fixed installations, deployable systems are designed to be quickly installed, retracted, and then relocated in the field and even deep underground in some of the most inhospitable environments on earth.

Given the environments in which they reside, industrial-grade fiber optic systems are typically commercialized versions of fieldtested, proven military-grade products.

As such, the component parts of the system are designed to withstand everything from dust and debris to chemical exposure, temperature extremes, UV, radiation, electrical power transients, interference, fire, moisture, humidity, water, crush, tension, flexing, impact, and vibration.

When designing a deployable fiber optic system, it needs to be looked at in its entirety.

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The primary elements of a deployable system include hardened cable jacketing; “genderless” connectors for quick deployment without regard for male or female ends; hybrid systems that include copper along with fiber to deliver data communications and power; and reel systems that speed deployment and retraction while protecting the fiber while not in use, or during transit.

Hardened Cabling: For purposes of deployment, tight bound, tight buffered distribution style cabling is recommended because of its small diameter and lightweight construction.

Distribution-style cables have a tight-bound outer jacket, which is pressure extruded directly over the cable’s core.

This combination of a helically stranded core, and a pressure extruded outer jacket provides an overall cable construction that offers better crush and impact protection and increased tensile strength.

This also reduces outer jacket buckling during deployment.

Escalating degrees of cable protection are available as needed www.connectionsplus.ca

Infra s t ructure Sy stems

to meet the specific needs of an application.

As an example, fiberglass or metal braided jackets not only provide excellent abrasion resistance, but also deliver increased rodent protection. Custom rodent resistant cables are available that include metal or dielectric armor or additives to the outer jacket.

In deployable applications, exposed cable is often an intriguing temptation for animals, which can, and often do, chew on it.

Hybrid Cables, Connectors: For applications that can benefit from fiber optics and copper, hybrid connector-cables offer both within the same cabling sheath.

A distinct advantage of hybrid cable-connector solutions is that the customer can bundle both the high performance of fiber with the copper power or control signals in one cable. This reduces the number of cables that must be designed, purchased and deployed into a system. It also offers distinct savings in labor and cable structure costs for the customer.

Genderless Connectors: “Genderless” connectors have both male and female elements, and perhaps are more appropriately described as dual-gender. They are designed for quick deployment, allowing the user to unreel fiber cable without regard for male or female ends.

Manufacturers have further simplified the genderless design with user friendly mating interfaces capable of “blind mate” and/or applications that require thousands of mating cycles.

In addition, the connector system is designed to resist extreme harsh mechanical and environmental conditions including high vibration, mechanical and thermal shock, and fluid immersion.

Another benefit of genderless connectors is that multiple identical cable assemblies can be daisy-chained (sequenced) together to extend the distance of a deployable system while maintaining polarity.

Polarity can be an issue when connecting an odd number of traditional male to female gender connectors. In such cases, an additional connector is required to correct polarity. However, such connectors are known for high loss and add additional components for the customer. Therefore, genderless connectors are uniquely advantaged over traditional interconnection systems.

Distances of several kilometres are possible, limited only by system link budget (dBm).

This type of genderless connector provides extreme flexibility in the case of redeployment, where the length of the cable assemblies required for the next application are not fixed, or even known.

Reel Systems: The key characteristics of a reel system in deployable fiber optic applications are that it is lightweight and stackable for storage and transit.

To meet these requirements there are lightweight alternatives to www.connectionsplus.ca

traditional metal reels. Constructed of durable, yet lightweight, impact absorbing polymers, these modular advanced reel systems (MARS) are designed specifically for the demanding needs of harshenvironment fiber optic installations.

Reels can be used with simple deployable axle or a flange supported deployment and acquisition system. These types of systems include A-Frames, cable acquisition cradles, transit case systems, tripods, bumper mounts, backpacks, backpacks with fiber optic slip rings, and cartridge systems.

The cartridge system, which comes with casters, is an ideal choice in many deployable applications. Using a cartridge system, a single person can handle multiple spools at once and can quickly deploy fiber and rewind on the reel without assistance.

To simplify shipping and transit, cartridge systems, transit cases and reels are designed with interlocking stacking features.

Reel systems also provide a measure of protection of fiber optic cabling for unspooled cabling, or then the cabling is retracted.

In harsh environments, when you can put your fiber optic assemblies in a controlled environment storage system like a reel, any potential damage to the cable or the connectors is minimized. This reduces the need to refurbish components regularly, because it the system better protected during its deployment.

Wireless Access/Data Communications: Although deployable fiber optic systems are largely “wired,” hybrid cabling (the combination of fiber optic and copper/electrical within the same cable sheath) also allows for installation of wireless access points anywhere, even underground. This is ideal when access points are constantly changing.

Unlike traditional wireless networking devices that require 110Volt AC power for each device, with a hybrid system power can be supplied in the same cable that also carries voice and data.

As a result, any 802.11-certified devices are able to communicate through the network, including personal devices such as PDAs, laptops, VoIP devices and cell phones.

This provides personnel even deep within mines with the means to communicate with each other and even make calls outside the system. In addition, sensor-based data such as temperature, humidity, airflow and gas can also be collected and delivered wirelessly for use by the entire network.

There are many industrial companies that are converting to fiber optics as the costs for components continue to drop, making fiber a better solution than copper in most applications. Even diehard copper devotees are moving to fiber and when they do, they rarely look back.

C+ Rick Hobbs is the director of business development at Optical Cable Corporation (OCC). He can be reached at info@occfiber.com.

March/April 2014

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I nf r a st r uc t u re S ys t e m s

BICSI BULLETIN

Next stop:

Vancouver

By Peter Levoy

he 2014 BICSI Canadian Conference & Exhibition will be held at the Vancouver Convention Centre on April 27-30. Previously, BICSI held a Canadian Conference every two years, but popular demand from BICSI members and other information and communications technology (ICT) professionals has led to making this an annual event.

The convention centre itself is in a wonderful location — just a few minutes away from Vancouver museums and performing arts centres, surrounded by a backdrop of mountains, ocean and parks. The scenery and experience alone is enough reason to make this trip.

BICSI has a great conference planned. In addition to the education and exhibits that the Canadian Conference offers, attendees can take part in numerous educational opportunities, network with ICT professionals, and earn continuing education credits (CECs).

Courses are scheduled before the conference, and exams scheduled on April 27, at the Vancouver Convention Centre. There are a range of educational presentations touching upon many topics including Understanding Digital A/V Technology and Applications; Data Centre Optimization; Building Information Technology; and many more.

Of interest will be the presentation “Workplace 2.0 —The Government of Canada’s New Initiative and Its Impact on Our Industry,” by Robert Horne, RCDD, of The Attain Group in Ottawa.

Attendees will see how the government’s drive to modernize how the public service works will impact our industry and where you can prepare to meet those challenges. There are new opportunities created by moving to more open work areas, using demountable wall systems and lower panel heights.

The introduction of secure Wi-Fi and the drive to provide employees with more flexibility to work from different locations means looking at more than just cabling to a workstation or access point.

During Tuesday’s general session, attendees can attend “The Danger of ‘Following’ Standards - Why Existing Standards May Not Work for Your Project,”

T Peter Levoy, RCDD, is the Canadian Region Director of BICSI and the vice president of channel sales with Anixter Canada Inc.’s Enterprise Cabling Solutions division.

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presented by Henry Franc, RCDD, OSP, of Belden in Mississauga.

While industry standards and best practices provide valuable guidance for users, designers and installers; merely following standards may not be good enough.

This presentation will discuss issues of blindly following generic guidance.

It will highlight the potential pitfalls of a checklist strategy and encourage solutions-based design specifically for your needs. The session will demonstrate the ability to capitalize and improve on existing guidance, providing solutions that will help the enterprise achieve its goals.

To close out Tuesday’s morning session, Bob Matthews, a technical manager with CommScope based in Richmond Hill, Ont., will present on the topic of “PON Technology—A Shift in Building Network Infrastructure.” Matthews will explain how PON works and how it can and will be applied in the enterprise. The differences between the various technologies and how they are used will be discussed.

At the conference, BICSI will highlight the release of its flagship publication, the Telecommunications Distribution Methods Manual (TDMM), now in its 13th edition. In addition to updating existing practices to current technology for data networks, the 13th edition TDMM has incorporated new information to address the issues and solutions emerging for today’s and tomorrow’s networks. This publication also emphasizes recommendations for best practices drawn from global industry experts.

Additionally, BICSI will kick off the conference with an exciting keynote speaker. The Exhibit Hall, open Sunday, Monday and Tuesday evenings, will feature the latest products, services and solutions from exhibitors. and, as always, attendees will be able to meet and interact with other industry professionals from around the world.

C+ Visit www.bicsi.org/canadian for more information and to register. I hope to see as many of you as possible there. www.connectionsplus.ca

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N et w o r ks & T h e C l o u d

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IBM Corp. has established the IBM Watson Group, a new business unit dedicated to the development and commercialization of cloud-delivered cognitive innovations.

The company will invest more than US$1 billion into the unit, focusing on development and research and bringing cloud-delivered cognitive applications and services to market.

This will include US$100 million available for venture investments to support IBM’s recently launched ecosystem of start-ups and businesses that are building a new class of cognitive apps powered

by Watson, in the IBM Watson Developers Cloud.

According to technology research firm Gartner, Inc., smart machines will be the most disruptive change ever brought about by information technology, and can make people more effective, empowering them to do “the impossible.”

The IBM Watson Group will have a new headquarters at 51 Astor Place in New York City’s “Silicon Alley” technology hub, “leveraging the talents of approximately 2,000 professionals, whose goal is to design, develop and accelerate the adoption of Watson cognitive technologies that transform industries and professions.”

The new group will tap subject matter experts from IBM’s Research, Services, Software and Systems divisions, as well as industry experts who will identify markets that cognitive computing can disrupt and evolve, such as healthcare, financial services, retail, travel and telecommunications, IBM said.

“IBM has transformed Watson from a quiz-show winner, into a commercial cognitive computing breakthrough that is helping businesses engage customers, healthcare organizations personalize patient care, and entrepreneurs build businesses,” said Michael Rhodin, senior vice president of, IBM Watson Group. “ “Nearly three years after its triumph on the television quiz show Jeopardy!, IBM has advanced Watson from a game playing innovation into a commercial technology. Now delivered from the cloud and able to power new consumer and enterprise apps, Watson is 24 times faster, smarter with a 2,400% improvement in performance, and 90% smaller – IBM has shrunk Watson from the size of a master bedroom to three stacked pizza boxes.”

Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, IBM Watson was developed in IBM’s Research labs. Using natural language processing and analytics, Watson processes information akin to how people think, representing a major shift in an organization’s ability to quickly analyze, understand and respond to Big Data.

In November, IBM announced it would make Watson available as a development platform in the cloud, enabling software application providers to build a new generation of apps infused with cognitive computing intelligence.

IBM has shrunk Watson from the size of a master bedroom to three stacked pizza boxes.

IBM forms Watson Group business unit Snake Tray ® and Mega Snake® Cut your costs not the cable tray!

Cable tray installations are seldom a straight run. Obstacles in buildings are everywhere. Fabricating wire mesh cable trays onsite is extremely time consuming and costly. Snake Tray simply bends by hand and Mega Snake is pre-congured. Both are designed to save on time, labor and materials!

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www.connectionsplus.ca

Ne t wo r ks & The Cloud

Dell signs bare-metal networking pact with Cumulus B y Paul Barke r

Dell has announced a reseller agreement with Cumulus Networks as its first partner in what it described as an “ecosystem to fill a critical gap in realizing the true promise of the software-defined data centre.”

As part of the agreement, the company will begin offering Cumulus Linux network OS as an option for Dell S6000 and S4810 top-ofrack switches.

“Networking is an industry crying out for disruption,” said Tom Burns, vice president and general manager of Dell Networking.

“Networks are like human minds – they work better when open.”

To that end, the two companies said the announcement represents a “significant shift for the industry in that this will be the first time Dell offers bare-metal networking gear with a choice of operating system to its customers.”

As part of the agreement, Dell will also resell the Cumulus Linux network OS, running on the Dell Networking S6000, and the Dell Networking S4810 fixed configuration switches.

“As the shift away from networking vendors who enforce proprietary lockin continues, a growing number of technology providers – Cumulus Networks and Dell among them – are moving towards an open approach that disaggregates hardware from software, and completely evolves the enterprise software supply chain in the process,” they said in a release.

“Industry standard bare metal hardware and open software networks are no longer just for the few megascale technology companies, and this new model lets players of all sizes scale their data centres faster, and in the simplest, most efficient manner possible, at a fraction of the cost.”

In an interview with Connections+ Arpit Joshipura, vice president of product marketing for Dell Networking, said the announcement at this point is not aimed at the “general enterprise sector,” but cloud providers, financial and Web 2.0 customers with IT staff skilled in Linux.

“The problem these guys have to solve are different,” he said.

“They need large data centres with a large scaleout architecture that have different workloads and requirements compared to the traditional enterprise.”

Meanwhile, Brad Casemore, research director, DataCenter Networks at IDC, described the announcement as a market development that “we suspected might happen.

“Cloud-service providers and large-enterprise customers are thoroughly evaluating alternatives to their traditional data centre network infrastructure. Dell has chosen to position itself as a strong proponent of disaggregation of network hardware and software, while Cumulus Networks has struck a partnership with a major vendor to gain favorable exposure in more customer accounts.

“This announcement is emblematic of an eventful period in data centre networking, and such alliances will become increasingly important as developments such as network disaggregation reconfigure industry ecosystems.”

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ICT CAPITAL

What’s on your stick?

By Mark Borkowski

e, as people, always can remember the past, the way things used to be.

We are normally afraid of the future or the unknown. The dawning of the 21st century has had an enormous effect on information, the way we use information and the way we store information.

For that matter, the Information Age has introduced a certain necessity to be connected to unlimited amounts of data that is impossible to keep contained in our heads. It affects every walk of life and every profession in the world.

From crunching numbers to home budgets to researching why the universe exists, the data is all available online. Every person has their own needs and, consequently, needs for answers.

All of this has led to an influx of smartphones, faster and faster computers and larger data storage capacities. In fact we store so much data that, very often, we forget where we stored it.

As a result, the proliferation of portable storage is growing so quickly that portable data storage has become a way of life for us. From external hard drives, the introduction of the Cloud to tiny USB flash drives, all now necessary to hold what data we now consider important.

Government workers, aerospace engineers, financial managers, almost every profession now use USB flash drives to make that data portable for themselves. For that matter, the sales of USB flash drives is estimated to hit half a trillion pieces by 2015.

Along with the massive amounts of data storage, hacking, prying and electronic data theft has also grown. Everybody knows that the Internet is not private so using the Cloud for personal or important information is not a good idea as passwords are hackable. Even your 10 digit

W

Mark Borkowski is president of Toronto based Mercantile Mergers & Acquisitions Corp.

Mercantile is a mid market M&A brokerage firm.

He can be contacted at mark@ mercantilema.com or (416) 368-8466 ext. 232.

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alpha-numeric mixed upper/lower case passwords can be hacked using available software.

One of the most secure forms of protection is Biometric encryption where only you physically have the key. Biometric Finger Printing is, by far, one of the most secure locks available.

Are there detractors to this statement, for sure, but if you want to worry about someone cutting off your finger, maybe you have more to worry about than the information you have stored.

Getting past a biometric scanner is not as easy as the fears many people have about it.

First, there is a matter of someone actually acquiring the finger print from the correct finger.

Next they have to duplicate it somehow, then they have to figure out which part of the finger was used, the tip or the swirl.

Then they have to figure out which orientation they have to use on the scanner. The permutations and combinations are countless so unless you actually help somebody break your biometric lock, you should just wish them good luck. Realistically it does not even have to be a finger print, just some part of your body like a toe, for example.

Today, many people already walk around with information/data on USB flash drives that are not protected and if this information/data gets out, it could affect a great many people or possibly give away company secrets. A great many of these flash drives are lost but, as a rule, the general public never hears about it.

A small company from Toronto has introduced a new line of Biometric Finger Print scanners which will protect your portable data: The Encriptor One line of encryption devices by Great Durable Products Ltd. Encrypt your stick and you are covered.

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N E W S – M o bi l e M o v e m e n t s

Spectrum auction results to change wireless landscape

By Le e Rickwood

Ten telecoms participated, 97 of 98 licences were awarded, and some $5.27 billion has been raised, but not all that much changed as a result of the recent 700 MHz wireless spectrum auction.

While the country’s major wireless companies led the action and obtained most of the available spectrum from Industry Canada’s auction process, one player; however, has extended its reach outside its home province.

Industry minister James Moore noted that the results mean more choice for Canadians by enabling a fourth wireless player in every region of the country, with the incumbent wireless companies securing spectrum that will enable them to deliver the next generation of wireless devices.

Companies that obtained spectrum will be able to start using these high-quality airwaves to serve their customers by mid-April, he added.

The fourth player to which Moore referred is Quebecor, now poised to offer wireless services in Southern Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, as well as its home base in Quebec.

Quebecor Media’s Videotron subsidiary acquired seven operating licences in those provinces.

“The wireless network Videotron launched in the fall of 2010 already has more than 500,000 customers,” said Robert Depatie, president and CEO of Quebecor Media and CEO of Videotron. “With the high-quality frequencies acquired in this auction, Videotron is now well-equipped to develop its network in the years to come and to continue offering its customers the best in wireless technology.”

The largest telecoms, Rogers, Bell and Telus, acquired the vast majority (89%) of the valuable spectrum, with Rogers leading the way and noting it had secured the valuable spectrum it most desired.

“We went into this auction with our customers’ needs front and centre,” said Guy Laurence, president and chief executive officer of Rogers Communications.

We believe they want the ultimate video experience and this spectrum will allow us to deliver just that. Not all 700 MHz spectrum in 18

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the auction was the same; we secured the beachfront property we wanted. You either want your customers to have the best for the next 20 years or you don’t.

Many observers and citizen’s lobby groups were less than thrilled with the role “the Big Three” played in the auction.

The Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) had called upon the government to “set-aside” valuable 700 MHz spectrum in the auction for “new entrants” who would challenge the incumbent wireless providers Bell, Telus and Rogers.

The low frequency 700 MHz licences were highly valued by bidders as this spectrum is well-suited to delivering signals well over long distances meaning it requires less infrastructure to deploy and penetrates structures better than higher frequency bands.

“Despite efforts by the federal government to promote competition, and previous efforts to improve access by competitors to towers and roaming requirements, little has changed with today’s results”, said John Lawford, PIAC’s executive director and general counsel.

“We urge the government to use other methods to attempt to address the lack of competition in the Canadian wireless market as consumers in Canada will continue to pay more for wireless than in other countries, at least in the short to medium term.”

Those methods include enforcing the new competition-focused policy on spectrum transfers; strengthening the roaming and towersharing framework; following through on the government’s promise to cap domestic roaming rates; releasing more licensed and unlicensed spectrum; and creating a more open and predictable environment for foreign investment. PIAC also encourages the Government to ensure that spectrum licence holders use their spectrum throughout their licenced territories, instead of using the licence as an investment to sell to a higher bidder.

“Quebecor’s potential entry into markets outside Quebec looks like it could provide welcome additional cell phone choice for many Canadians,” noted citizen’s lobby group OpenMedia.ca executive director Steve Anderson.

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N E W S – M o bi l e M o v e m e n t s

HP on-demand app download service geared to a BYOD world B y Pa ul Bar ke r

HP has released the HP Access Catalog, an on-demand mobile content catalog that the company said allows employees to “instantly download applications and digital content” across mobile and desktop devices.

“The trend in consumerization has indelibly marked the enterprise,” it said. “Employees expect access to content from their device of choice, their enterprise apps to work intuitively and their experience to be seamless. IT organizations, in turn, are facing increasing pressure to deliver a marketplace experience that makes it easy for employees to find and install applications and content that drive workforce productivity, while maintaining enterprise security and controlling costs.

The Catalog offers organizations a secure, private “app store” for employees to browse, search and download mobile applications and digital content onto their devices of choice, including mobile and tablets devices, as well as desktops. It currently supports Android and iOS platforms, which comprises close to 94% of the mobile device market share.

Tim Rochte, director of product management for HP Web Services, said in an interview with Connections+ that the transition from employer-owned devices with complete lockdown and control to the BYOD model is creating different expectations and needs from both IT staff and end users.

“We are seeing a consistent trend both in terms of analyst input and talking to real-world IT folks that there is a mind shift,” he said “They are saying we can’t keep doing it the way we were doing it because that is not viable in a BYOD world. What do we need to change to make it work?”

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The Catalog, he added, gives an app store kind of consumer experience for the employees with the manageability and identitybased control to the enterprise to control who sees which piece of the content or other digital content.

“The apps are not what we do,” said Rochte. “We are about the discovery, distribution and access control on the apps and content, not the creation. How many apps the enterprise has or will have is up to them.”

Meanwhile, HP recently also introduced other BYOD initiatives, but for a different market segment – the small and mid-sized (SMB) market with additional offerings for its Just Right IT portfolio.

New to the program are HP ServeIT and HP ServiceIT, which HP said allows resellers to assess and deliver “solutions” based on the size of a company and the stage it is at in its IT development.

“We are trying to get at the core top IT pain points,” said Lisa Wolfe, leader of HP’s worldwide small midmarket business. “It is a short list. We only see our customers and our partners deploying a very core set that really helps their business.

“Even three years ago, a company was able to dictate, especially to employees: You can not interact with our business unless you have XYZ kinds of devices. That is no longer the case.”

ITServe offerings include HP Flex-Bundles for: • Microsoft Windows Server with Hyper-V Virtualization and for VMware vSphere with Operations Management Virtualization • SMB First Server Solution with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 • Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 The three new offerings within the HP ServiceIT portfolio revolve around technology services, financial services and cloud services.

“The ability to access the business anytime, anywhere from any device is the preeminent change for SMBs because if they are unable to do that with employees, partners, suppliers and competitors they pretty well will not be competitive,” Wolfe said.

“If you step back from all of this and think about it, mobility more than cloud has opened up a significant number of opportunities for SMBs to interact with their customers, their suppliers, their employees. In addition, it has created new IT challenges for the back end that people don’t think about for server, storage, networking and services.

“The explosion in unstructured data is not new, but the rate is pretty well straight up. It used to be very simple for a mid-sized business to put in another server and handle that unstructured data with internal disk drives. It is pretty much untenable to handle it that way any more.”

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COV E R S T ORY

INTEGRATED DESIGN

In A Web World

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COVER STORY

Buildings are now expected to support human activity that is Internetdependant and that can securely support a never-ending stream of new technologies.

There is simply no way to succeed in this market without involving a range of stakeholders and vendors.

By Tim Wilson Photos courtesy of Oxford Properties Group

www.connectionsplus.ca

promise of the Internet has hit a wall – not a figurative wall, but the real brick and mortar kind. Whereas greenfield design in state-of-the-art data centres and brand new hospitals and commercial high-rises are showing us that buildings can be very smart indeed, the truth is that the vast majority of structures in Canada were not built with Big Data in mind. The result is that although there is a lot of buzz around the standards that are being set with new builds, retrofits also represent huge long-term opportunities – and challenges.

“We are breaking new ground on greenfield sites like the Oakville Hospital we are building for Halton Healthcare Services, and with Waterpark Place Phase III in Toronto,” says Stephen Foster, Director of ICT at construction and building services firm EllisDon. “That massive demand is now in new builds, but over time there will be a backlog for retrofits to meet the needs and demands of clients and tenants.”

“Over time there will be a backlog for retrofits to meet the needs and demands of clients and tenants, but now that massive demand is in new builds.”

Greenfield sites like Waterpark Place Phase III are setting a new standard, exemplifying how an integrated approach can deliver results to a mixed residential-commercial environment. The centrepiece of Waterpark Place Phase III is a 30-storey office tower that can handle over 10,000 occupants, with retail space below. At 550,000 square metres, Waterpark Place Phase III is being built with a LEED Platinum certification in mind, including the possibility of lake water cooling and steam heating systems.

“This is a $247 million project designed with a solid technological backbone – crucial to ensure the building can deliver the most to its owners and tenants for years to come,” says Foster. “It is expected to be completed next summer, but the ICT people have been involved for the past 18 months. It is a great example of how ICT was engaged early on to ensure that the building has a strong infrastructure.”

Projects like Waterpark Place Phase III are being built to take advantage of what is being called the Internet of Things, wherein all devices will have IP-based connectivity, with many being wirelessly-enabled.

Power over Ethernet (PoE) can provide basic power to those devices with a physical connection, allowing for integrated designs that converge HVAC, security, entertainment – anything that draws power or interacts with humans. This is not just a technological trend; it is a societal one, too. The problem is that though we have the technology, most buildings are a long way out from realizing the benefits of having a robust, well-integrated IP-based network. o “The problem with retrofits is if they are approached in incremental stages, without an eye to the overall design,” says Piyush Bhatnagar, managing director at Accenture Canada. “The big retrofit opportunity is still a few years out, but we need to approach this with caution. You want to have the entire architectural diagram in hand before you start on the heating system, the foundation, or the roof.”

Bhatnagar is warning of the dreaded ‘silos’ that have been the bane of systems integrators for years.

In retrofits, this is complicated by limited capital budgets that, in effect, mandate a step-by-step approach. However, that can work out fine, as long as there is an eye to overall design integration so that at

The

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are doing this within highly sophisticated, automated systems, not only in new structures, but in retrofits as well.

“As it stands, in most buildings the various systems are living on their own,” says Caroline Cadieux the director of marketing for Distech Controls in Montreal. “There are a lot of missed opportunities for control strategies that can increase efficiency and comfort, and this can actually become a main rationale for retrofits.”

To address the issues Distech, which develops building automation and energy management systems, promotes a multi-protocol, multi-system management system that can deliver offerings with wireless capabilities on numerous devices, including battery-less sensors and switches.

“We only have to develop one control sequence to show a potential customer how they can be helped,” says Cadieux. “For example, in a commercial building or an office tower we can demonstrate how a badged employee can enter a building, and a signal is sent to his office to start heating it and to turn the lights on. From there, our integrated room control solution can use a wireless sensor to monitor light levels in a room.”

The Distech system will continually adjust shades, dim lights, and control for temperature. This approach delivers as much natural light as possible, while also redefining the relationship between energy efficiency and comfort. And it does so with wireless as a central component to the strategy. Wireless makes sense when retrofitting older buildings made out of marble, granite, and stone, and is also relevant for new builds given that newer construction practices use a lot of glass. Aesthetics are a concern as well: newer builds want a clean look, and many retrofits leverage the historical beauty of brick and wood beam lofts.

“You don’t want to dig through those materials,” says Cadieux.

“Wireless allows us to put our sensors in the wall, or in another location – a nice option given that they are not that visually pleasing.

We then have a web interface so that they can be controlled with mobile applications.”

Photos courtesy of Distech Controls

the end of the day HVAC, security, and future add-ons can be monitored and managed as one system.

“Point solutions are the problem right now with retrofits,” he says. “The market needs people who can take a holistic view, including the business arguments, and integrate these into one implantation strategy.”

When devices outsmart buildings Devices in buildings that connect to IP-based and even cellular networks are, in essence, simple things: refrigerators, lights, security cameras. Most people have an ‘on-off’ relationship to such technology, but the role of these technologies in our built environment is becoming more complex. The smallest appliance is able to communicate not only singularly, but as part of a larger view of how people behave within built environments. And these unassuming gadgets 24

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Living on the edge Wirelessly enabled devices, combined with a web-based management system, can propel buildings new and old into the 21st century and beyond. But each edge device is also a potential security threat.

This is a new concern for experts in HVAC and building maintenance who are used to having their systems operate in silos. Now, in a networked world, the risk is real and ongoing.

“Security is a key concern for our customers,” says Greg Turner, vice president of Honeywell Building Solutions. “Building systems have been hacked; this is essentially an offshoot of hacking industrial control systems. We have been addressing these system design requirements for years, and now have a software update service that will push a solution automatically to our customers, if they desire, or that can be downloaded and installed when appropriate for them.”

Turner says that Honeywell takes a three-pronged approach to the problem. Crucially, this includes education to reduce human error, and also addresses the need for security to be a consideration www.connectionsplus.ca

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COV E R S T ORY

Photo courtesy of Distech Controls

from the earliest stages.

“First you have to start with training your people with an eye to a secure design that includes virtual private networks [VPNs] and firewalls,” he says. “Second, you make sure that even during the construction phase all flash and dump drives are scanned and cleaned, because at this stage a lot of IT monitoring is not yet in place, and you don’t want to hand over a contaminated site to the customer. And third, you need to be on top of how the building is accessed and serviced, especially if there is remote access.”

Covering off these main areas is a big undertaking. Honeywell has a guide that runs over 400 pages to help clients with issues around security planning and access; it covers everything from the design stage, to installation, to the care and feeding of an integrated building. Such a thorough approach is a necessity because the proliferation of end-points (many of which – like flat screen monitors in hospital rooms – were initially designed as consumer grade) can be a headache when trying to put in place a fully-secure system.

“The number of endpoints we are facing is truly staggering, and that includes BYOD,” says Turner. “You have to start thinking of how to tier the infrastructure, and how to isolate some of the devices. Fortunately, the move from IPv4 to IPv6 dramatically reduces the cost per endpoint to our customers, and the security protocols are built in, which makes device management easier.”

Like Foster, Turner says that it is crucial to get the ICT infrastructure people involved in a project as early as possible. Getting security right – or wrong – has huge cost implications for a project, particularly for the first five years after a build or retrofit.

A world of partners The societal trends driving the move toward building integration are much bigger than the oft-quoted “low hanging fruit” that come from having green building practices and energy savings. Buildings are now expected to support human activity that is Internet-dependant 26

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and that can securely support a never-ending stream of new technologies. There is simply no way to succeed in this market without involving a range of stakeholders and vendors.

“The reality of the industry today is that you have to work with multiple vendors,” says Cadieux. “Some industries have stringent requirements, and require specialized systems. For those there will be different manufacturers, but everything can still be brought into one interface for analysis and reporting.”

Knowing how to approach the problem requires having designers, architects, engineers, ICT, and HVAC and security people on the same page. It also means listening to users, particularly if they have job-related or industry-specific requirements, such as doctors or floor managers. Each building location will have a unique profile.

An airport, for example, will have high volume wireless traffic from thousands of short-term users.

“We are seeing that some verticals such as airports, hospitals, and data centres are ahead of the pack,” says Bhatnagar. “In these examples, integration can The number of build significant value. But to get endpoints we the job done we must partner with construction companies are facing is truly and others to see what they are staggering and that trying to achieve.”

Not surprisingly, in order to includes BYOD. succeed in these environments, You have to start standards can be crucial. Increasingly, vendors and customthinking of ers are embracing industry prohow to tier the tocols such as BACnet, which allows a range of building system infrastructure and control devices to interoperate how to isolate as one, including lighting, HVAC, security, and access. The real some of the value then comes in being able devices. to manage a diverse and growing ecosystem of devices.

“Now, with edge devices being everything from lights to blinds, to door hardware, with all of them residing on the IP network, and all of that data flowing upstream, the real value comes when managing the data,” says Foster. “All that data has to serve a useful purpose to anyone who needs to use and enjoy a space.”

That means having diverse product sets that can roll into one digital interface, which can then be of use to facilities managers and tenants, and also available as a web interface that can be accessed on mobile applications. This is an almost utopian vision of what our built environment will look like in the years to come, reminiscent of the catch phrase from the 1970s TV show the Six Million Dollar Man: “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” And yet it is a near certainty that it will come to pass.

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It is really clear to us that the retrofit domain is a lot more complicated when our customers want to keep too much of their legacy technology.

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BIG BUILDINGS Drive Big Data Advanced building integration systems are usually first deployed in high fluctuation, high traffic data scenarios, and often tied to cost centres such as HVAC. These systems must be able to measure the data coming off an IP network, and structure it in order to make it actionable. Ideally, that structured data is visualized to make it available for analysis to multiple stakeholders, and to handle the ongoing data surge.

“The arrival of Big Data is influencing more than just business analytics,” says Christophe Maisonnave, critical facilities strategies lead at HP. “It will also bring new ideas to real estate owners when they see the savings they can get.”

While Big Data has yet to appear is in many older buildings, but societal demand means that its arrival is imminent. Consumers and businesses will expect their buildings to be smart and connected, no matter where they are, how old they are, or what they’re made of. And that means making investments in technology that will stand the test of time.

“It is really clear to us that the retrofit domain is a lot more complicated when our customers want to keep too much of their legacy technology,” says Maisonnave. “There are real integration challenges when merging a single solution with a good level of intelligent integration, and not just basic technical achievements.”

The Big Data demands coming off of leading-edge examples in data centres and hospitals are informing other structures, such as commercial high-rises, which are embracing the reality so that the cabling and wireless networks can handle future demand.

“Hospitals have pushed demand, and have shown what we can do when we get building systems talking together,” says Stephen Foster, director of ICT at EllisDon. “This is now true in commercial high-rises, too, such Waterpark Place Phase III in Toronto, where the ICT infrastructure requirements are being embraced early on.”

And though there can be industry-specific arguments, the truth is that Big Data will result in both a heightening and a flattening of data relevance, so that best-practices will ensure that building-integration in large structures can be done to meet the stringent demands of the Big Data era.

“A bank will tell me that debit transactions are the most important, and a hospital will says it is clinical data, and the building guys will says it is HVAC,” says Foster. “But the truth is that all proper networks have to be built to the right standard; they need to be redundant, self-healing, and reliable.”

When end-to-end controls and monitoring systems fit into a larger strategy, the result will be to enhance the independence and expertise in various domains. Buildings in the era of Big Data will be able to effect operational changes with greater ease, and with better results.

“There will still be people in front of the controls,” says Maisonnave. “It’s just that there will be fewer, and with greater responsibilities.”

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BIG DATA DEMANDS As more and more users add their information to what EMC Corp.’s chief technology officer Kashi Ansari calls the “giant big bucket,” an organization’s IT infrastructure needs to change. By Dave Webb

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T R ENDI NG – Big Data

ccording to Jean-Paul Isson, Monster Worldwide Inc. has been in the Big Data business since it launched in 1999. It just was not called Big Data at the time.

“I often say that Monster has been doing Big Data since Day 1, because of the nature of our business,” says the global vice president of predictive analytics and business intelligence for the biggest online job search site in the world.

“We have to manage resumes and manage job postings, and the resume doesn’t really have any pre-defined structure.”

Job seekers upload resumes, use Monster’s resume-builder tool, submit them as Word or rich text format (RTF) documents; some will start with their CV with their education, some with a profile, some with work experience, some with a career objective. It is the very definition of unstructured data, and there is lots of it: more than a million job postings and resumes at any given time, with 63 million job seekers a month visiting the site.

Add to that data from social media streams, text messaging and e-mail, along with the behavior of people on the site, and the job of harnessing that data to make business decisions becomes, well, a monster.

But on the infrastructure side, Isson says, Big Data begins with the humble data warehouse. His is called Monster House, where transactions from 44 countries across the globe land. That transactional data is married to customer behavior and social media content in a Hadoop-based environment that allows 1,000 commodity x86 servers to process the mass of data in parallel. In the end, it converges on one single MapReduce server.

“We are talking about thousands of terabytes (of data) on a daily basis,” Isson says.

Trying to harness that with traditional database tools leads to a quandary: To make it manageable, what information do you keep and what do you throw out? With cheap commodity hardware to do the grunt work, “now, we just keep everything because of the scalability of having a Big Data solution.”

Before there was Big Data, there was data, and a lot of it, says Kashi Ansari, chief technology officer for Canada at storage vendor EMC Corp.

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“The traditional technologies that were on the market were all data warehouse centric, very much a snapshot of the past… and we analyze it and make projections based on that,” says Ansari. Big Data demands nearreal-time analysis of whole data sets, not just samplings. “Traditional IT technologies that have existed for 30 years are very successful at what they do, but they’re not designed to take an entire data set.”

Traditional data warehousing technologies also rely on tightly structured data in a relational database. “That put a lot of strain on the IT department, because the business wanted all this information put in this clean, neat box to get a report back,” Ansari says. “What Big Data technology allowed them to do was take all that data and dump it into a big bucket and run analysis against it.”

The challenge of creating the infrastructure to process that data is complicated by the fact that while pressure on IT budgets is turning heads toward public cloud providers – which turn massive capital expenses into more palatable operating expenses – most Big Data applications do not suit an off-premise environment.

“The problem with going off-premise is big data has mass,” says Ansari. “When you are moving terabytes of data around, it is hard to move it off-site to an off-premise solution.” It is often data proprietary and has intellectual property value, the sort of data companies tend to want to keep a tight rein on.

And it is usually not done at the behest of the IT department.

“A CEO will get off a plane and say, ‘We have to get us some of that Big Data,’” says Darin Stahl, principal consulting analyst with Info-Tech Research Group in London, Ont. Pilot projects are one context where doing Big Data off-premise makes sense. That can defer big OPEX and CAPEX decisions, he adds.

Once you have validated the use case, though, you are likely to outgrow an offpremise solution fairly quickly, depending on interoperability issues. “Latency becomes your enemy when you start trying to tie it to external sources,” Stahl says. That is a trigger point to bring the operation in-house, where it is typically incorporated into the existing IT

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infrastructure. “The traditional IT infrastructure that has existed for a long time ends up being a source for a new infrastructure to be branded some kind of big data initiative,” Ansari says. “They are buying new infrastructure that is usually x86 based, or it is some kind of appliance, and it kind of lives in the middle of all the existing previous data warehouse (infrastructure).” That is where the structured and unstructured “gets all kind of smashed together,” and an interesting thing happens: the knowledge model you apply defines the infrastructure.

“The beautiful thing about Big Data infrastructure is that its personality will change based on the knowledge model you create,” Ansari says. That is where architecting for a particular use-case does not make sense.

Big Data infrastructure changes as more users add their information to the “giant big bucket,” Ansari says.

Here is where the information becomes exponentially more valuable.

A very simplified example: A mobile phone company’s Big Data project is launched by the marketing department to investigate customer churn.

When network operations throws its network failure data into the bucket for analysis, both groups see a correlation between network failure and churn.

The Vancouver Police Department’s Big Data initiative grew like that. VPD moved to an intelligence-led policing model about six years ago, largely cued by two factors: the coming 2010 Winter Olympics, and the fallout from the case of serial murderer Robert Pickton, now convicted in the deaths of 26 area women.

“When we first started developing our data warehouse, we originally were just (using) municipal Vancouver Police data,” says Ryan Prox, VPD’s analytics standards advisor and an adjunct professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University.

“It went from municipal Vancouver Police data to lower mainland data, so we looked at the whole metro area. And it incrementally got bigger. Then we went from Vancouver to Metro to the whole southern part of the provinces, from Chilliwack to Whistler. Then we went from that to including the interior and northern part of the province and Vancouver Island, to the point right now where we have police records for the entire province coming into our data warehouse.”

Take the more than 1 billion records including graphics, link tables and entities dating back to 2001, add a complete province wide update every midnight and a refresh of 911 call data every minute, and you get an picture of the scope of VPD’s data collection. Eight physical quad-core servers with 128 GB of RAM are virtualized on a Citrix platform and load balanced. Queries take about 15 seconds, and the processors are usually running at 15 to 20 per cent capacity, though a query that demands extensive geographic information sys32

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tem (GIS) information can make that spike to 80 per cent.

Geospatial information is perhaps the heaviest workload for the police department, so there are several ESRI ArcGIS Servers in the mix, with hardware from IBM Corp. also helping grind geographic data.

Which leads to a bit of a paradox: While architecting for a single use-case limits the functionality of a Big Data solution, the use of the data will dictate the infrastructure needs, says Piyush Bhatnagar, managing director of Accenture’s technology practice in Canada.

Consider an enterprise resource planning solution: If you build an on-premise ERP to accommodate the users and processes of every single business group, it will cost a fortune to build and maintain.

A software-as-a-service architecture with limited tools would be more standardized and cost-effective.

“If you push folks that are consuming the data saying, ‘Here are the tools at your disposal,’ they’re often very innovative about how they make it work,” Bhatnagar says. “You do not want it so narrow that you are only allowing one method to access and manipulate the data, but enough that you have made an architectural decision saying this is the type of methodology we are going to support, and that is going to come with a certain cost to deploy as well as to maintain.”

But the most overlooked aspect of Big Data infrastructure may be in the wetware. There is a dearth of Big Data talent in Canada, Bhatnagar says.

Do it on premise and you now need not only the sought-after data scientist roles and analytics roles, “you also have to understand how to configure, how to optimize and performance-tune the environment that you have, which, again, are not necessarily abundant skills in the Canadian marketplace.”

“If you go to the other end of the spectrum, and you do your due diligence on a cloud-based approach, as long as your security concerns, your SLAs for performance, etc., are all agreed to and laid out and you’re confident you can get those as needed, then again you’re back to focusing on the data scientist and data analytics skills, which, again, you’re going to need in either scenario.”

Info-Tech’s Stahl agrees.

“From an infrastructure perspective, you could end up with an island of servers, and that will have an impact on people and processes and that kind of stuff you might not have competency for,” he says. “Similarly, I think, what we see is DBAs who come at this having worked for 30 years supporting DB2 or something like that in a transactional way struggling with some of the issues around Hadoop and those sorts of tools.” See also p. 38.

C+ Dave Webb is a Toronto-based freelance writer. He can be reached at dave@dweebmedia.ca.

www.connectionsplus.ca

HOW WILL YOU SPEND YOUR LAST 10 YEARS? The average Canadian will spend their last ten years in sickness.

Change your future now.

New & Noteworthy

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4

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1. RITTAL

2. BERK-TEK

3. ICC

4. AFL

Rittal now offers a more energy efficient means of ventilating enclosures by supplying electronically commutated (EC) versions of its TopTherm fan-and-filterunit, in all but the very smallest size. Compliance with ongoing energy efficiency guidelines can be met and exceeded by using EC motors. Intelligent control and fan status monitoring is available for larger units.

Berk-Tek, a Nexans Company, is now shipping the LANmark XTP Category 6A cable, which according to the company features noise cancelling crosstalk prevention (XTP) technology that eliminates alien crosstalk. LANmark-XTP is the cable component in the new Berk-Tek Leviton Technologies CX6800 cabling system, which is designed for data centre computer clusters and emerging PoE++ applications.

ICC has introduced a Category 6A patch panel featuring 110-Type Insulation Displacement Connectors (IDCs) terminals on the rear. The terminals are in-line vertically and separated specifically to make wiring easier and to improve performance. The patch panel is UL listed and supports IEEE 802.3an standard for 10 GBase-T network performance.

AFL introduced the FOCIS WiFI fiber inspection line at the 2014 BICSI Winter Conference. Providing wireless connection of an inspection probe to an Android or IOS phone or tablet, field installation and maintenance personnel can now view images, save and verify standards compliance using a free app on their own devices.

www.icc.com

www.AFLglobal.com

www.rittal.ca www.berktek.com

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New & Noteworthy

8

5

6

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5. SNAKE TRAY

6. SUMITOMO

7. LEVITON

8. BROTHER MOBILE

Snake Tray’s current monitoring power reception module allows data centre managers to observe the current of four independent power receptacles either numerically displayed on the device or offsite using HTML protocol.

They can also set alarm criteria for circuit overloads. The module integrates with all Snake Tray cable trays or can be mounted on cabinets and racks.

Sumitomo Electric Lightwave recently launched the 4th Level DataCenter Solutions LGX and High Density (HD) patch panel product line, which it said is the industry’s first LGX and HD panel in one. The 4th Level 1, 2, 3, and 4RU patch panels can be configured for various module footprints including LGX and HD.

The Leviton Intact Intelligent Port Management System for fiber and copper networks monitors port status and manages network changes. The system sends alerts and real-time information to IT managers, allowing them to diagnose problems and handle changes quickly using Intact software. Patch cords and patch panels communicate the port status though USB cable.

The PT-E500 labeling tool from Brother Mobile Solutions Inc. (BMS) incorporates smart technology with software, connectivity and printing capabilities to produce durable laminated labels for wire, cable and electrical installations. The labeler uses snap-in cartridges to generate labels for marking copper and fiber wire and cables, faceplates, punch blocks, racks and cabinets.

www.snaketray.com

www.sumitomoelectric.com

www.leviton.com/Intact www.brothermobilesolutions.com

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March/April 2014

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Anixter Belden Canadian CommTech Shows Graybar Honeywell Genesis Series Cable Hyperline Canada JFC Solutions Nedco Rittal Systems Ltd Siemon Snake Tray Tripp Lite Wesco

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Literature Reviews Anixter ipAssured for Data Center

Nedco Communications

Anixter ipAssured for Data Centers is an infra–structure assurance program that includes the physical infrastructure products (including net–work cabling, power and cooling solutions, racks and cabinets, security as well a manage–ment and monitoring) and best practices needed to support current and future data center applications. The program considers maximizing the efficiency, sustainability and profitability of your data center. For ease of planning, ipAssured for data centers addresses three possible scenarios: “Refined” (IP-ClassSM 1+), “Enhanced” (IP-Class 5+) and “Advanced” (IP-Class 10+).

To learn more call: ANIXTER 1-877-ANIXTER

Nedco was founded in 1911 and for over 100 years has been servicing the utility, industrial, commercial and contractor markets in every province in Canada. Nedco is part of Rexel Canada Electrical Inc. Rexel is the world's largest electrical distributor, present in 37 countries and employs over 28,000 people.

Nedco is at the leading edge of the data communications industry in Canada and provides products from manufactures that set the benchmark in performance and quality. As part of Nedco's core values, delivering the best possible experience to the customer is a constant focus and we are making it even easier to receive immediate support via a new Canadian call center that can be reached at 1-888-73-NEDCO.

www.anixter.com

www.nedco.ca

Belden’s Traceable Patch Cords

Rittal’s IT Liquid Cooling Package

In today’s complex network infrastructure environments, maintaining uptime and network reliability is more important than ever.

Being able to quickly and easily trace cables with instant cable identification can dramatically reduce downtime.

Belden Traceable Bonded-Pair Patch Cords allow today’s IT managers to ensure fast and easy maintenance, and quick resolution of connection mistakes to save time and money.

To learn more visit: www.belden.com or call 1.800.BELDEN1 (800.235.3361)

Rittal provides an innovative cooling solution that provides up to 60 kW of cooling capacity direct to your rack. By bringing the cooling direct to the heat source, energy efficiency is optimised. Rittal’s LCP is a scalable solution that you can expand as your data centre and cooling needs grow. marketing@rittal.ca 1-800-399-0748

www.rittal.ca

www.belden.com

Delivering Product Training to You New products and updates to current systems are always evolving as technology is continuously being integrated into everything to make our lives easier. How do we keep up with the latest and greatest?

Through training and education, that's how.

We want to keep you updated, too! Graybar Canada offers customer training delivered in a variety of methods to keep customers up-to-date on new technology, products, and industry trends.

Check out the training calendar at: graybarcanada.com/training

www.graybarcanada.com

Free Siemon INNOVATE digital magazine Siemon celebrates 110 years of technology leadership in the latest edition of INNOVATE interactive magazine: • MAX TurboTool significantly reduces termination times • Case study: Cat 6A and 7A cabling equips the St. Louis Art Museum • Infographic demonstrates the advantages of structured cabling over Top-of-Rack • White paper discusses the benefits of fiber optic cabling • Standards Updates: Cat 6A, shielded, 40GBASE-T, data centers To access INNOVATE, visit:

www.siemon.com/innovate

Network & Security Infrastructure For over 17 years JFC Solutions has been offering Canadian customers superior service and support for their communications and network infrastructure needs. We are now offering those same superior services in Security Infrastructure. Our comprehensive offering will help our customers ensure their next project goes smoothly and is built for the future. JFC Solutions represents the right product mix for you.

For additional information please contact: JFC Solutions Tel: 1-800-815-9959

Connections+ 2014 MEDIA KIT The magazine for ICT professionals, Connections+ readership targets 60,000+ individuals who purchase, design, specify, install, maintain and test structured cabling, networking and telecom products as well as facilities management specialists and senior IT executives who are responsible for overseeing the implementation and installation of these initiatives.

For more information contact: Maureen Levy – 416-510-5111 mlevy@connectionsplus.ca

www.jfcsolutions.ca www.connectionsplus.ca

www.connectionsplus.ca

March/April 2014

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37

TH E B ACK PAG E

BIG DATA versus the SAN

By Dave Webb

s you may have noticed, I wrote a feature earlier in the magazine on Big Data’s impact on enterprise infrastructure. It was exhausting.

Too much material to work with. Interviews left unused.

Avenues left unexplored. Thankfully, editor Paul Barker offered to let me use this space to go down one of those avenues, a significant one, but one that just did not fit into the 1,500-word narrative of the feature. In the most recent era of virtualization – let’s not get into the whole debate about whether the original mainframes were a virtualized environment; I don’t do religious wars – storage virtualization was the original success story.

Before virtualized desktops, desktop virtualization (different things and a discussion for another day) or server virtualization had a substantial footprint in the enterprise, organizations were pooling storage resources behind a layer of abstraction from the user.

It mattered not to the user where physically the data was stored; from his or her desktop, it was all the same place. These were on the ground long before companies started trying to carve up a Wintel box into eight different packages of CPU, memory and I/O resources.

The thing is, SANs actually tend to work as advertised and are useful for solving business problems, unlike many other buzzword technologies that I could name but I won’t because I’m not that petty, but they should feel ashamed anyway. SANs solve a business problem elegantly and don’t need publicists because they don’t care what’s in the papers.

Big Data is in the papers now, and it is a challenge to the relevance of storage area networks.

Big Data solutions are actually similar to storage area networks in a way: They are composed of a number of disparate physical resources which do not matter a whit to the user if they are working properly. In the case of a SAN, it is a user finding files regardless of where they are. In the case of a Big Data solution, it is returning a query regardless of how many pieces of commodity hardware are crunching the data. They have abstraction from the user in common.

But SANs, as they are usually architected, thrive on structure and order. Data is siloed by application.

That is efficient. Big Data solutions are the keg-party of information, with not just database information, but

A

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clickstream data, social network feeds, video metadata and a whole bunch of other co-eds mashing it up in what I have heard several analysts refer to, without irony, as “this big bucket.” Take a query that performs speculative questions on a pool of structured and unstructured data in the thousands of terabytes, and your SAN is likely to start looking a little worried and fussing about cleaning the china. (This is probably a good time to acknowledge that any wisdom to be found in this column should be credited to the people quoted in the feature article along with David Senf of IDC Canada and Gerry Orenstein of Fusion IO. Any folly in it, I take full responsibility for.)

In a Big Data solution, those disparate resources are often commodity x86 hardware. Thanks to the magic of Hadoop and MapReduce, these cheap compute resources work in parallel on a problem. Every computer has its own storage resources, and every node on the platform has access to the others’ storage. In this environment, onboard and direct-attached storage are kings.

And then comes the curve ball: In-memory analytics. The notion of processing queries on ridiculously large data sets in near-real-time – none of this nonsense about reading and writing to disk – moves the data into an environment of terabyte arrays of flash memory. When the infrastructure gets cheap enough, you can be sure that a grocery store chain that can change its shelf prices in real-time in reaction to customer demand is going to do just that.

Other technologies will evolve, aimed at ingesting and processing more and more data at higher and higher speeds. What’s missing from this formula?

In December 2013, hundreds of thousands of customers went off the grid, some for as long as a week.

It’s only one of a number of scenarios under which all that precious, limitless data can be lost. Where’s the backup protocol? From where do we recover this data?

Did I mention storage area networks tend to work as advertised and be useful in solving business problems?

C+ Dave Webb is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

He can be reached at dave@dweebmedia.ca.

www.connectionsplus.ca

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