CONNECTIONS PLUS March/April 2015

MARCH/APRIL 2015

+ the magazine for ict professionals

Tracking the

IoT Revolution also: Smart Workspaces

MWC 2015 Coverage

SOTI Turns 20

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CONTENTS Fe a t u r e s

26 Ecosystem In The Making Some view IoT as the new Industrial Revolution

26

30 Two Sides Of DCIM

18

We explain what it is and where it is going

Departments

member of:

Editor’s Note

4

Infrastructure Systems

6

Networks & The Cloud

14

Mobile Movements

18

New & Noteworthy

34

The Back Page

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I n the N ext Issue audited by:

>> Storage >> 3D Printing

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E D I TO R ’S N OT E

Action-packed time

in Barcelona arcelona was the place to be in early March and for good reason. The GSMA’s 2015 rendition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) proved once again that it is the premium ICT conference in the world. This is one event Mats Sjodin, editorin-chief of Telekomnyheterna in Stockholm, told me, you really cannot afford to miss.

With 2,000 exhibitors in booths that in some cases were larger than a football field and 93,000 senior executive-type delegates in attendance, the atmosphere was electric.

Germain Lamonde, founder, president and CEO of Quebec City-based EXFO Inc. has been an exhibitor for the past five years and likes what he sees. There are top decision makers, executives, and movers and shakers from across the telecom industry, he said, adding that MWC is the gathering of “who’s, who in the industry on a global scale.”

The numbers certainly back that up, see story p. 18, and when it comes to trends, prior to the show, Mark Newman, Ovum’s chief research officer, said that “cloud, data analytics and SDN will all feature prominently on the exhibition floor. Enterprise services and applications are a dominant theme and most of the future-gazing on display will be around the Internet

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of Things.” IoT, this issue’s cover story, represents something of a worry for Dr. Kevin Curran, a Reader at the University of Ulster’s School of Computing and Intelligent System in Londonderry, Northern Ireland who I spoke with in Barcelona.

“Things are being connected that nobody ever envisioned would be connected,” said Curran, a technical expert for security with the IEEE. “There are going to be problems when data is collected on a scale of this magnitude.

“There is no encryption, there is no security, it is wide open.”

The only hope is through the creation of advanced encryptions and bullet-proof algorithms that the bad guys will not be able to penetrate for there is no turning back when it comes to the IoT movement.

To Curran’s point, for anyone interested in installing a smart home device, I suggest you read Candid Wueest’s blog on our Web site. Wueest, who works for Symantec Corp.’s global response team, recently outlined the results of an analysis conducted by the firm of 50 smart home devices. Many contained “several basic security issues such as weak authentication and common Web vulnerabilities.”

The IoT movement is far too large for it to come to a crashing halt over a security breach, but what it will mean is that every player in this space, regardless of what their role is, will need to put in place the proper security mechanisms.

“IoT went from hype to reality in a very short time frame,” says Victor Woo, general manager of IoT at Cisco Systems Canada Co. “(Organizations) like Schneider, IBM, GE, Rockwell, Panduit and Honeywell are all talking about their work in IoT and creating ecosystems to accelerate adoption.”

I would like to hear your thoughts via Twitter. You can reach me at @ConnPlus2014.

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Volume 2, Issue 2 March/April 2015

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Editor Paul Barker 416-510-6752 pbarker@connectionsplus.ca Senior Publisher Maureen Levy 416-510-5111 mlevy@connectionsplus.ca Art Director Mary Peligra

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Smart workspaces, smart returns Technology’s impact on the workspace of the future is immense

By Clint Undseth

Smart buildings are a major contributor to owners and tenants future business success. Technologically capable spaces enable organizations to leverage their workspace as part of their corporate brand strategy while enhancing wellness standards and productivity.

Other benefits from technology integration include improved occupancy ratios and a reduction in maintenance repair & operating costs. Smart, Intelligent Buildings eliminate infrastructure redundancies and they are scalable and adaptable to change. This is Building Performance.

With a focus on building performance and real estate planning, Canem is being asked “how will technology impact our office buildings, hospitality and retail malls today, and tomorrow?”

The following is our response to this important consideration summarized in the segments listed below.

Factors transforming organization’s workspace of the future 1. Strategic Change 2. Defining Smart Buildings 3. How do we achieve Building Performance?

4. Lessons Learned 5. Video links of interest 1. What are the most important factors in transforming organizations’ perspectives on what offices of the future should look like?

These factors include: a) Connectivity – The ability to share and access data as a collaborative team across the room, or around the world. b) Cloud Technology – Access to infinite storage and a massive reduction in paper storage. c) Mobile Communications – Bring your own device BYOD- securely enabling individual choice where and how we work with individual control of our workspace environment. d) Talent – leveraging our space to attract and retain top talent, while leveraging our technology to retain operations tacit knowledge. e) Multi-functional Workspace – free addressing workspace 6

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where people use whatever space is available when they come to the office. f) Customization – enabling individual choice and control of our workspace environment through smart systems that remember our preferences.

We believe this transformation is not so much about changing spaces as it is about smart spaces and systems that change the way we work.

Work space is becoming recognized as a critical element to attracting and retaining talent. Our workspace has an impact on creativity, innovation and productivity. Traditional industries have realized that the workspace is core to a company’s brand strategy. As such the marketing of Smart Buildings requires a new approach that goes beyond LEED certification.

Future Forward Flexibility, enabling change on the fly is a critical success factor for any building. Today’s workspace needs to reflect diverse and ever changing demands of working requirements. We see free addressing workspace becoming popular because of the highly mobile and diverse workforce. Organizations like CBRE are now implementing free addressing workspace. Consider the statistics according to Liquid Space; 72% of people work in office four days a week, 15% work in public once a week and 33% occupy an office during the day.

Mobile technology is growing at a rapid pace. No longer are employees tethered to their physical desk. Their office is accessible through mobile devices wherever they are located.

According to our 2014 market analysis, IPad sales were down by 16% from earlier in the year meanwhile Samsung tablets were up 32% in that same time frame. 28 million tablets were sold in first quarter 2014 which was the same through all of 2013. The new Phablet sold approximately 200 million units in 2014.

This perspective validates the need to facilitate for high bandwidth, secure, mobile communications. This enables teleworking so workers can remotely access digitized files or have remote facewww.connectionsplus.ca

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innovative collaboration are critical success facface meetings. When we reflect over the last three tors across a range of industries. Leading archito five or even 10 years it is clear that advances in tects like Sweeny & Co. design with a sense of technology will only accelerate, so it is paramount Transformation is community which is emphasized through brainto effectively design and implement a common fistorming-spaces, kitchens, lounges and recreber optics, IP network and wireless infrastructure not so much about ational areas to help foster cultural alignment. into our buildings to support the implementation of any future technology requirements. Mobility changing spaces Wellness has changed the dynamic of the office to that of a community. as it is about smart In the future, Productivity, Creativity and EmIt’s not just about individual work spaces but ployee Engagement, we believe, will be meamore about team spaces. In other words, open spaces and systems sured as a direct correlation to Wellness. This space plans with some closed office space will rewill require formal methodologies by which to that change the measure competitive advantages. Employers main in the future.

Wireless infrastructure with integrated sysare recognizing that having a healthy environway we work. ment enhances happier employees and higher tems, predictive analytics and individual-user controls via mobile phones and intuitive visualizaproductivity. tion are key elements of technology that are used Formal wellness programs are being driven to attract talent. to establish industry standard benchmarks Then there is talent retention and knowledge where Google is taking a leading role in estabmanagement where analytics can be used for lishing wellness standards. This includes more continuous commissioning where operators can define their busi- natural light, noise cancellation, high quality air purification, imness rules to support their individual building optimization plans. The proved thermal conditions and flexible working environments. same is true where analytics can be used to capture the building Studies indicate that workers are at their desk only 40% of their operators’ tacit knowledge, where todays’ building operators are an workday and that many meetings or casual human interaction ocaging workforce and employee attraction is becoming more difficult. curs on the fly. According to CBRE people aren’t in chairs 55% of the Analytics can help serve both knowledge management and also re- time. In the last 10 years this has meant a reduction from 319 sq ft / source optimization. person to today where we see 180 sq. ft. / person. In the view of many industry leaders this trend will only continue.

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Cultural Considerations Baby Boomers are working longer careers, breaking ranks with the traditional retirement models. Gen Xers are focused more on work life balance where mobile communications has become an enabler to achieving their balanced life objective. Gen Y born in the eighties and nineties and commonly coined as millennials, are growing in the ranks. Gen Y has demonstrated a desire for flexibility both in terms of hours and location of their work. Gen Y’s were born into a society of technology. They are highly adaptable and engaged in technology utilization. These three generations will continue working together over the next decade.

Our work space has to reflect and embrace the different cultural backgrounds and expectations. Soon Gen Y workers will represent half of Canada’s workforce. Our workspace needs to reflect these changing dynamics combining open community spaces, modular work areas and closed office spaces.

Gen Y’s choose where they want to live, and then, where they want to work. They are immersed with social media. They are independent, yet embrace innovative collaboration. Retaining Gen Xers while attracting and retaining Gen Y, requires flexible, technology centric workspaces to embrace these mixed cultures and changing work patterns. Collaboration is being recognized as a key to improving productivity. We are seeing greater interdependence across industry and academia. Strategic alliances, knowledge sharing and www.connectionsplus.ca

2. Strategic Change Change requires thoughtful planning in bridging the generations with cultural differences. This is not only about space change it’s also about cultural change. For change to occur business leaders need to commit to having a Smart Building Program with a clear companywide message that a smart building will be a major contributor to their business success.

The tenants will leverage their workspace as part of their corporate brand strategy while enhancing wellness standards and productivity, improving occupancy ratios while reducing maintenance repair & operating costs.

To achieve a truly smart, sustainable, adaptable building will require a client advisory committee early in the process to get buy in from all employee and project stakeholders.

Employee benefits and sustainability metrics have to be clearly defined as do the risks. This requires process enablers where all stakeholders can participate in surveys; share their concerns, their questions and ideas.

We are learning that when leading technology companies are planning next generation workspaces they create “Buy In” Committees that initially focus on incremental steps proving high value results. Focus areas include Technology, Art and Recognition, Health and Happiness, File Digitization and Modular Furniture.

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Smart buildings provide the opportunity to sigSpace Planning nificantly reduce marketing costs, energy costs This is a software application allowing effecand maintenance, repair and operations costs.

Mobile technology tive space allocation for the use of the buildTo truly appreciate these cost savings requires ing by tenants or owners. It provides the alignment of people, technology and processes is growing at capability to draw and manage space with at the earliest planning stages. Often these are two dimensional floor plans using actual a rapid pace. sizes of real world objects such as furniture stakeholders that have never worked together in the past- this serves as a key example of the need and equipment, walls, windows, doors, etc. It No longer are allows for the development of alternative space for strategic change planning.

To support the strategic change initiative, our and provides the basis for real and employees layout collaborative team maps the incremental steps well-organized space design and planning providing the business use cases, defining bentethered to their Integration streamlines a building’s infrastrucefits for the various stakeholders. With marketture, including pathways, spaces, structured ing for example, there is a compelling need to physical desk. cabling and converged IP Network providing present the technology roadmap that will help capital savings. achieve target goals like tenant attraction and retention.

Converged Infrasructure 3. Four key pillars of Smart or Intelligent Converged infrastructure ensures that proper Building Performance planning takes place early on in the design phase of a building so a) Financial Returns that the system can accommodate changes in the future for an inb) Resource Consumption telligently connected building riser. c) Occupant Health d) Global Responsibility Building Management Systems A smart building has clear tenant recognition that the building is These systems provide an interface to your building operations, a major contributor to their successes. ranging from metering, security, lighting, preventative and predicSmart buildings have a number of definitions, so Canem has tive maintenance, asset management, heating and cooling, operprovided a summary below, correlating this with the Smart Buildings ational logging and even work order and inventory management Institute. Smart and green features may overlap but are not iden- systems. Through networking, integration and information managetical. Smart technology combines IT services like sensors, meters, ment the Building Management Information must be consistent and monitoring systems, converged secure infrastructure and automated support a wide range of devices from tablets to desk tops, enabling controls through an integrated visual dashboard. For green build- operational excellence. ings it goes beyond performance and serves the corporate sustainability program by auditably reporting results through energy and Metering environmental measurements.

You can only manage what you measure. Building meters are a A smart building has clear tenant recognition that the building is a critical component for successful integration because they collect the major contributor to their success. It anticipates and facilitates tenant building system information that helps make better, faster decisions. changes, serving rapid response time for tenant service. The build- By integrating the utility metering with the Building Management ing systems are built on open standards ensuring multi-vendor multi- Systems allows the user to identify spikes and consumption with the system integration. Building performance is measured through a mo- daily equipment operations. This combined with analytics provides bile tenant interface for performance transparency, sharing instant insight for immediate resolution with building systems. accurate information with tenants for total information exchange.

Smart building management systems can integrate automated work Analytics order systems. It can translate equipment maintenance, repair and Once building systems data is captured, the information is pushed operations data into performance analytics and pinpoint equipment to an analytics program that makes sense of all the data and tells issues in ways that go beyond the human capacity. you what you need to know. Analytics are key to communicating The building accurately communicates to the world how well your the results of integrated systems performance. Analytics find what building is performing through its lifecycle. It enables the building matters. This application is used to prevent failure of equipment operator to predict and fine-tune the building systems for continuous through the use of suggested preventative maintenance from the optimization. Smart buildings are scalable and adaptable to change. manufacturer or by predicting equipment failure based on equipOccupancy parameters are precisely controlled from an easy to use ment data or usage. The system should support the scheduling and dashboard. tracking of recurring maintenance tasks, automatically assign tasks A smart building eliminates redundancy between base building and work orders, and be able to create daily, weekly, monthly, and and tenant fit out, therefore reducing waste. yearly tasks. Typically this maintenance may involve inspections, The building blocks of smart buildings include: testing, measurements and parts replacement or adjustment.

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general contractor, vendors, designers and sub- contractors.

Canem’s Centre for Building Performance is a lab where we house strong technology and related process knowledge with proven experiences. We provide industry confidence through our testing verification and training for all industry stakeholders. At the Centre we facilitate strategic change and collaborative planning workshops.

With construction we know that project management is essential to the successful completion of any project.

Data Standards Data is an asset, and facility management should have written standard methodologies and processes to manage the facility data. This would include document management, naming conventions and standardized databases, in coordination with other relevant groups and applications, such as the IT department and enterprise asset management.

Visualization Analytics gather building information and visualization is the graphical representation of the data collected. Building dashboards can show the information in a variety of charts and graphs to make the analysis easy to understand for all stakeholders.

BIM Building Information Modeling is the significant data management tool for new construction. The data and modeling generated in the use of BIM must be exported to the facility management system; specifically the COBie files into the asset management application. This export of design and construction data into facility management system is critical to the successful handoff from construction to operations. Without it, FM and the building operations are handicapped at the outset.

Processes From a collaborative integrated design process through, construction day 2 handoff and ongoing life cycle services, some process changes will inevitably be necessary. If we think of operations throughout the lifecycle, integrated systems with sound information management provides predictive service to optimize systems performance.

This necessitates the need for new processes and standard operating procedures. When integrating technology this impacts people and processes; so process mapping must be incorporated into the earliest planning phases.

4. How do we achieve Building Performance?

In Canem’s view, achieving true building performance requires alignment and collaboration of client stakeholders, the architect, the 10 1

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5. Lessons Learned • Bridge the historic disconnect between design, construction and operations collaborating at the early stages of design to optimize the building lifecycle.

• Change is here and to fulfill the demand, technology infrastructure and systems must accommodate multi-functional requirements, variety and choice at the workspace.

• Bridge the gap between the operators and information technology systems demonstrating how this measurably impacts business performance.

• Actionable information can and must be customized to the individual user’s needs to help shape behavioural changes.

• The value potential for integration and information management is only limited to the planning and design capacity.

• Invest in a Facility Information Manager to manage all facility data from the design, modelling, construction and operations. Turning data into actionable information aligning with standard operating procedures and best practices, for all stakeholders will enable faster, better decisions.

• By creating a smart building space, owners will be able to uniquely differentiate for tenant attraction and retention. End users will increasingly be looking for spaces that include all the value added benefits of having an integrated technology space.

• Customization has become a key feature for the individuals within a building. Enabling individual choice and control of our workspace environment through smart systems that remember our preferences is an attractive feature.

In conclusion we believe technology can impact our office buildings, hospitality and retail malls today, and tomorrow in the following ways: • Enable higher net profits for the owner and operator • Increase comfort & wellbeing of users • Improve work productivity/performance • Reduce energy consumption & carbon footprint • Enhance the individual users flexibility and control • Enhance unique market differentiation • Reduce fixed O & M costs • Building Operator Skill Development & Succession Planning • Attract top talent • Optimize space Clint Undseth is the vice president of corporate development for Canem Systems Ltd. www.connectionsplus.ca

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STANDARDS

Turning up the heat

By Paul Kish

he IEEE 802.3bt task group is currently developing the third generation Power over Ethernet Standard (4pPoE) to deliver power more efficiently using all four pairs in a telecommunications cable. The timeframe to complete this work is February 2016 The objectives of IEEE 802.3bt Standard are to define the operation of 4-pair powering for Type 2 (up to 30 Watts), Type 3 (up to 60 Watts) and Type 4 (up to 90 Watts). In parallel, TIA is developing Telecommunications System Bulletin TSB-184-A “Guidelines for Supporting Power Delivery Over Balanced Twisted-Pair Cabling” that provides additional guidelines on the temperature rise under worst case condition as a function of the current level, cable Category and bundle size.

The benefit of 4-pair DC power is that for a given amount of power that is to be delivered to a remotely powered device, less power is consumed in the cable due to resistive heating because there is less current flowing on each pair when it is divided over all 4 pairs instead of only two pairs.

Resistive heating is proportional to the square of the current multiplied by the conductor resistance; the higher the current, the higher the heating effect.

For example, for an applied power of 60 Watts over 4 pairs at 600 mA current per pair, 9 Watts of power is consumed in the cable to deliver 51 Watts to the remote device.

For the same example applying 60 Watts over only 2 pairs at 1.2 A current per pair, 18 Watts of power is consumed in the cable to deliver 42 Watts to the remote device. Furthermore, the temperature rise of the cable at these higher current levels (1.2 A versus 600 mA) can be excessive and can adversely affect the transmission performance of the cable.

The second benefit of 4-pair powering is that higher power levels can be delivered to the remote powered devices while maintaining the temperature rise inside a cable bundle within acceptable limits. What are acceptable limits for the temperature rise inside a cable bundle compared to the ambient temperature?

The IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Standard requires a 10°c reduction in the maximum ambient operating temperature of the cable when all cable pairs are energized

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

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under worst-case conditions. A complementary document, TIA TSB-184 allows a temperature rise of 15°c (based upon a maximum ambient temperature of 45 °C) for a bundle size of 100 cables.

The graph above shows the temperature rise inside a 100 cable bundle for different cable types that are defined in TIA TSB 184-A as a function of the applied power at the power sourcing equipment (PSE). If the curve is within the green shaded region, the temperature rise meets the 10°c criteria specified by IEEE 802.3.

The yellow region is within the TIA 184-A guidelines of 15°c. The red zone exceeds both criteria and indicates an excessive temperature rise for the power delivered over the cable.

For another application, the HDBaseT alliance has published HDBaseT specification 2.0 that enables up to 100 Watts of power delivery (called PoH) over 4-pair Category cables for powering HDTVs and displays at distances up to 100m. At these higher power levels, in order to meet a 10°c temperature rise limit, the bundle size can vary between 22 cables to 100 cables depending on the cable type and Category.

As you can see, the future trend is to deliver higher power to remotely powered devices over telecommunications cable and to do it more efficiently. Even when powering over all 4-pairs, the heating effect can be quite significant for power levels above 60 Watts. The recommendation is to choose the right cable that can deliver the power without an excessive temperature rise and that provides additional Insertion Loss margin without length de-rating at elevated temperatures. C+

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

Engineering

To The Top Four female technology execs share their employment tips and tricks at ITAC event B y Ste p h en Pro cto r

Speakers at the event were from l. to r. Julia Elvidge, president of Ottawa-based Chipworks, a patent and technology firm; Maria Elena Carbajal, Ericsson’s solutions vice president for global ICT centres, TE and cloud; Nilufer Erdebil, CEO of Spring2Innovation, an innovation and commercialization consulting firm; and Trina Alexson, regional vice president with Cisco Systems Canada Co.

When Trina Alexson looks out across her organization for a next generation leader, the regional vice president with Cisco Systems Canada Co. is not watching for the engineers with perfect attendance or research reports that are completed on time and on budget.

Those are valuable qualities, but the civil engineer turned senior executive says she looks to the pain points in her organization for the rising stars.

“Where there is pain, there are problems to be solved,” she says. “Follow the problems and there are always learning opportunities. It’s problem solvers that really get noticed.”

Alexson was one of four senior female engineers who gathered at the Ericsson Visitors Centre in Kanata outside of Ottawa recently to share employment tips and tricks with 90 women hardwiring their careers in technology. The event was co-sponsored by the Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) and Women in Communications and Technology (WCT) and chaired by Lynda Partner, vice president of marketing with Pythian Inc. Growing up in pre-oil Newfoundland where double-digit unemployment was the norm, Alexson learned “the value of a job” early, leaving her open-minded about pursuing all opportunities.

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“I remember vividly the male engineers I worked with early on would kick up a fuss about doing tasks that weren’t cool or operationally routine. “Let Trina do it”, they said and I always did. It was awesome. I moved around a lot after that because it gave me the foundational skills I needed.”

Those skills took her to San Jose, Calif. where she ran a development team and had a ringside seat as the Internet revolution was born.

Julia Elvidge is also a big fan of embracing the positive in any situation. She says her penchant for “saying yes to almost any opportunity” helped power her rise from intern engineer to president of Chipworks, an Ottawa patent and technology firm which counts global tech giants as customers.

One of just six female electrical engineers in her University of Waterloo graduation class of 1987, Elvidge used her technical skills to land a job at Chipworks and then built out her value proposition by finding ways to work across all parts of the operation.

Marketing and sales are still not “her thing”, but because she learned to talk that language, she became an invaluable conduit linking different parts of the operation.

“They used to call me the Manager of Everything Else,” she says www.connectionsplus.ca

Ne t wo r ks & The Cloud

sharing a laugh. “What it really meant was when the time came, I was presidential material because I’d been exposed to so many parts of the business.”

Nilufer Erdebil agrees continual learning is important, but the CEO of Spring2Innovation, an innovation and commercialization consulting firm, insists you sometimes have to be prepared to take roles you may not initially be interested in.

“Over the 17 years I’ve worked as an electrical engineer in telecommunications, application development, program and IT management, I’ve been offered roles that I didn’t think suited me at all, but I always said yes. In most cases, I was thankful for the experience it brought me.”

A 2014 recipient of the Ottawa Forty under 40 Award, Erdebil believes her willingness to be flexible made her an obvious choice when her bosses were looking for engineers to work on leading edge projects or to experiment with circuit board designs that had never been attempted before.

Variety has played a key role in Maria Elena Carbajal’s career.

In the 20 years leading up to her current position as Ericson’s Solutions vice president for Global ICT Centres TE & Cloud, she worked for the company on three continents, managed teams in 10 countries and worked across multiple verticals.

“I was never afraid to learn and try different roles -- aerospace, IT, development, point of sale or advanced engineering. I had role models and mentors along the way, but I never left it to anyone but me to manage my career,” she says.

Her recommendation to young techs in the infancy of their careers is to find something you are passionate about and then run with it.

“Passion shows,” she says. “Passionate workers stand out from the crowd.”

Each of the women have stories about sexism in the workplace such as bosses or colleagues who’ve expected them to get their coffee or take notes at meetings, but in every case they were able to manage around the roadblock. They still see instances of discrimination, but in general believe the challenges facing women engineers are falling to the wayside.

If that is true, the quartet at the presentation can claim at least a modest role in shaping the new reality.

Carbajal is head of Ericsson’s Womens Network and shares her insights at numerous speaking engagements around the world targeting both men and women.

Elvridge was the first female president and CEO to get involved in Mindtrust, a leadership development program for graduating students at Carleton and Ottawa universities.

Meanwhile, Alexson has co-authored the book Bit by Bit, a guide for young women aged 15-25 considering careers in technology.

The women are clear their ascension could not have been accomplished without tapping into a buffet of mentors and champions within their organizations.

“You cannot climb your career ladder alone,” says Alexon. “In fact, I recommend against it. Think of your career as a pyramid.

Build out your network in everything you do. It’s a lot more stable at the top of a pyramid than a ladder.” www.connectionsplus.ca

Speake who tal activity

March/April 2015

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World’s first ‘climate positive’ data centre being built in Sweden

Falu Energi & Vatten, in collaboration with EcoDC AB, has announced that EcoDataCenter, the world’s first climate positive data centre, is being built in Falun, Sweden. Schneider Electric will supply energy efficient systems and products to the project, which the firms said will be the 13th safest data centre in the world. The organizations added that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is emerging as a new market for energy efficiency systems.

“The ICT sector alone consumes up to 10% of the world’s electricity, reflecting the growing cost of powering the data centres that are the global backbone of the Internet and cloud computing. A single data centre can easily use more electricity than a mid-sized town, but a large part of this energy is never used and is instead released as heat into the atmosphere.”

According to several reports, the combined carbon dioxide emissions from the more than three million data centres globally are expected to exceed the emissions from the entire airline industry in only five years.

“This development implies an increased need for energy, which also affects the environment to a great extent. It is also a cost-driver, which requires a new way of thinking,” said Børge Granli, one of the founders of EcoDC AB. EcoDataCenter in Falun will be connected to the local energy system, which received a Global District Energy Climate Award in 2013 for being one of the world’s best.

The excess heat from servers and information technology (IT) equipment will warm buildings in Falun through the district’s heating system. In the summer, excess steam from the local electricity plant will run the machines cooling the data centre.

“The collaboration between the data centre and the district’s heating system will ensure that emissions are reduced to the extent that EcoDataCenter will have a negative carbon dioxide footprint 16

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annually,” said Bengt Gustafsson, CEO of Falu Energi & Vatten. “We are connecting the data centre to an already sustainable energy system to make use of all the energy. In this way, we are building the very first climate positive data centre in the world.”

The electricity powering the data centre comes solely from renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and water, as well as secondary biofuels.

EcoDataCenter is being built to meet Uptime Institute’s Tier IV™ certification, the highest standard of availability in the world and a designation only 12 other data centres globally have achieved.

“We live in an age when more and more people are concerned about the global data centre industry’s environmental effects. Internet penetration and the Internet of Things don’t have to happen at the expense of the climate,” said Marc Nezet, country manager, Schneider Electric Sweden. “IT security and performance is also increasingly critical for companies and organizations.”

EcoDataCenter’s energy efficiency and integration with the district heating and cooling system means that energy will be used that otherwise would have been wasted. This lowers the costs for the electrical utility and customers.

EcoDataCenter Facts: • EcoDataCenter will be three buildings totaling 23,250 square metres. The first building will be completed in the first quarter of 2016.

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• Power consumption rating: 18 megawatts.

• Up-time: 100% • Energy sources: Sun, wind, water and secular biofuels.

• Security classification: Tier IV™. The data centre will be protected by heavy concrete walls and advanced security, control and surveillance systems.

• PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness): Less than 1.15 (Tier IV design).

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• Sedum (flowering plants) on the roofs cooling them throughout the summer.

• Climate: Average annual temperature 5°C. Average number of days per year with max temper ature >25°C is 22 days.

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Attendance record set at MWC 2015 IoT, cloud and software analytics in great demand at the Fira Gran Vira By Paul Barker photos: paul barker

Barcelona, Spain – The annual telecom bonanza known as the Mobile World Congress again broke records with organizers estimating the event attracted 93,000 visitors from 200 countries.

It featured more than 2,000 exhibiting companies housed in 100,000 net square metres of exhibition and hospitality space.

Held from March 2-5, among the industry observers were 17 senior analysts from the research firm Ovum, there to identify and discuss the latest industry trends with its clients and partners.

Prior to the show Mark Newman, Ovum’s chief research officer, sent out a prediction of what could be expected.

Hot topics, he said, will come mostly from the world of IT: “Cloud, data analytics and SDN will all feature prominently on the exhibition floor.

Enterprise services and applications are a dominant theme and most of the future-gazing on dis18

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play will be around the Internet of Things.”

Newman went on to say that for the first 30 years of its life, mobile communications felt like a standalone industry with its own technology, services, vendors, and service providers. “A select group of telecom vendors created the technology roadmap and vision; a relatively small number of investors and operators captured the most lucrative licenses to build and operate mobile networks; and a few European, U.S., and Asian vendors controlled the mobile phone sector.

“The Mobile World Congress will highlight just how quickly the technology and services landscape is starting to change. It will mark a further shift in the evolution of mobile communications from a sector in its own right to a service and a capability which other companies in other sectors – banking, enterprise technology and software, and digital media to name just a few – can use to www.connectionsplus.ca

M o bile Movemen ts

deliver improved services to their different use of resources and perown customers.” formance requirements.

All of his predictions came to According to ERP vendor SAP, pass for there was that and more to remain competitive in today’s at eight different halls located “hyperconnected, saturated marin the Fira Gran Vira conference kets, telcos must leverage their facility. massive stores of data in order to On the opening day, Stefano achieve deeper customer engagePileri, CEO of Italtel, warned that ment and streamlined omnichanoperators wanting to stay afloat in nel commerce, gain insight into the rapidly changing telecom marnetwork usage and drive-cost-effiket will need to massively transcient operations.

SAP’s Brent Cohler demos the BCN4U tourist application. form their infrastructure in terms “According to an IDC study, of guaranteed bandwidth, commuthe amount of data in the world is nications security, low latency rate set to grow 10-fold in the next Samsung launched its newest smartphones at MWC. and minimum cost for increased 10 years to 44 zettabytes or 44 capacity. trillion gigabytes.”

Speaking as part of the NetEricsson president and CEO work Evolution in Practice session Hans Vestberg reflected on the Pileri said the rise of Internet of pace of change in the industry at Things (IoT), exponential growth the company’s opening-day meof IP traffic, reduction in the profitdia and analyst briefing: “We preability of telecommunications serdict four key changes during 2015: vices and the increase in the nummore people will watch streamed, ber of devices have all contributed on-demand video than broadcast to the need for this transformation.

TV on a weekly basis; video will Over the course of his speech, generate half of the mobile data Pileri said three main elements will traffic; LTE subscriber growth drive this transformation: simplifiwill exceed 80% and world mocation, virtualization and automabile broadband coverage will be Ericsson’s massive exhibit area in Hall 2. tion, with networks needing to take above 70%. a minimal architecture which Ital“These are all massive forces of tel calls ‘ABC’: Access, Backbone change and open up new opportuand Cloud. This approach will also nities both in the ICT industry and allow the integration of concepts in other industries. such as Software Defined Net“There is a new logic being apworking (SDN) and Network Funcplied across industries. We can tions Virtualization (NFV). see a definite shift from physical “Operators will see a range products to digital services. New of benefits with this simplified business models are emerging, structure,” said Pileri. “These along with new ways of solving old include reduced total cost of problems that create new efficienownership of around 40%, recies. True customer intimacy can duced consumption and reduced be created using digital tools. All operations and maintenance. In in all, you can see that ICT drives addition, operators can reduce the time to market for new services transformation that is really changing the game.” and, most importantly, expose network services with standard interMeanwhile, Nokia Networks showed the possibilities of mobile faces to many third-party specialist applications, taking up the role connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT) with live demonstrations of service enablers.” that included 5G radio equipment on new millimeter and centimePileri went on to suggest two possible architectures to guide the ter wave bands as well as new frame structures to achieve singlenetwork transformation: A cutting-edge “Central Cloud” architec- digit millisecond latency. ture and “Edge Cloud” architecture, with each type defined by a According to the Helsinki-based networking company this allows www.connectionsplus.ca

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Mo b i l e Mo v e m e n t s

for the immediate, synchronous eye-hand feedback that enables remote control over robots working in construction and maintenance.

It added that with IoT, critical new security capabilities will be needed at the device and network levels “The transition to IoT means we will soon live in a world with between 10 and 100 times more Internet-connected devices than there are connected humans. Real time IoT will require even more reliable communication links, lower transmission delays (latencies) and extreme throughput to serve the data transmitted by hundreds of billions of sensors and machines.

“The Internet of Things, a driver for what we call the Programmable World, opens tremendous potential to expand the human possibilities of technology,” said Kathrin Buvac, vice president of strategy at Nokia.

“Within the next 10 years, we will see 50 billion things connected, enabling industries to become more efficient and helping people to improve their daily lives.”

Through WorkLife, enterprises can choose to pay for all employee usage within the KNOX container, or they can select specific work applications to be billed to the company.

• Enterprise software vendor SAP announcing the availability of SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services, which it described as the “foundation of its mobile app development strategy and what it The number of delegates at called the “next step in delivering MWC totalled 93,000. mobile innovations in the cloud.”

Rick Costanzo, executive vice president and general manager Sierra Wireless was part of the GSMA Innovation City. of telecommunication and mobility solutions with SAP, said it is critical for the company’s customers to be able to create context-aware mobile applications in the cloud.

The company also launched Barcelona for You Tourist Network (BCN4U), software that simplifies the way people experience a city by connecting people, places and things through a mobile app. It uses IoT to “improve the tourist experience by offering customized activity suggestions, while reducing long wait times by guiding tourists to attractions with the shortest queues.”

• Richmond, B.C.-based Sierra Wireless, part of the GSMA Inno• The release by Samsung Electronics of its Galaxy S6 and Gal- vation City, demonstrated several applications with its partners Philaxy S6 edge smart phones that contain the “world’s first curved ips, Schneider Electric and Oxblue. These included the securing display on both sides and a glass body made from the toughest and monitoring of construction projects with high-resolution timeglass to date.” Both are built on the upgraded Samsung KNOX lapse cameras that can be accessed with any Internet-connected mobile platform and will be available in April with 32, 64 or 128 GB device through secure data servers over 4G LTE networks; and improving public safety, manage energy consumption and lower storage options.

• Quebec City-based EXFO Inc. releasing the latest feature for maintenance costs through a public lighting system that can be reits iOLM application, which it said simplifies optical time-domain motely managed and adjusted to a city’s needs.

• Brian Anderson, vice president of marketing with Sierra Wirereflectometer (OTDR) testing. The iLOOP intelligent feature speeds up the fiber-certification process, resulting in time spent on testing less, said every year the conference “gets bigger and this year is no exception. All the things you can do with a smartphone are explodand analysis being reduced by more than 50%, the company said.

• The Lumia 640 and Lumia 640XL smartphones from Microsoft ing. When you think that five years ago they really didn’t exist and Inc., both of which will be upgradeable to Windows 10 when it is now there is over a billion of them.”

• Germain Lamonde, founder, president and CEO of EXFO said released later this year. Microsoft also introduced a lightweight universal keyboard that works with iPads, iPhones, Android devices that with 90,000+ top wireless decision makers, executives, and “movers and shakers” it a gathering of “who’s-who in the industry and Windows tablets.

• SOTI announcing support for Google Android For Work and on a global scale. We have been exhibiting here for the last five years. EXFO historically was more involved in the fixed-line, but Samsung KNOX 2.4 and launched V12.1 of MobiControl. (see p. 22) • Blackberry announcing that Samsung KNOX will be integrat- eight years ago we made a strategic decision to get into wireless. ed with two of its services – WorkLife by Blackberry and SecuSuite. Today, it represents one-third of our business.”

Other product launches included:

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Mo b i l e Mo v e m e n t s

A store associate prints labels for inventory management. He is using a Zebra mobile printer device managed via SOTI ‘s MobiControl.

photos: glen tosco

SOTI’s Two Decade EMM Journey Launched in 1995, today it is a leader in the enterprise mobility management space

By Paul Barker

The world of mobility was in a very different space 20 years ago when enterprise mobility management software vendor SOTI Inc. was first formed. Back then, its eventual revenue lifeline would be Pocket Controller Professional, a consumer product that contained core technology pieces that in one form or another are still in use today.

It is a success story that Carl Rodrigues, the founder and chief executive officer of the Mississauga, Ont.-based company never tires of talking about. In 1995, he was a software consultant and “hired hand” who decided it was time to try something new and build an actual product.

Working out of the basement of his home, Pocket Controller Professional, a device that handled remote control of mobile devices, morphed into Pocket Controller Enterprise, which in turn was

eventually renamed MobiControl that would evolve into the flagship product that remains as relevant today as it did then.

In an interview with the Financial Post published last year, he explained how MobiControl came about: “While working on PDAs, I was frustrated at having to tap the screen one character at a time.

So I figured out how to attach a keyboard and see the screen of the device on my desktop. What really happened was that I had built a technology for remote control of mobile devices.”

Today, SOTI is a major player in the Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) market with upwards of 14,000 enterprise customers and “millions of devices managed worldwide.

“What is playing out on the modern stage is not new to us,” says Rodrigues. “We have been able to live this journey once before. It is different this time, but also there are similarities.

Continued on page 24

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“Enterprises are now trying to leverage the capability of mobility.

The next stage is offence – what can I do with these devices to become more productive, what can I do to gain more market share as a business? How do I change my business to leverage the benefits of this new technology?

“As soon as they start thinking about that, all the desktop apps are slowly, but surely, going to morph on to the mobile devices and there will be new and different apps that are possible because of mobility. Now your office is your mobile device.”

The changing landscape was certainly on Roula Vrsic’s mind, SOTI’s chief marketing officer, in January during an interview with Connections+ from a conference in New York City on the day version 12 of MobiControl was launched.

Features of V12 include: • Elimination or minimization of common mobile device deployment and management tasks, allowing “zero-intervention provisioning,” policy administration and the ability to assign configurations over-the-air based on a broad range of criteria or LDAP attributes.

This saves businesses up to $100 per device in provisioning costs, the company claims.

• Device provisioning and remote support for Zebra Technologies peripherals.

• Enhanced support for Apple, Kyocera, Lenovo, Sony, LG, Samsung, Zebra Motorola APIs, as well as Windows Phone 8.1.

• Over-the-air device configurations for e-mail, Wi-Fi, VPN etc. at a granular level based on various criteria including device properties, custom attributes and data, and more. This takes the burden off IT as users can now enrol their own devices quickly with zero IT intervention through a simple URL, the company says.

• An updated user experience that optimizes device management across operating systems using advanced profiles and policies.

“With mobility quickly becoming the nerve centre of IT, total cost of ownership is “”key because mobility is being used in every area of the business,” she said. “It has certainly moved well beyond BYOD. Lines of business are looking at it to drive efficiencies.

Vrsic pointed to American Airlines, an organization that was part of the V12 beta program and has 40,000+ Android and Apple mobile devices in use including iPads, barcode scanners and Zebra printers. (see photo above.).

The airline is using MobiControl 12 to manage all aspects of its mobility strategy, be it in the air or on the ground. “They are trend setters in terms of how they are leveraging mobility today,” she said.

“I don’t think there is one area of their operation that is not mobilized at this point.”

It also did not take the company long to release another upgrade.

At the recent Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona, Spain, SOTI announced support for Google Android For Work and Samsung KNOX 2.4 and launched V12.1 of MobiControl.

Android for Work creates a secure Work Profile to isolate and protect data and manage the flow of work information, Google says, adding that “people can use approved work apps right alongside their personal apps while IT administrators can manage 24

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business data on all Android devices.” Meanwhile, Samsung KNOX allows companies to secure both employee and company owned devices by creating a secure container for corporate email, files, and apps while still allowing employees to have personal apps and data on the device.

In a release issued on March 2, SOTI said Samsung devices enrolled in a BYOD program can be configured so that IT only has access and control of the secure workspace, ensuring privacy of user data.

It added that devices such as the new Samsung Galaxy S6 can be enrolled with a split billing policy and configured so that cellular data usage for enterprise content is billed separately from personal data usage.

In a blog entitled Android Gets Down To Business SOTI said security and privacy can reside together: “End-users will be happy to know that there is virtually zero access to their personal data. And corporations and businesses can breathe easy and be assured that all corporate data is housed within a separate and secure workspace via profile separation, enhanced data security and that cannot be accessed by personal apps.

“Productivity and efficiency are key factors to the enterprise’s success and ability to grow. Employee productivity is enhanced by enabling secure access to corporate resources for Android, empowering the end-user to continue using a device they’re already accustomed to with the full support of the IT department. Also, IT can fully manage what applications are available inside the workspace without impacting the native experience for employees.”

According to the company, the added layers of complexity stretch well beyond the capabilities of IT today, and basic EMM offerings do not fulfill the requirements needed to provision, manage, secure and provide report support tools when everything is an endpoint.

“If not leveraging the right tools to manage mobile users, processes and endpoints; however, mismanaged mobility deployments can siphon intended profits and ROI due to significant TCO, negatively impacting on adoption, your bottom line and your business.” www.connectionsplus.ca

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COV E R S T ORY

Tracking the

IoT Revolution

It’s been coined as the new Industrial Revolution and the enterprise world is absolutely embracing it.

By Denise Deveau

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nyone looking for where the real business action is in the IoT world will find that it’s not so much in the highly touted consumer wearables or smart cars and homes.

In fact a prime example of IoT at its finest is Dundee Precious Metals Inc.’s flagship Chelopech mine project in Bulgaria. The site has become a benchmark for next generation mining in an IoT world, says Mark Gelsomini, corporate director, information technologies for Dundee in Toronto. He contends it is the only mine in the world to have Wi-Fi as the primary communications media from tracking assets to providing business intelligence.

What is driving IoT investment for Dundee is a combination of environment, economics and worker health and safety, Gelsomini

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COVER STORY

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“They see the value in IoT as a means to says. “We are providing Internet connectiviIn the not so drive efficiency, productivity and/or worker ty to the underground regardless of whether safety,” Woo says. “This customer validathe asset is a vehicle or miner. Our word for distant future, IoT tion has provided a strong baseline in terms it is ‘internizing’.” of businesses understanding the value of IoT Manitoba Hydro is another beacon for ecosystems will investment.” the future of IoT in industry. It has broken A recently published 2015 Canadian Technew ground with Canada’s largest fully become ubiquitous nology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) redundant IEC 61850-compliant protecPredictions report from Deloitte confirms that tion and control system at its Riel Terminal now that the IoT is very much an enterprise/industrial play. It Station near Winnipeg. The network has business case is states that over 60% of the 1 billion global wiremore than 120 intelligent devices from mulless IoT devices will be bought, paid for and tiple vendors communicating over Ethernet proving its worth. used by enterprises. The IoT specific hardware through PACiS technology from Schneider will be worth $10 billion, while the services enElectric. abled by those devices will be worth $70 billion.

These are living breathing examples of This validates that enterprise (which inwhere IoT is making significant inroads becludes manufacturing, yond the cool factor to actuutility and resources) ally delivering measurable is the sector that is rebusiness value. ally driving overall eco“IoT went from hype to nomic activity in the reality in a very short time IoT world, says Anders frame,” says Victor Woo, CaMcKenzie, partner, finadian general manager, nancial advisory pracIoT for Cisco. “(Organizatice for Deloitte Canada tions) like Schneider, IBM, in Waterloo, Ont. “90%+ GE, Rockwell, Panduit, and plus of activity is on the Honeywell are all talking enterprise side. Conabout their work in IoT and sumer is only a very creating ecosystems to acsmall portion of the celerate adoption.” overall market.”

Connecting over IP has Elements that have been a big catalyst in inteManitoba Hydro is another beacon for the future of IoT at the recently completed Riel Terminal Station, shown during construction. Riel improves contributed to this have grating the engineers in the the reliability of the transmission system serving Winnipeg and southern been the proliferation of plant with the managers in Manitoba. low cost sensors comtheir offices, Woo adds. “Peobined with ubiquitous ple are designing industrial connectivity and masgrade networks that can handle the scale, data management and security for 24/7 operations. sive data analytics capabilities, he adds. “It’s all fundamentally Once that infrastructure is in place, it will yield an aggregate effect shifting the way people think about business. It’s been coined as the new Industrial Revolution and the enterprise world is absolutely emin terms of use value.”

Now that the technology infrastructure is maturing, those indus- bracing it. It is just not as readily apparent as the consumer side.” tries embracing IoT are making huge strides when it comes to the business value equation. Others are destined to follow shortly. Over Building the foundations 80% of companies in the manufacturing, oil and gas and utility sec- There are; however, a number of technical and business challenges tors have decided to make investments in IoT over the next three to overcome for the sector before IoT will hit its stride, says Mark years, according to Cisco studies.

Carroll, vice president and chief technology officer of HP Network-

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COV E R S T ORY

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in making multiple IEDs (intelligent electronic deing in Palo Alto, Calif. “It won’t happen overExecutives vices) communicate over the same network have night. The problem for the industrial sector is been rooted in finding the right protocol to make that it grew up with numerous types of autounderstand this this happen. It has settled on the IEC 61850 stanmated protocols.” dard to enable seamless communication.

Companies are choosing to go to different has to happen.

The concept is no different than walking into levels in terms of where they want to invest, a house and your cellphone automatically starts he notes. However there are now a lot of use It’s not a matter using Wi-Fi, Joyce explains. “The 61850 standard cases that deliver an easy return on investis an enabler for substations because you don’t ment, from monitoring to inventory control. of if, but when. have to send all data to a centralized facility to be “Once you get past the common discovprocessed.” ery protocol that enable sensor to sensor, Canadian utilities are leaders in deploying scanner to scanner or access point to sen61850, which is taking interoperability to a new sor interoperability, there is no real technical barrier. The issue then becomes the applications and big data ana- level. Schneider has already found that using standard protocols lytics. There’s a whole new revolution going on in that space that immediately reduces engineering time by 60% or more. “The next domain will be understanding what to do with the data, including will take a bit more time to monetize.”

Rick Joyce, senior director, sales Smart Grid IT for Schneider analytics around predictive maintenance,” Joyce says.

Platform revolution is much more of a B2B than B2C play beElectric in Atlanta, says the utility industry for one has historically had isolated pillars of automation, databases and application cause it’s easier to come up with the metrics, says Stephen Gardinspace that has been owned and driven by the IT side of the busi- er, managing director, digital at Accenture Canada in Toronto. “Inness. “It was not tightly coupled to the OT side. Now there’s a big dustry-centric platforms in specific sectors such as manufacturing, push in convergence via a single user interface and common net- pipeline and utility are much more prevalent in connecting people within the industry to provide different outcomes and be more effiwork model and database.”

For the Manitoba Hydro project and others, Schneider’s efforts cient. For mining and other heavy industry companies for example,

”

The IP value equation The hottest topic at industrial forums these days is accelerating the transition of information driven enterprises to a connected world, says Dan McGrath, industrial automation solutions manager at Panduit in Tinley Park, Ill. Panduit is involved with industrial partners including Cisco and Rockwell Automation to create the Industrial IP Advantage coalition (industrialIP.org).

The goal of the effort is to educate the market on how IoT and Internet Protocol (IP) technologies will transform business value. “Studies show that there is US$14.4 trillion at stake with IoT. Manufacturing accounts for 27% of that at US$3.88 trillion.”

Mobility has been a real game changer in terms of getting connectivity to people with the information to make decisions, avoid waste and improve productivity. “As more devices are connected with IP networks, they are able to bring data into applications much more cost effectively with more manageability and scalability through virtualization and cloudbased approaches.”

One of the key hurdles for IoT today is security, McGrath says. “Coming up with a holistic security approach for what were once islands of data have been a real challenge. There has been much effort in improving IP network security.”

This ties to the second hurdle which is the physical infrastructure. “If you don’t have a structured network built on standards you won’t have sufficient bandwidth to accommodate wireless and the increased demands of automation applications. Networks being used for automation and control must have high availability, resiliency and redundancy built in.”

The first step in the IoT journey for the industrial sector is a secure managed infrastructure with enough bandwidth and structure to support IT and OT needs while ensuring physical security and network segmentation. “If the IT and OT sides can think more holistically around the architecture and technologies including VLANs, firewalls, demilitarized zones, logical and physical segmentation, and design practices, these networks can provide the basic foundation for all sorts of potential value.”

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COVER STORY

markets and introducing new capabilities into the ecosystem. AT&T for example is getting into the platform revolution by providing entire platforms for companies to connect fleets of vehicles.

Dell’s new version of its Dell KACE K1000 Systems Management Appliance offers significant new updates that enhance and simplify how organizations discover, configure, secure and manage computers and devices in multi-platform environments.

This is designed to get actionable information out of non-computing devices sending SNMP data, making KASE for applicable to the IoT world.

IBM recently announced a cloud-based programmers digital toolkit to speed IoT application development. Called the Internet of Things Foundation service, developers can extend Internet-connected anypoint management.

An Accenture Technology Vision 2015 report offers examples of how the interconnection of embedded computing devices within an existing infrastructure The network at the Riel Terminal Station has more than 120 intelligent devices is creating a new digital ecosystem that will reshape from multiple vendors communicating over Ethernet through PACS technology business. Another Accenture survey also found that from Schneider Electric.

35% of respondents are already using partner APIs to integrate data and collaborate with business partwe are seeing tremendous applications in the area of predictive ners, with an additional 38% planning to do so.

Industry and communication-oriented industries are seeing the maintenance and worker health and safety.”

These were certainly prime motivators for Dundee’s IoT efforts value and benefits of IoT rising faster and more prevalently than to develop an infrastructure and technology that could benefit the other sectors, says Chris O’Connor, general of Internet of Things for mining industry as a whole. The Chelopech project is built upon a IBM in Raleigh, N.C. “It could be something as simple as a single Cisco-based backend infrastructure including a fibre optic back- sensor embedded in a pump, road or moving vehicle. The challenge now lies in aggregating the different types of information bone and Wi-Fi access points for primary communications.

“Our strategy was to build the primary layer of ‘plumbing’ so being transmitted at different speeds and languages. That’s a rich that we could build on that,” Gelsomini explains. ‘Leveraging that area for benefits and will be for some period of time. If you can get technology has allowed us to make polar leaps in improving over- that right you can build value-oriented use cases off the back.”

The focus should now be on creating relationships with data all business processes and enabling real-time data capture and and driving use cases that add value, he says. “That’s a significant analytics.”

Dundee’s connected underground world relies on a range of business model shift. Technology is not the inhibitor now. No one sensors that have been re-engineered to fit their needs, whether to maker of a physical thing will be alone in needing to connect to track vehicles, report on environmental conditions or follow worker another thing out there. It’s the processing of it at speed that continues to generate the largest part of the gap when creating that movement underground through embedded tags in hat lamps.

Currently Dundee is in the final stages of testing monitoring vital added value” In the not so distant future, IoT ecosystems will become ubiqsigns of workers. Another potential IoT innovation is applying techuitous now that the business case is proving its worth, McKenzie nologies such as drones to increase safety.

“We’ve developed the technology for this. We just need to de- says. “IoT is going to envelope the earth. The entire planet will be velop proof of concept. We’re now looking at the app world to see sending, transmitting, interpreting and analyzing once things are how we can improve on what we currently have. We have built a fully connected.”

“Executives understand this has to happen,” Woo says. “It’s not great base. Now we just have to build on top of that for the next generation,” Gelsomini says. a matter of if, but when.”

C+

An ecosystem in the making Vendors for their part are also putting efforts into reshaping entire www.connectionsplus.ca

Denise Deveau is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

She can be reached at denisedeveau@bell.net March/April 2015

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TR E N D I NG

The Two Sides of

DCIM The core is data centre monitoring. The other component is in capacity planning.

By Lynn Greiner

here has always been a need to manage data centres.

But most IT people, when they think of those management tasks, think about servers and storage and network devices.

That is not all there is. Beneath the computer equipment, there’s an infrastructure of power and cooling and cables that underpins the entire operation. And it needs managing too.

That’s where data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) comes in.

DCIM, says Willie Bloomstein, director of strategic services and marketing at Commscope, is the name coined around 2009 to describe an emerging level of capability in management software developed to respond to escalating energy costs in data centres. At first, it just looked at power, but users soon realized that power is just the tip of a very expensive iceberg.

Now, he says, DCIM is thought of as a single integrated

T

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platform that helps understand, manage, and optimize the entire physical ecosystem, and with that revelation, the value offered skyrocketed.

“Data centres used to be managed by Excel, BCS data, and the brains of operators,” notes James Nathan, enterprise account manager at Schneider Electric Canada. “That style is no longer effective.”

IT managers have a lot more data to wade through, and no more resources with which to operate, so they need tools.

“DCIM software either provides information, or takes the black hole of information and enables people to see the health of the data centre or its capabilities going forward,” he says.

Analysts at Gartner believe that DCIM will be deployed in 60% of larger North American data centres – those over 900 square metres – by 2017, and say that today the market for DCIM tools is worth over US$1 billion. And the bigger the www.connectionsplus.ca

TRENDI NG

”

When you’re moving to (a DCIM) project, one of the biggest requirements is having representatives from both IT and facilities at the table. You need buy in from both.

data centre, the more important it is to manage it efficiently.

Consider, for example, Facebook. People expect it to always be available, and given its reach, it has a lot of infrastructure to manage.

And, it has big electricity bills.

“Every single day, 728 million people actively use Facebook and expectations around quality of service, availability and reliability are extremely high,” says Terrence Clark, senior vice president, infrastructure management, CA Technologies, the company’s DCIM vendor.

“This places significant demands on the IT infrastructure with little room for error or costly inefficiencies. As a result, it is a top priority for Facebook’s IT and facilities teams to know as much as they can about how their infrastructure is performing from a power and cooling standpoint, where potential problems might lie with energy-related systems and where there are opportunities for associated cost savings.”

But there are two sides to DCIM, says Lara Greden, senior principal of strategy for enterprise management at CA Technologies.

The core is data centre monitoring, getting information in real time.

That’s something that staff would have to have done manually in the past, going from place to place taking readings from various systems and then trying to correlate them. “Now you don’t have to go around with a clipboard,” she says.

The other component is in capacity planning. With a real time view of the state of power, cooling, and other constraints in the data centre, it’s easier to determine where new servers can be placed, and where there’s unused capacity that can be reallocated.

“It’s the IT organization’s job to have a holistic view of the infrastructure so services can be delivered successfully,” adds Mark Balch, Cisco’s director of product management for data centre solutions and software. “DCIM is about making sure that the data centre infrastructure is successfully configured to deliver IT services, and to continue to deliver apps and services.

“You have to be able to close the loop to make sure the environment is operating correctly. It is important to be able to understand the realistic power consumption and the realistic cooling requirements of infrastructure. People can try to be overly conservative by just looking at the nameplates (for power and cooling requirements).

But then what happens is you end up wasting a lot of money. One www.connectionsplus.ca

of the interesting values of DCIM is that it allows you to operate with a greater level of efficiency, but without sacrificing application availability.”

Balch believes that the massive underutilization of data centre resources described in analyst reports is in large part because of overbuilding to avoid risks. In some ways, he notes, that’s how people have always operated in the past.

Now, he says, we’re seeing much more efficient models. The key is in having real-time control over resource consumption, so everything operates within a safe range, but without waste. And that means real-time visibility into consumption. That’s what DCIM software is designed to do.

It’s especially important today. With the consolidation from virtualization, there’s a significant increase in the power consumption per rack. An IT manager may not be aware when a new virtual machine is spun up, impacting the power draw and heat generation from the rack.

Managers can typically only see room level capacity, Nathan points out, yet the room as a whole can be fine even when there’s a crisis at the rack level. And that generates a whole new set of questions that can be addressed with DCIM software.

For example, what’s the effect of adding servers or network components on the power upstream, or on the cooling? Are there enough network ports available in the rack, or is there unused capacity that can be reallocated? When should managers cap out available power by throttling back the amount supplied to a rack, to compensate for excessive consumption elsewhere? When will they lose redundancy?

DCIM suites can help answer all of these questions, and more.

Some DCIM suites integrate with change management process products, allowing them to see the impact of changes immediately.

They can also help evaluate the criticality of a fault, and whether it must be corrected immediately, or can wait until a scheduled maintenance window.

Of course, the other driving factor is the almighty buck. There’s a top-down push to better manage the energy spend in data centres.

Discovering the power usage effectiveness (PUE) – how much of the incoming power is used to drive IT equipment, not infrastructure such as cooling and lighting – provides one popular metric. A PUE of 1.0 is theoretical perfection; realistically, Microsoft touts an average PUE of 1.125 for its newest data centres, and Facebook’s Swedish facility claims an average of 1.05. Less efficient data centres can have

”

March/April 2015

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”

TR E N D I NG

IT managers have a lot more data to wade through, and no more resources with which to operate, so they need tools.

PUEs of 2.0 or more. Its inverse, data centre infrastructure efficiency, measures the percentage of facility power devoted to the IT components.

Adoption of DCIM has accelerated over the past few years (only 36% of attendees at a late 2013 Gartner conference says they would implement DCIM in 2014), led by telecom, financial services, hosting, and co-location businesses, according to Schneider’s Nathan, but he sees companies of all sizes and industries beginning to get their feet wet. His biggest obstacle today is in explaining that DCIM is no longer just the asset management-type product it was a few years ago. Another challenge is in his audience. He says, “When you’re moving to (a DCIM) project, one of the biggest requirements is having representatives from both IT and facilities at the table. You

need buy in from both.”

“DCIM can be disruptive,” he went on. “It provides the ability to pull data from many areas.” And that can lead to turf wars between facilities and IT. Yet, says Bloomstein, the fact that IT and facilities have traditionally been separate also causes issues. Inefficiencies span both areas. DCIM bridges the gap between IT and facilities to manage the physical infrastructure. “It’s not system management,” he says. “It’s not at the system layer. It turns infrastructure data into information that helps make smart decisions.”

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Greden agrees. “DCIM is IT operations and facilities having a common view of the data,” she says. It also lets them provide visibility to their customers.

A hosting company, for example, would be able to let each customer see its individual power consumption through a portal, potentially eliminating questions about billing, and an enterprise could do the same to justify chargebacks.

Bloomstein sees six areas in which DCIM helps the data centre: Basic operations management – it lets staff see what’s happening with power, cooling, and can generate alarms to head off potential outages.

Resource management – it can track power, cooling, space allocation, IT asset usage, network connectivity.

IT assets and connectivity – it replaces the manually updated Excel spreadsheets recording where assets reside and how they’re connected.

Change management – it has the ability to create workflows, helping determine the best location for assets, seeing their impact on the infrastructure, and verifying the outcomes.

Availability management – because DCIM shows dependencies, users can run what-if scenarios to identify potential outages before they occur.

Capacity planning – it can help make planning decisions by identifying opportunities to eliminate inefficiencies and reallocate unused capacity.

Selecting the appropriate product takes care, notes Nathan.

“DCIM is one of those magical pieces of software that starts as a need or desire, then as people see what it can do, the scope expands,” he says. “Red flags come after the scope has been at least loosely defined.” Thus, customers should make sure the vendor’s product can accommodate future needs.

Adds Balch, “You can guarantee that no one product can do everything.”

He recommends that customers make sure they get as much of the functionality they want out of the box, but to also make sure the product has an API so it can be extended if necessary.

This is just the beginning for DCIM. With the proliferation of devices in the Internet of Things, the volume and types of data to be managed increase. And that probably means the addition of sophisticated analytics to the mix.

It’s a far cry from the early days of just monitoring power.

C+

”

Lynn Greiner is a freelance writer based in Newmarket,Ont. She can be reached at lynn@itwriter.com. www.connectionsplus.ca

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New & Noteworthy

1

4

2 3

1. LEVITON

2. BERKTEK

3. HP

4. BELDEN

Leviton has announced the release of the Lumina Gateway and the related wireless Lumina RF energy management product line, including occupancy sensors, motion sensors, door and window contacts, load control modules, light switches, thermostats, in-wall touchscreens and mobile applications. Lumina Gateway and its accompanying product family were designed specifically for small commercial operations such as retail, office, restaurant and storefront spaces.

The system features event logic scheduling, up to 40 connected wireless two-way sensors and load control. www.leviton.com/Gateway

Berk-Tek’s Micro Datacentre Plenum (MDP) fiber optic cable is the smallest diameter fiber cable construction available, according to the company and ideal for data centres as it allows better airflow in the pathways, equipment racks and cabinets. The cable includes GIGAlite-10XB fiber, which exhibits bandwidth of 4900 MHz-kilometer, resulting in extended distances for 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet. It can push 10 Gig out to 600 meters, 100 metres beyond industry standards, and 40 Gig to 300 metres which is more than double the specified 125 metres in the OM4 standards, the firm says. www.berktek.us

HP has announced a new line of open network switches for the data centre it says will provide Web scale organizations and service providers more flexibility and control of their networks to power cloud, mobile, social media and big data workloads. The company will deliver the switches to Web scale data centre customers through partnerships with Accton Technology Corp. and Cumulus Networks. Web scale data centres are a growing market segment with distinct needs for high scalability and network flexibility. www.hp.com

Belden Inc. has introduced a new aisle containment system that eliminates the mixing of hot and cold air in data centre environments to maximize energy efficiency and lower operating costs. By eliminating the mixing of hot exhaust and cold supply air, it allows for an increased differential between the inlet and outlet temperatures of computer room air conditioner (CRAC) units. This significantly improves overall operating efficiency of the cooling system, eliminating the need to oversupply cold air and the potential for hot spots. www.belden.com

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www.connectionsplus.ca

a new hat and onments ncy By ot exhaust s for tween tures tioner antly

stem, rsupply r

New & Noteworthy

5

8

7

6

5. MICROCARE

6. SIKUR

7. PLATINUM TOOLS

8. HARTING

MicroCare Corp. recently launched the Sticklers CleanClicker pushto-clean tools, which the company says delivers the lowest cost-percleaning in an ergonomic cleaning tool. The CleanClicker tools contain more than 750 cleaning “clicks” and can clean both male jumpers and female ports. They are available in three sizes: for the 2.5mm configurations, the 1.2mm configurations, and the MTP/MPO design often used in data centres, central offices and cable TV head ends. MicroCare also recently upgraded its Sticklers cleaning kit line. www.microcare.com

Sikur’s new GranitePhone smartphone, which was released at MWC 2015, was designed specifically for exchanging sensitive and confidential information, without affecting its speed and efficiency. Based on research relating to national defence, governmental and multinational communication, it will ensure privacy on calls, messaging, documents and instant messages, the company says. The device contains all the features of a cutting edge smartphone without risking any information leaks or any loss of business data. It contains high levels of encryption, corporate control and device management. www.sikur.com

Platinum Tools launched a new Tone and Probe Set during the recent 2015 BICSI Winter Conference held in Orlando, Fla. Now shipping with an MSRP of US$29.95, its steady tone, push-to-scan button, and a clear loudspeaker allows someone to quickly trace and identify cable locations on jacks or through walls.

Wire bundles are easily penetrated with the tapered probe tip and the probe volume is controlled with a thumbwheel. The probe features a recessed push-button which activates tone scanning when needed. www.platinumtools.com

Harting’s new Han HMC is the first rectangular connector designed to deliver robust, consistently reliable performance through 10,000 mating cycles or more. Optimized for signal and power, the Han HMC is designed for applications in the medical sector, laboratories, engineering testing facilities where devices and machines are often disconnected and reconnected several times a day. For measurement and testing systems, each test step may entail one mating cycle. The connectors are specially enhanced versions of the Han industrial connectors. www.harting.ca

www.connectionsplus.ca

March/April 2015

Connections+

35

L it e rat u re R eviews

10 Steps to Holistic Data Center Design

Rittal’s IT Liquid Cooling Package 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. www.rittal.ca marketing@rittal.ca 1-800-399-0748

Designing a data center can be a daunting and complicated process. There are many considerations and decisions that impact the cost to build, operate and scale the data center.

To learn more visit: info.belden.com/holistic-design Or call 1.800.BELDEN.1 (800.235.3361)

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O k r

TH E B ACK PAG E

Location, Location

Location

By Dave Webb

have to confess, I never really got FourSquare. Is it still a thing, or is its flavor-of-the-month status past its sell-by date? I never really saw the point in letting all of your contacts know you were having a latte at the Starbucks on the Queensway. To my mind, this contributes nothing to my social life except telling my friends that, hey, this guy drinks waaaaay too much coffee.

Of course, there was the competitive aspect, which I think appealed to the athlete in all of us. Or, more accurately, the politician in all of us. You could become mayor of an unrecognized constituency, and it would probably cost your marginally less in product purchases than actually running for office. I did have a colleague who competed aggressively to be mayor of the YMCA across the street from the office, and that was a positive – it became an engine for better health for him.

There has been a backlash against such locationbased services from the paranoid (read: me) because of the oversharing aspect of it.

Famously, PleaseRobMe.com advertised locationbased tweets, Facebook posts, FourSquare checkins, etc.

At the time, the site’s organizers, Forthehack, claimed it wasn’t providing a burglary advisory site, but just trying to make a point – you’re telling people way too much, and it can be dangerous.

There’s still an element of paranoia associated with location-based services, but the generation raised on Facebook and FourSquare is becoming inured to privacy concerns. It’s simply the cost of having online services that have become indispensible, and if the benefit to socmed companies is to deliver targeted advertising to people who will largely ignore it, so be it.

And, in fact, I still believe that in a social media context, we’re sharing way too much information, and that’s dangerous.

But that’s in a social media context. In the context of an enterprise network, the benefits far outweigh the paranoid risks of location-based services.

I recently wrote a piece for Canadian Healthcare Technology magazine on home care workers using mobile technology.

I

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March/April 2015

Pretty much every mobile device on the market these days is location-aware. Those BlackBerrys home care workers use that transmit location data to a backend system ensure workers can check in at their call so they can bill accurately; they allow supervisory staff to reschedule on the fly if a home worker doesn’t arrive; they offer a personal safety net to home care workers who are on the road all day, every day, and working out of the homes of patients who aren’t always predictable; they allow co-ordination staff to optimize routes and schedules.

Weigh the pros and the cons of activating locationaware technology for mobile workers. On the plus side, there’s accuracy, safety, optimization, analytics, and more. The downside: Your boss knows how much time you spend at Starbucks.

Mobile staff have to understand the trade-off between privacy and effectiveness. The paranoid – like me – have to be convinced of the efficacy of a location-based services regimen, that it actually makes it easier for them to do their jobs.

Perhaps there’s a halfway to be met at. If mobile staff are to be diligent about the use of location-based services, management has to agree that location monitoring will only be used in service of those benefits – accuracy, safety, optimization, and the like – and not for privacy-intrusive purposes. It has to be agreed up front and defined as a policy that is meticulously adhered to by both sides. For example, many mobile workers carry their devices 24/7; does management have the right to monitor where users are when they’re not on the clock?

My paranoia is receding somewhat. I don’t reflexively gag when I install an app on my phone that wants access to my location (or, for that matter, my contact list or browsing history). Perhaps I’m becoming more like that generation weaned on Facebook, inured to privacy concerns.

Perhaps when that generation dominates the workforce, this won’t even be an issue. But it should, and there has to be a balance between utility and invasion of privacy.

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

He can be reached at dave@dweebmedia.ca. www.connectionsplus.ca

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Our focus is taking HD to the extremes

Capturing of details in extreme environments 24/7 Punishing winds, relentless rain, huge temperature fluctuations, clouds of dust or high-impacts. No matter how tough conditions get, with MIC IP 7000 HD cameras your surveillance operation always goes on.

Learn more at www.boschsecurity.com/hdsecurity