Uptime Magazine 1213

#3 DEC 2013

Revolution Edition

solution selling revolution Mr. Ian wood revolution throughout time UP MAGAZINE

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January uptimeICT & Microsoft — SCCM, Lync & HyperV2012v2

FUTURE UPTIME GROUP EVENTS

February SmartTime & Netgear — Wireless Lan Neoria & Symantec — Roundtable Neoria & Cisco — EBC visit

March Neoria & Cisco — Roundtable Uptime Group — Storage Expo

Publisher

Chief Editor Layout

Authors

Editor

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Uptime Group nv Veldkant 35D 2550 Kontich Tel. + 32 (0)3 451 23 82 marketing@uptimegroup.be

Ann Van den Sande

Lieze Stevens & Karlo Stirmer hallo@noticed.be

Rita Verreydt Ian Wood Hugues De Pra Michiel von der Crone Erlend Schenkels Ann Van den Sande

Annelies Hendrickx

Cisco (www.cisco.com) Symantec (www.symantec.com) NetApp (www.netapp.com) Schneider Electric (www.schneider-electric.com)

Dear readers, What’s another year! Christmas and New Year are knocking on our doors already. Time for the fourth edition of our UP magazine.

I got inspired by the challenges that are awaiting us in 2014. What will be revolutionary and who will hit the jackpot? We believe in our strategic partnerships, our customers, & our teams and hope you’ll enjoy their two cents on our theme 2014 Revolution.

We open our show with an inspiring article of our sales team on Solution Selling. On our search for an eloquent testimony on new challenges in the world of storage, the natural movement of our eye fell on… Hugues De Pra. He explains us …

Traditionally, we are also giving our partners the chance to raise their voices on 2014. In our Spotlight on Partners quire, please welcome Mr. Ian Wood, NBU specialist @ Symantec. He reveals …

As you all know, we are one group providing you with ICT at your comfort. In order to do this, we have multiple teams of specialists focusing on a wide range of technologies. In every edition of our UP, we put the spotlight on different teams via our Voice from the Group feature. This time we are highlighting e-Square, “where storage meets quality” and Neoria, “our team shapes around your business. We also look over the fence of ICT in our Off the beaten Path, where two men are telling you the stories behind their career (r)evolution.

Last but not least, we are taking a minute to look at revolution throughout time. And another minute to put our outdoor events under the loop.

And another minute to…? Fasten your seat belt, sit back and enjoy your reading.

Ann Van den Sande Chief Editor UP MAGAZINE

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 001 003 005 006 008 012 014

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Events Calendar & Colophon Editorial Welcome: Rita Verreydt. CEO Uptime Group Cover Story: Solution Selling Revolution Spotlight on Partners: Commvault What’s been Up? Uptime Group intervieuws: Mr. Hugues De Pra. Cisco

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Revolution throughout time Spotlight on Partners: Schneider Electric Spotlight on Partners: Mr. Ian Wood. Symantec Off the Beaten Path: Career Revolution Spotlight on Partners: NetApp Reference case EMC² See You Next Time

CEO’s corner

RITA VERREYDT. CEO UPTIME GROUP

Dear all, Time flies when you’re having fun and before you realize it, you’re heading towards the yearly Christmas dinner and the next happy New Year party.

Once again, we were able to issue a sparkling UP Magazine for you, with interesting trends and exciting news from the fast moving world of ICT. Despite of the economic recession, Uptime Group can look back on a successful 2013. We did well as a team. We are still growing, a lot of new employees have joined the force and regular as well as new clients are approaching us. We are truly blessed.

The path towards becoming a hybrid cloud system integrator demands our full focus in order to comply with the increasing needs of our clients. Our daily calendar starts with the continuous expansion of our datacenter, extra storage and back-up capacity.

Being actively engaged in the world of ICT means changing continuously, being alert to new trends and testing out new products & software thoroughly. In short, turning revolution into evolution. This edition reviews this (r)evolution extensively.

The fascinating world of ICT also demands constant adjustment of the human brain as well as the skills to be successful in our sector. Some people decide to step out, others are attracted to this continuous change of landscape.

Clients have new needs and demands. This creates huge opportunities our sales force. They are ready to assist our clients in finding their answers to all these new challenges.

I would like to thank everybody for putting us where we stand today. But as always, we keep in mind that last mile is the longest. We will take care of you to the very end of 2013 and are already looking forward to working together in 2014. A new year full of exciting challenges and breakthroughs for sure!

I wish you and your families at home a warm Christmas and a happy New Year, full of joy and happiness. May all your professional as well as your personal wishes come true.

Rita UP MAGAZINE

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Cover Story THE SOLUTION SELLING REVOLUTION

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Nowadays, almost all sales organizations are more and more confronted with the shopping customer. And of course, we are all well aware that a good relationship with the customer is crucial. However, practice is showing that in difficult economic times, customer loyalty changes can change quicker. The majority of ICT departments are under tremendous pressure to keep their business running with increasingly smaller budgets. As a result, the customer has a different approach to the market: he starts comparing visions and proposals. The key is to take advantage of this situation to use products and services as well as the flexibility to collaborate with a wide range of vendors.

ICT departments sometimes find it difficult to indicate what their company actually expects from ICT. Tenders are often prepared with lists and lists of features, performance requirements, capacity, etc.

The art of successful selling does not only include pricing and features. It lies in bringing a vision and matching the needs of their organization with your offer. By not focusing only on technology but also on the business of the customer, you bring beautiful new credentials.

A few months ago, we received a tender to chew on. The competing vendor and integrator had a 10 year relationship with this customer. They also helped out the customer repeatedly. The customer was satisfied with his integrator and their consultants. Technically, all was good. A happy customer?

Despite the good relationship with both vendor and integrator, the company management asked their IT department to shop around, so that other parties came in the loop too.

The core of our success was being able to shift the client discussion to the consciousness of their particular business needs. In a first phase, the customer was surprised that we asked them to describe their business needs and topics such as SLA’s on SAP, VMware, file servers, etc. What is critical?

What data is extremely important? Where do you get your revenue and profit from? What is needed to run manufacturing and administrative services smoothly? In short, what ICT services should we provide you so that you cannot only generate profit for the organization, but also reduce the risk of possible business impact to an absolute minimum?

applications had to stay in the air 24/7, manual interventions suddenly became a breaking point, not one minute of data could be lost, etc.

The new look we created on the business needs, turned into reliable customer information, which had never been mapped before. It put us, integrator as well as vendor, in a new position.

We were in control and we brought both ICT services and business closer to each other.

Thinking about business processes of a prospect makes us win more and more deals. We have learnt to expand the discussion with the client to the applications and the business needs of their applications. Everything has its price, of course, but do you good enough or what you really need?

EVERYTHING HAS ITS PRICE, OF COURSE Sometimes other departments have budgets to handle specific issues. Talking to the CFO helps transferring these budgets. In this particular situation for instance, the legal department had budget foreseen for archiving. A part of this budget was transferred to ICT and we hit two birds with one stone. Consolidation resulted in fewer point solutions. Result: no time loss and better IT control.

By giving a lot of attention to the company and its challenges, the customer began to talk more and more about taking the entire Uptime Group as their system integrator. Management teams met, references were visited. Because we were able to shift the main discussion, our entire group is now significant to this company. And this significance is growing every day throughout our consultants on site.

The Uptime Group Sales Team

It seemed very difficult to them to pinpoint their real business needs and it was clear that they had never had the chance before to examine this thoroughly. What in case of disaster?

What in case of manual error? What impact does the ICT failure have on the processes within the organization? Fact is: the larger the organization, the more difficult it is to have an overview and to be informed on all inquiries.

Because we confronted the customer and have him talk to the C-levels & application owners, we made a huge step forward together.

By daring to shift the discussion, we were taken seriously. They communicated more easily about input from both business and ICT. Downtime was not allowed anymore, UP MAGAZINE

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Spotlight on Partners

COMMVAULT. TO THE EDGE AND BACK

There is no escaping the changing face of modern business. The traditional picture of a company located in an easy-to-travel to building where employees physically work alongside each other, in a fixed and networked computing environment, no longer rings true.

Fifteen years ago, the typical mobile worker was probably a CIO with a laptop, heavily supported by IT and restricted to basic offline computing operations. Widespread support for remote workers was not available and, even if it had been, the technology that would have supported them outside the office was limited.

However the new breed of mobile workers is now transforming the modern working environment. Armed with technologies that not only bring flexibility into their working day and improve productivity levels overall, they can now experience an enhanced work/life balance by being able to work anytime and anywhere.

Any early technological limitations on the emerging mobile worker have now largely been eliminated as broadband data speeds and wireless mobile connections have become widely available. Equally the range of mobile devices has expanded well beyond mobile phones and laptops to include PDAs, notebooks and now tablets.

Mobile initiatives are also being proactively put in place by many organisations and telecommuting, virtual workplaces, mobile and wireless computing are now common practice, for all employees at all levels.

It was therefore no surprise to learn that IDC predicted in its report, Worldwide Mobile Worker Population, 2011-2015, that one-third of the global workforce would be mobile in just three years.

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Facilitating and managing the mobile workforce is no mean feat.

The rise of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement not only confirms that mobile employees expect to use the latest lightweight mobile devices to carry out both standard and complex computing activities but that they also expect interactions with enterprise applications to replicate their experiences in the consumer world. Their growing familiarity with search engines and the ease with which business applications can be downloaded onto any mobile device has only raised expectations that they should be able to share, search and restore data instantly - without requiring IT assistance or third-party services.

WORK/LIFE BALANCE

BY BEING ABLE TO WORK ANYTIME AND ANYWHERE. The challenge for the IT Department therefore lies in its ability to protect the increasing amounts of data that is created by users outside of the enterprise whilst still meeting the demand for a mobile lifestyle. In a clear reversal of roles, instead of stipulating what systems and processes should be used by employees,

IT professionals now need to provide services that deliver real value to the user. For IT to regain and retain control of sensitive corporate data and safeguard assets from loss, destruction or damage, it has to embrace its role in enabling the productive, collaborative and secure self-service mobile computing environment that users now expect.

It has to provide users with a sophisticated alternative to ad-hoc and un-regulated data storage on USBs or the subscription based consumer cloud solutions chosen by employees to address short term needs. It also needs to provide a centrally managed solution that makes it easier to store and retrieve information ‘on the go’ whilst simplifying compliance and eDiscovery for everyone across the organisation.

PROFESSIONALS NOW NEED TO PROVIDE SERVICES THAT DELIVER REAL VALUE According to IDG Research Services, “76% of organizations say secure access to company data from mobile devices is critical1 “which suggests that IT professionals need to address some fundamental issues if they want to protect data at the edge of the organization.

For users to be able to access old documents indefinitely or all of their most recent files instantly, from all of their devices and regardless of the computer they were created on, automated file and folder synchronisation is essential. The aim here is to make data fluid, not isolated, so that it can be shared across laptops and desktops but more importantly be accessed from smartphones and tablets; particularly as the trend to use the most portable, user friendly device is set to continue. Also, by supporting different environments and operating systems, automated and continuous synchronisation (which should be differentiated from traditional backup that is scheduled to take place at given intervals) should enable users to immediately access the right document, even if they have inadvertently deleted it on one device, when they need it.

The ability to search and retrieve data, immediately and without waiting for IT support, is also a must-have capability for employees who are increasingly expected to be able to refer to either historical data or the latest figures at a moment’s notice. Given that 80% of organisations report that IT spends a lot of time retrieving files for people1, it’s also important that the IT department finds a new way to provide access to data in order to reduce pressure on the helpdesk and focus on strategic, long term projects. Self-service access to protected files and emails via a mobile app on smartphones and tablets, or via a web browser and natively within Windows Explorer would benefit an increasingly IT literate workforce and would immediately provide an extremely effective method of access to a secure, personal ‘data cloud’ that is then managed centrally. It could also therefore eliminate the use of high-risk consumer file sharing tools (which can be prone to human error) and ad-hoc cloud backup services (which are outside the IT department’s awareness and control and virtually impossible to restore). However it’s worth remembering that users are only likely to use a corporate self-service application if they are confident that ‘standard’ search engine functionality and ease of use is guaranteed. Intuitive, role-based search capabilities across all enterprise data are also needed in order to simplify often complex eDiscovery and compliance requirements.

Transparent protection for business critical data on mobile devices that can be easily lost or stolen or unintentionally damaged by the user is also essential. In order to guarantee fast restore times, the IT department needs to be able to backup thousands of devices in an instant, ensuring that it has the latest versions of every user’s files at any given time. The best way to achieve this is by utilising flexible policy definition and opportunistic scheduling to provide a wide variety of customisable backup options to suit each user, and using inbuilt intelligence to only run a backup if a file has changed, for example. It’s this heightened level of centrally-defined yet automated processes that will improve mobile data protection without any involvement from the user. Bandwidth throttling to optimise backup efficiency will also help to protect distributed data with existing network resources. This should also help to ensure that there are no disruptions during backup process where connectivity is poor which could result in an inability to retrieve files at a later date.

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About the Author: Whichever way you look at it, what is increasingly clear is that creating a content-indexed central repository of distributed files and documents that is stored and maintained on a dedicated corporate server is a key factor in making synchronised, self-service access and data protection at the edge work. The ability to collect, protect, access and retrieve data across disparate locations, across the organisation, on multiple devices to a constantly fluctuating number of users means that IT professionals will increasingly need to rely on data management tools to automate the entire process.

It’s also then perhaps obvious that in order for IT to reduce the management costs associated with deploying, setting up and managing distributed yet scalable data protection, it must be able to create policies centrally and then apply them quickly to different user groups. It must also offer end-user initiated installation or automate silent deployment across thousands of devices if all data is to be protected across the organisation.

The mobile workforce is undoubtedly calling for far more than the usual ‘insurance policy’ that traditional backup offered, combined with the often costly levels of storage that was needed for the vast amounts of data that never again see the light of day. If they aren’t already, most corporates will soon be relying on the IT department to transform essential data management tasks into something of real value. This, in turn, will empower users to turn raw data into invaluable information that can enable effective decision making at the edge of the enterprise. That’s something that every CIO should be comfortable investing in.

Source: IDG Research Services. Market Pulse Research: Impact of Data Silos and the Demand for Anytime, Anywhere Information Access.

Published: February 2013.

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MICHIEL VON DER CRONE. FIELD ADVISORY SERVICES TEAM DIRECTOR Michiel started his career in 1992 as a Systems Engineer with a Belgian storage solution distributor in Legato products. Later he became a pre-sales expert for EMC software. He joined CommVault in 2007, in the EMEA North team to provide Pre-Sales support in Belgium, in 2009 he was promoted to the EMEA Product Specialist role and his focus on archiving and search has been instrumental in the EMEA wide success of this product initiative. Taking on the role of Product Director in 2010, he was responsible for linking up the capabilities and knowledge of the EMEA product specialist and field sales teams with the corporate teams, primarily the product management and SME teams to provide the latest product information and sales initiatives to the field.

In 2012, Michiel became responsible for the FAST (Field Advisory Services Team), including all product specialist, to help the company be even more successful in larger opportunities. The FASTeam has, in addition to the EMEA product management role, an advisory role to help out the entire EMEA pre-sales field in complex and challenging environments.

Boost productivity.

Single-handedly.

Introducing secure access to protected data from any device CommVault® Edge™—part of the Simpana® software single platform—is the enterprise-class solution to protect all laptop and desktop data for thousands of employees, while giving them secure access.

Give users unprecedented anytime, anywhere access to all Simpana-protected data with the CommVault Edge mobile app. With the Sync feature, files and folders can be synced across all PCs for immediate access on any device, giving people what they need, when they need it—without IT assistance.

With intuitive enterprise-wide search, CommVault Edge also solves eDiscovery challenges for Legal and Compliance teams, minimizing risk.

To learn more about CommVault Edge, visit commvault.com/edge

backup & recovery > replication > analytics > archive > search & ediscovery www.commvault.com n 2 Crescent Place n Oceanport, NJ 07757 Regional Offices: Europe n Middle East & Africa n Asia-Pacific n Latin America & Caribbean n Canada n India n Oceania ©1999-2013 CommVault Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. CommVault, the “CV” logo, CommVault Edge, and Simpana are trademarks or registered trademarks of CommVault Systems, Inc. All other third party brands, products, service names, trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of and used to identify the products or services of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice.

What’s been Up?

DATACENTER IN A BOX. HESTIA SITE VISIT. EMC FORUM. SALES TRAINING.

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Uptime Group interviews:

MR. HUGUES DE PRA. CISCO

CISCO, RISING STAR OF THE DATA CENTRE Cisco has a long history in data centres with its routing, switching and security equipment.

The company added the x86 blade and rack servers to its portfolio four years ago with the Unified Computing System. Thanks to intensive collaboration with prominent storage and virtualization specialists, Cisco is now also commercializing converged systems, such as VSPEX with EMC and FlexPod with NetApp, and all-in-one-box data centres such as Vblock with EMC & VMware. Cisco also recently completed a few strategic acquisitions of companies to gain an even stronger foothold in the data centre market: Whiptail, the flash-based storage array manufacturer, to improve application performance in intense workloads such as VDI; and Sourcefire to help improve virtualized data centre security. Together with its recently announced application centric infrastructure (ACI), Cisco is now a true data centre trendsetter. We asked Hugues De Pra, Head of Architecture, Data Centre & Virtualization at Cisco Belux, for further explanation.

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Hugues, Cisco provided a quick taster of the application-centric infrastructure at Cisco Live! in Orlando, and it was finally launched in November during an impressive conference in New York.

What's going to change exactly?

We have evolved into an ‘application economy’: 83% of organizations now use more than 150 applications. We are in fact seeing the emergence of a “Third Platform” for the IT industry. If the mainframe was the first platform, and the PC with client-server model was the second, we are now facing an era in which millions of new apps and services will be built on this emerging technology. These apps and services will be built using an innovative mix of cloud, mobile devices, mobile apps, social technologies, big data/analytics, and more. For each app or application, you have to configure and interconnect several different infrastructure components: get a virtual server up and running, assign it to a switch that needs to know how to route data packets, define an appliance in the storage network for the backup, and so on. These are sequential steps that are not always performed by one or more member(s) of the IT operations team. This complete provisioning process can often take more than a month; even just the updates can take equally long for many companies. And the larger the IT infrastructure, the more complex its management. Successful trends like cloud computing require a modular but above-all simplified approach for application and data centre management. The application-centric infrastructure will allow our customers to program the entire data centre using policies; not just the network, our strength, but also servers, storage and virtualization.

WE ARE SEEING AN EVOLUTION IN NETWORK DEPLOYMENT AND CONFIGURATION How does it work exactly?

We are seeing an evolution in network deployment and configuration. The first network model consisted of separate components that were configured one by one. In the second model – software-defined networking (SDN) – we virtualized the network and made it programmable via a central controller. This simplified configuration and manageability. Now we have created a new network layer in both physical and virtual environments that connects all data centre systems with each other and lets them speak the same language or protocol. Our ACI data centre and cloud switches feature application awareness so the network infrastructure is flexible and agile for dynamic response to application needs

and virtual machine workload mobility. It’s hardware that is designed to equally provision both physical and virtual resources in data centres and cloud networks no matter what hardware or hypervisor those resources are based on. There is so much intelligence that applications can be deployed instantly and consistently. All data centre systems required by a specific application are automatically interconnected with the right services to guarantee an optimized level of performance, security and availability.

The application displays what it needs, and ACI does the rest?

With ACI we can reduce the average deployment of applications from one month to a few minutes. You can create and install your data centre stack automatically. ACI’s strength therefore lies in the ecosystem: all major IT vendors are ready for ACI. The network really is the heart of the data centre. Application architects can build better catalogues and launch applications much faster, thus offering end users new features to perform their duties more quickly. Their needs are met much sooner, because the work is already deployed. It allows businesses to accelerate their processes and the commercialization of new products, enabling them to regain a competitive advantage. ACI is a new paradigm aimed entirely at serving the business.

So can we say the complexity is gone?

A data centre might be seen a tangle of wires and flashing lights in a cold environment. Every organization wants to reduce this complexity. It explains the current great success of converged systems. Network, storage, servers and virtualization are perfectly integrated: plug-and-play. Uptime is an important FlexPod partner for us...

Now that you mention it, the FlexPod infrastructure is celebrating its third anniversary. Why don’t you briefly explain its history and look ahead to the future for us?

FlexPod is a fantastic story. The number of installations has doubled every year, and we now have three thousand customers worldwide. After just three years NetApp and Cisco have become leaders in integrated systems, according to IDC. Furthermore, improvements are constantly being added: FlexPod now has flash storage for transferring data even faster, and can also activate up to 10,000 virtual servers.

Last month we expanded the system with technology that guarantees application availability and simplifies the management of cloud computing.

Why are converged systems so successful?

Less hardware and less maintenance mean less support, fewer contracts and lower costs. With a unified support approach between Cisco and NetApp, there is no more UP MAGAZINE

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finger-pointing, and you don’t need as many administrators. Converged data centre server systems have storage, networking, virtualization and sometimes other systems all under the same roof. It enables operators to manage all the different components as a whole. For customers, converged systems like FlexPod are the easiest way to reduce the complexity I just mentioned. We have all spent several years cabling the data centre and linking systems. With these pre-configured systems, there is no risk of error. They are almost all plug-and-play. Our customers say that the cost of configuration and cabling has dropped by 80%, and system management costs have fallen by 59%. IT organizations can reduce their expenses by as much as 50% and management overheads by 60%. These staggering figures are all reasons why the converged infrastructure market is growing so rapidly. According to IDC, 12.8% of expenditure on storage, servers and networking will be spent on converged systems by 2016. That might not seem very much, but last year it was only 3.9%.

Can all Uptime customers benefit from a FlexPod? We have large organizations and SMEs amongst our 3000 FlexPod clients, and everyone wants to be free of managing different silos. FlexPod has a wide range of products for any type of organization. It is particularly suitable for large data centres that need high availability and scalable storage, but also for SMEs who want to reduce operating costs, quickly get started with the cloud, and simplify data centre management. With FlexPod Express, there’s now also a converged system for smaller organizations up to 500 users. Uptime already has a track record with this solution: at Subaru for supporting their SAP environment, but also at the

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water company Pidpa, and more recently the public health institute WIV-ISP. It’s clear that the data centre is the future for us. With ACI, FlexPod, Vblock, UCS and our routers and switches, we’re definitely ready for it!

With the acquisition of Sourcefire, you’re also working on data centre security. How important is this strategic acquisition?

Security is now a boardroom issue. Breaches mean lost IP, compromised customer information, lack of confidence and valuation impact. In tomorrow’s world of the Internet of Everything, the number and type of attack vectors will continue to increase, creating a daunting challenge for companies and those responsible to defend the infrastructure. The single network perimeter has been replaced by a constantly morphing set of users, locations, access methods and devices, creating the dual challenge of defending a dynamic perimeter and creating a near infinite number of points of vulnerability. With the acquisition of Sourcefire, we are able to shift our focus from perimeter security to threat-centric security, meaning that we will put a heavier focus on the threats themselves versus policy or controls. Given the fast-changing threat landscape, an organization’s approach to reducing the time from breach to recovery needs to be integrated, pervasive and continuous, as well as open. Through our threat-centric model, we will provide broad coverage across all potential attack vectors, rapidly adjust to and learn from new attack methods, and implement that intelligence back into the infrastructure after each attack. Deploying this new security model within the virtualized data centre and DMZ is critical for our customers.

WE’RE DEFINITELY READY FOR IT!

REVOLUTION THROUGHOUT TIME Einstein introduces his general relativity theory.

Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin.

Louis RĂŠard introduces the bikini.

Yuri Gagarin is the first man in space.

Mikhail Gorbachev initiates his new policy of perestroika.

Barack Obama becomes the first American president with African roots.

09/1905 10/1917

Spy Mata Hari is executed.

03/1930

Gandhi starts the 400 km Salt March.

06/1955

Che Guevara meets Fidel and Raul Castro.

07/1977

Elvis Presley dies in Graceland.

02/1994

Nelson Mandela is elected as president of South Africa.

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Spotlight on Partners

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC. STRUXUREWARE

Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, today introduced StruxureWare for Data Centers v2.0, an integrated suite of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software engineered to manage data centers across multiple domains, providing businesses with actionable intelligence for an ideal balance of high availability and peak efficiency throughout the entire data center lifecycle. Designed to integrate data center performance with business goals and provide new levels of insight to c-suite executives, updates to the solution include: the addition of specialized applications for enhanced monitoring and management support for facility managers, additional power capping capabilities for further control of power consumption at the server level for improved IT management, and a new StruxureWare Portal for increased visibility into business and data center key performance indicators (KPIs) with customizable views across the various company stakeholders.

“Data center environments traditionally rely on siloed IT and facility management tools that alienated the executive team and made it difficult to optimize physical infrastructure while balancing efficiency and financial demands,” said Soeren Brogaard Jensen, Vice President, Solution Software, Schneider Electric. “With

ALLOWING BUSINESSES TO MAKE THE RIGHT DECISION BASED ON SHARED DATA 18

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StruxureWare for Data Centers v2.0, Schneider Electric is providing a holistic approach to managing the data center by integrating IT, facilities and now the executive suite through the use of DCIM, allowing businesses to make the right decisions based on shared data – helping them make the most of their energy.”

Bridging the gap between IT, facilities and the c-suite executive, StruxureWare for Data Centers v2.0 is an open, modular, fully scalable and integrated DCIM solution that breaks down the typically siloed information that often prevents a holistic and intelligent view of the mechanical, electrical and IT aspects of center operation.

According to a recent Gartner Market Trends report, the challenge is for companies to find funding for (DCIM) for an existing data center. The reasons revolve around tight budgets and budget ownership. The facilities team has its budget, and so does the IT department. Both would benefit from DCIM, but neither has prebudgeted for it, and therefore neither wants to take money away from another project to pay for it. Therefore, the impetus often has to come from the executive level to get this done.* Application programming interfaces (APIs) and EcoStruxure™ web services allow for data-sharing between applications and enhance data accuracy and availability. These components seamlessly integrate with third-party applications, other StruxureWare software suites and EcoStruxure physical infrastructure components, enabling businesses to manage their data centers across multiple domains. Asset alignment functionality that complies with regulatory requirements delivers an audit system for monitoring and management and provides input into the financial management of the business. Service assurance capabilities help data center managers easily resolve issues related to system availability through cross-department integration and automated impact analysis.

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC STRUXUREWARE ENHANCEMENT ENABLES HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT OF DATA CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE ACROSS BUSINESS SEGMENTS ™

The StruxureWare for Data Centers suite consists of: Resource Advisor

for tracking and managing enterprise energy and carbon costs.

Data Center Operation

for managing data center assets, and operational and capital costs; incorporates multi-tenant, space and cage management as well as integrated tenant billing.

Data Center Expert

for monitoring and controlling data center power, cooling and security.

Power Monitoring Expert for advanced power monitoring, analysis and power quality.

Cooling Monitoring Expert

for advanced cooling monitoring and automation.

The StruxureWare for Data Centers suite has been extended with several applications aimed at providing facility managers with indepth support through building management systems, utility, power and power distribution monitoring and management, reinforcing the balance between IT and facilities, and enabling the business to make informed decisions based on shared data.

StruxureWare for Data Centers has also been strengthened on the IT side by enabling Data Center Operators to further control power consumption at the server level through power capping capabilities provided through Intel DCM technology – resulting in reduced OpEx, optimized utilization of existing servers and delayed equipment investment.

An end-to-end DCIM software suite, StruxureWare for Data Centers v2.0 enables IT and facility managers to monitor, operate, analyze and optimize the power, cooling, security and energy usage from building through IT systems – from floor, to cage, to rack, to server and virtual machine. The addition of StruxureWare Portal aggregates information from all applications across the StruxureWare framework for a customizable and easily-sharable single-screen view of a wide range of information, offering increased visibility into business and data center KPIs. The StruxureWare Portal facilitates communication with external resources, can easily be adapted to corporate branding guidelines and can be accessed via laptops, tablets and smartphones.

StruxureWare for Data Centers serves as one facet of Schneider Electric’s global StruxureWare initiative. The complete line of StruxureWare solutions are designed to provide an integrated software platform intended to simplify energy management and optimize energy usage in all types of buildings, data centers and industrial facilities.

Currently available through Schneider Electric or its partners, all new offerings and updates within the StruxureWare for Data Centers suite continue to be compatible with existing components of the InfraStruxure Management Software portfolio.

For more information on Schneider Electric’s complete line of DCIM solutions, visit www.apc.com/struxureware.

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How can I cut data centre costs by 15%?

By choosing InfraStruxure and its triple promise of 24/7/365 availability, fast deployment, and energy efficiency Introducing Next Generation InfraStruxure

Whether your company just acquired another company or is planning ‘follow the moon’ virtualization to streamline energy use, you’re most likely facing pressing demands on your company’s IT infrastructure. Your legacy data centre infrastructure may not be able to handle these business changes.

That’s where Schneider Electric™ steps in with its proven high-performance, scalable data centre infrastructure. Only InfraStruxure™ ensures that your data centre can adapt effectively, efficiently, and quickly to business changes, making you the company hero! What’s more, it gives you the capabilities you need to monitor and manage your data centre proactively and easily to ensure healthy operations at all times.

InfraStruxure data centres mean business!

We say that InfraStruxure data centres mean business. But what does that mean to you? The answer is simple. A data centre means business when it is always available 24/7/365 and performs at the highest level at all times, is able to adapt at breakneck speed, lets you add capacity without waiting on logistical delays (e.g., work orders), continues to achieve greater and greater energy efficiency — from planning through operations —, and is able to grow with the business itself. In addition, open architecture capabilities deliver any-IT vendor compatibility, and our comprehensive life-cycle services help InfraStruxure data centres retain business value at all times.

InfraStruxure data centres also enable you to: 1) Accommodate high densities easily.

2) Add cooling quickly and easily.

3) Monitor threats proactively.

4) Upgrade instead of overhaul.

5) Manage in a ‘single-pane’ view.

6) Ensure your business drives your IT. 7) Manage new equipment in seconds.

8) Move at business speed.

The triple promise of InfraStruxure deployment

InfraStruxure fulfills our triple promise of superior quality, which ensures highest availability; speed, which ensures easy and quick alignment of IT to business needs; and cost savings based on energy efficiency. What better way to ‘mean business’?

Business-wise, Future-driven™.

Data Centre Physical Infrastructure: Optimizing Business Value

> Executive summary

Contents

APC by Schneider Electric™ is the pioneer of modular data centre infrastructure and innovative cooling technology. Its products and solutions, including InfraStruxure, are an integral part of the Schneider Electric IT portfolio.

Be the company hero!

Learn how to optimize your business value with data centre physical infrastructure… Download White Paper #117!

Visit www.SEreply.com Key Code 42068p

©2013 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, InfraStruxure, and Business-wise, Future-driven are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. • www.schneider-electric.com • 998-3861_GMA-UK

Spotlight on Partners

MR. IAN WOOD. SYMANTEC

Symantec: a new look on data protection Data growth, the need for instant IT and the growing complexity of IT are today’s top challenges in the field of information management. Ian Wood explains the success of Symantec’s appliances for backup and recovery. It’s all about the simplicity of an integrated and platform independent solution.

The challenges of information management have reached a completely new level. Until recently, data growth was most of all something that made storage vendors happy. Today, we realize that we simply can’t continue storing all data.

We are facing a true data explosion, with an enormous impact on storage, backup and information management as a whole. The numbers speak for themselves. IDC’s latest estimate says that in 2010 there was 1.2 zettabytes of digital data (created and replicated) in the world, growing to 7.9 zettabytes by 2015 - or seven times the volume that was around only five years earlier. “Everybody needs to realize that the information volume doubles every two years”, says Ian Wood, Director of Information Management Product Marketing EMEA at Symantec. “Every business - big or small - needs to take that growth rate into account.”

of instant IT.” The cloud is the driving force behind this trend.

Businesses go to the cloud, where they purchase IT solutions that work instantly - and at low cost. The impact on the organization’s IT department is enormous. “The organization’s employees expect the same type of instant IT delivered by the IT department. Needless to say the IT department needs to adjust its information management policy.” The disruptive trends that we see in IT today, show how we evolve from a system centric to an information centric approach of IT. Ian Wood: “The direct link between data and systems is disappearing. Data is everywhere: on the company’s infrastructure, but also in the cloud, on social media, and so on.”

The rapidly expanding volume of data a businesses need to manage, isn’t the only challenge concerning information management. “It’s not just a matter of volume”, explains Ian Wood.

“The whole IT landscape is changing. We are living in the age

Organizations begin to realize they need to adjust their information management and information protection policies to these new circumstances. “Due to the sheer volume of data and the fact that the data is scattered over different

New rules

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environments, a one-size-fits-all solution for backup and recovery does no longer apply. There is just too much data to stick to the old rules. Today, information management is knowing what data you need to store, what data to delete, what to archive for compliance reasons and what to backup.” In a world that is becoming increasingly dependent from data, backup and recovery gain importance. “Those are the bare basics, especially when we see that businesses use their backup and recovery solution as the core element for a disaster recovery policy.”

And there is more. The growing appetite for virtualization causes a whole new challenge in terms of data protection.

“Backup and recovery of a virtual environment is a completely different ball game, compared to the physical world”, Ian Wood continues. “There is a simple reason: virtual machines are breeding like rabbits.” In the physical world, the investment in a new server was a well thought out process.

Purchasing a server was rather expensive. Several weeks - if not months - would pass between the order of the server

talking about true instant recovery”, explains Ian Wood. “This way, our instant recovery solution sure meets the needs of the instant IT world.” On top of that, Symantec’s solution stands out from the crowd as it is a platform independent offering. “Businesses run applications on a vast array of different environments these days. At Symantec, we choose to act platform independent, which allows us to offer our solutions as a service, keeping the same high standard for any platform in the market, while keeping costs low.”

Cloud, mobile, social and big data are the four disruptive forces in today’s IT landscape. As they make an organization’s IT environment more complex, simplicity is the key to efficient and effective data protection. Hence the success of Symantec’s NetBackup appliances. “We launched the appliance just three years ago”, says Ian Wood. “The objective was clear: keeping things simple. In a way, the appliance offers an organization an easy way to modernize its backup and recovery solution.” Symantec’s appliance acts as a consolidated data protection platform. It is Symantec’s software, running on Symantec’s hardware. Ian Wood: “It really is an all-in-one solution. For the customer, there is no more need to deploy a server, an operating system or software. All you need to do is switch on the appliance, set the right configuration and you’re good to go.” This explains the rapid growth in the NetBackup appliances market. “The customer looks for simplicity. That is what the appliances are about: they do exactly what they say they do.”

IT REALLY IS AN ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTION One integrated solution

and its actual go-live. There is a striking difference with the virtual world. Adding an extra virtual server takes less than five minutes and is practically free. Whatever it does cost, is being regarded as operational cost, not as an investment.

But what about the impact on data protection? Ian Wood: “The virtual world’s scale is its biggest problem. We always had an eye for that at Symantec - in NetBackup 7.6, for example - and we’ll keep doing so.”

Instant recovery In the instant IT world, downtime is not an option. That’s why Symantec invested in the scalability of its NetBackup solutions. Symantec ran a test, backing up block changes in a VMware vSphere environment using VMware’s Operations Management Standard Acceleration Kit. It resulted in a backup that was 33 times quicker than what would have been needed for a standard backup procedure of the entire environment. Recovery even was 404 times quicker. “We are 22

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Obviously, Symantec continues to develop and improve its software portfolio, extending the offer in the cloud with solutions based on infrastructure as a service and software as a service. Ian Wood: “This allows our partners to offer the Symantec solution to their customers in a very straight forward and simple manner. We look at it as backup and recovery as a service.” Those who are in search of even more simplicity, are easily convinced by the appliances. “For backup and restore, we see a lot of organizations that want to make the move from tape to disk. In that case, the appliance is perhaps the better choice. It offers an integrated data protection solution, not only taking away the tape, but the entire stack that is traditionally necessary to run backup and restore. The impact is significant: better data protection and less complexity at a lower total cost of ownership.”

Streamer: As cloud, mobile, social and big data make an organization’s IT environment more complex, simplicity is the key to efficient and effective data protection.

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Off the Beaten Path

CAREER REVOLUTION

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FROM ICT ENTREPRENEUR TO EPICUREAN Here I am, Filip Smette, 43 years young and sitting in my shadowed garden enjoying a cocktail.

Life is good.

Did I expect to end up here?

Read and enjoy.

At the end of my secondary education in business economics & informatics in Antwerp, a graduate program Informatics at the St. Lodewijk Hogeschool seemed to be the logical path to follow at that time. But in the last year of this program I felt more and more the urge to become an entrepreneur, a feeling that was partially born in the period I actively worked for our student union.

After my military service (I was one of the last victims of compulsory national service) and with no diploma, I started up a computer store named “Salto” in the center of Kontich together with a former fellow student. After barely six months our store was transformed into a wholesaler company in CD-roms, mainly games. Initially, we sub distributed games for the Dutch distributor ‘Homesoft’. Later on, numerous distributors and labels joined the club and soon we became the “one-stop-solution” for the Belgian market. We moved to a bigger location just outside the center of Kontich.

When Playstation launched its first console our product range and client portfolio exponentially grew. Besides the numerous independent computer shops and video stores, larger chains such as FNAC, Colruyt, Fun, Dreamland, Selection, Videoland & Game Mania began to contact us.

A third, larger location was needed and we moved to an office building in the industrial zone of Satenrozen. With 400m² of warehouse and 200m² of office we prepared ourselves for the expected growth in the coming years. As a relatively small player on the market, we also dared to take a step towards the exclusive distribution of controversial games such as Carmageddon and Hooligans. This last game even took us to the television studios of ‘Recht op Antwoord’ with Goedele Liekens.

It was exceptional in our sector, but “Salto Multimedia” was profitable for 10 years in a row. Our biggest risk were sudden price drops of stock value (up to 90% in one week). A lot of our colleagues unfortunately crashed, but we always adapted the carrying value of our stock to the actual value instead of the purchase value. This approach has always kept us healthy and steady.

In 2003 we sold “Salto Multimedia” to PB Projects, the owner of the “Game Mania” concept. I stayed on board as a purchaser for another 1, 5 years, but working for a boss being born an entrepreneur made it pretty difficult for me to survive. So I quit and began to think about my future.

On holiday in Aruba, I loved to watch the bartenders preparing their cocktails during Happy Hour. I got inspired and decided to do something with that concept at home. I immediately subscribed myself to bartender courses at renowned schools in Amsterdam and London, after which I started up a business doing workshops at home, onsite and as team building event for companies. “Cocktails at Home” was born.

I kept another hobby to that memorable holiday as well; I started a PADI Open Water Course and in the meantime I made it to PADI Staff Instructor, giving courses at the diving school “Scuba College”.

Although preparing and serving cocktails is a big step back financially, I experience much more fun in what I’m doing.

The risk is limited and my guests are always in a good mood.

Nowadays everybody works their but off to be able to afford the luxury life they want to have. I have chosen to make a step back financially and to enjoy life more. I don’t miss my big car and the exclusive events. I have no intension to make “Cocktails at Home” big either.

It is fun to work by myself, not having the cost and worries of personnel, enjoying life without stress. Small is beautiful. www.cocktailsathome.be www.cocktailworkshop.be www.scubacollege.be

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Off the Beaten Path

CAREER REVOLUTION

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FROM SOCIAL WORKER TO ICT ACCOUNT MANAGER Here I am, Henk Lannoo, 41 years young and sitting in my kitchen with a nice cup of coffee, thinking of the clients I have to contact, plan meetings with, give advice and propose new solutions to.

Life is good.

After 6 years of Latin and Greek at the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe College in Assebroek, I decided to choose another path and study Economics at the University of Gent. Life was a party, but unfortunately Caesar and Plato didn’t help me through my math and bookkeeping exams. So I followed my ‘social economics’ gut and changed to Political and Social Sciences, where I chose International Relations as main subject. I did an extra year of Multilingual Business Communication and dreamed of becoming the best social worker in Africa ever.

When I finally got all the degrees I needed, one particular issue popped up and became the reason for not going abroad: my hometown. I couldn’t give up my roots. Well, there I was…such things only happen to me!

Job searching in Belgium it was then. In 1996, I started working for ‘UFB ACE leasing’ and experienced a lot of fun working as a representative, negotiating with clients, looking for prospects and convincing them to buy my product. I enjoyed the daily contact with my clients, helping them out with issues and giving them advice on leasing contracts. But in 4 years’ time, administration got the upper hand and therefore I decided to switch again.

My choice was made, ICT it was. I became account manager at Systemat and together with a colleague we built up a strong portfolio in Flanders. We were both very driven and our enthusiasm and attracted many customers.

After several happy years, a switch in the board of directors, figures became the only thing counting and client follow-up often ended up in the bin. In the end, we often felt embarrassed in front of the client, not being able to guarantee 100% quality & service anymore.

For me, selling does not only consist of achieving my budget and cashing the money. I sell a solution basket that contains listening, advising, consulting, ad hoc problem solving and giving after-service.

The market was talking more and more about a company called Uptime Group. They seemed to be very professional, innovative and technically extremely advanced. Wow, I thought, a family I want to be part of! I got invited by Neoria for an interview and felt that they, first of all, had a very strong technical team, and second, had potential to grow. There infrastructure portfolio was huge.

It’s been a year now that I work for Neoria as Account Manager for Flanders. They do not just offer their products, they practice supportive selling. I feel very much at home and am finally able to build long term relationships with my clients. Furthermore, Neoria continuously invest in its team.

But most important, I finally discovered the social and long term vision aspect of my Social and Political studies in my job.

I knew that I wanted to work with clients and in different regions of Belgium, being able to look at your own ROI, always on the road but making part of a team. Having had a lot of contact with the Helpdesk in the beginning of my career, I knew there was still a lot to discover for me in that area.

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Spotlight on Partners

NETAPP. INTRODUCTION

NetApp has just introduced two new hardware platforms and updated a third to address the broad performance requirements of data-intensive applications.

- The new NetApp EF550 flash array, which delivers high performance and consistent low latency for business-critical applications for which responsiveness and enterprise reliability are critical.

- The new NetApp E2700 for small remote/branch offices requiring optimal price/ performance.

- The updated NetApp E5500 for performance, density, and modular flexibility for the widest range of data-intensive workloads.

By offering the broadest and most complete flash portfolio in the industry, NetApp maximizes the value of flash across the entire compute, network, and storage stack, improving efficiency and accelerating business-critical application performance. Every workload is different; that’s why NetApp’s broad portfolio of hybrid and all-flash arrays allows customers to create an optimal solution. The company has shipped over 62 PBs of flash storage to date.

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Technology News in Depth EF550 Flash Array

What is FlexPod ? ®

The NetApp EF550 is a trusted platform that keeps business operations running by delivering business results faster and improving the customer experience. The EF550 delivers consistent, predictable, submillisecond response times to accelerate the latency-sensitive applications responsible for driving revenue, productivity, and/or customer satisfaction on a day-in, day-out basis. Key applications include database, VDI, and web services. The EF550’s scale-up architecture provides more data access to low-latency performance while remote replication enables business-critical application to be fully protected at a remote site.

The leading

converged infrastructure solution from Cisco® & NetApp®

Flexible platform from the industry leaders in networking, computing and storage

Supports the leading

hypervisors, applications and

management platforms

Operational costs are dramatically lowered with the EF550 due to the elimination of overprovisioning. In fact, a single EF550 is able to match the performance of two full racks of traditional spinning drives. This results in significant savings of space, power, and cooling.

E-Series The NetApp E-Series leads in innovation with Dynamic Disk Pools, Intelligent Cache Tiering with SSD Cache, the NetApp AutoSupport™ tool, remote replication in a simple array, and the latest release of 12G SAS. The E-Series is part of the NetApp portfolio of block-based, performance optimized storage. Easily scalable by design, the E-Series is for workloads requiring 99.999% reliability and consistently high performance.

E2700: The E2700 offers simple and flexible management, allowing IT staff to focus on adding business value versus managing storage. IT departments can add storage capacity as their organizations grow without reconfiguring running applications. By introducing 12G SAS, the E2700 dramatically accelerates application performance for price/ performance value. Seamless operations with seamless application integration meet the demands of any application environment with the support of fabric controller (FC), Internet small computer system interface (iSCSI), and SAS.

Reduces risk and increases efficiency with pretested, validated solutions Easy to

scale up and out with no disruption

Why trust FlexPod ? ®

Deployed in

35

The

countries

No.1

ranked integrated reference architecture1 with more than

2,400

customers

Validated in more than

40 designs

by Cisco® & NetApp® Validated with NetApp Data ONTAP, the world’s

#1 storage OS

Which FlexPod is right for you? ®

FlexPod Express for small and midsize businesses

E5500: The performance-efficient E5500 expands enterprise data protection with the SANtricity suite of data replication features and flexible interface offerings with 10G iSCSI and 16G FC, in addition to SAS and IB. With NetApp AutoSupport, users have enterprise monitoring and installed-base analytics for proactive operations. The E5500 scales to 1.5PB per system for data-intensive storage at scale.

FlexPod Datacenter for core enterprise applications

FlexPod Select

for dedicated, data-intensive workloads such as Big Data

More information on the new Flash Array and E-series can be found on:

Curious? See how you can accelerate business success with FlexPod® at netapp.com/flexpod

www.netapp.com

1

by Gartner Reseach and by IDC

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Reference Case

ENERGIE ZOALS HET HOORT. 2 EMC

Essent.be, a well known energy supplier in Belgium, is part of the larger European group RWE. They started ten years ago as a small challenger in the then recently liberalized energy market, and have since grown out to be one of the most successful players in the country.

Today essent.be is proud to service more than 350 000 households and 20 000 businesses worldwide. Over the past five years essent.be has delivered exponential growth, surpassing everyone’s expectations. However, this expansion has not come without growing pains.

Koen Rousseau, essent.be’s IT Manager, explains how this growth led to numerous challenges for the entire company, including its IT department.

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“THE UPTIME GROUP TEAM TRULY SHOWED US WHAT THEY WERE MADE OF IN THOSE THREE DAYS. THEY WENT ABOVE AND BEYOND… EVEN WAKING UP COLLEAGUES AT 3AM BECAUSE WE WERE MISSING A REQUIRED CABLE. INCREDIBLE!” Luckily, essent.be prides itself on being an agile and flexible organization, and has been able to quickly adapt to the rapidly evolving market. Therefore it is of no surprise that agility and flexibility are two essential ingredients in the IT department’s cookbook: “Our job is to make sure that IT fully enables our company’s mission, which is to deliver affordable AND sustainable AND reliable energy to our customers.

Cultivating such a landscape while at the same time remaining agile and flexible is not a straightforward marriage,” adds Mr. Rousseau.

What was their challenge? And the solution?

A solid IT landscape needs a solid IT infrastructure. Last year, essent.be had outgrown its offices in Antwerp and needed to relocate. Instead of simply moving the IT infrastructure as-is, essent.be set out to find a strategic partner who would help them transform/upgrade their infrastructure and help them relocating it. Having already worked with Cronos for several projects in the past, Mr. Rousseau contacted his account manager, who invited him to talk to uptime group, Cronos’ infrastructure division.

“We were confident that the Cronos team would be able to assist us in this daunting undertaking.

Cronos & essent.be are a very good match, because we both believe very much in giving our people the freedom & responsibility to thrive in their work. “There is a huge difference in giving people a task to do, versus setting them a goal. A lot of suppliers do not understand that difference, Cronos is one of the few that do” ,explains Mr. Rousseau. Uptime group immediately started to size a solution for essent. be’s needs, i.e. a renewed storage infrastructure designed with performance, availability and disaster recovery in mind.

After carefully considering various scenarios, essent.be chose a solution built on two EMC VNX storage arrays: one offsite at a remote data center and one onsite at their new offices in Kontich. EMC RecoverPoint Appliances constantly mirror the most critical data between the two sites. RecoverPoint does not only protect essent.be from site disasters, it also provides continuous data protection with multiple recovery points to restore applications instantly to a specific point in time. The VNX arrays take advantage of Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), enhancing storage performance by using enterprise Flash drives to extend both read and write cache capacities to hundreds of gigabytes and using low-cost SATA drives for capacity intensive applications.

Both teams had three days to move essent.be from Antwerp to Kontich. Failure was not an option. “The uptime group team truly showed us what they were made of in those three days. They went above and beyond… even waking up colleagues at 3am because we were missing a required cable. Incredible!

They truly understood that every second mattered at that point,” emphasizes Mr. Rousseau.

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The proof of the pudding…

A few weeks before this interview, the essent.be team discovered again just how good the service at uptime group really is. Due to a human error essent.be got stuck and the downtime that every company dreads so much, unfortunately became a reality. With the help of the uptime group team and the implemented RecoverPoint technology, essent.be was able to get their environment corrected and up & running again within a few hours, without losing one single bit of data. When I asked Mr. Rousseau about the incident, he responded: “Well, you simply cannot stop every disaster from happening in today’s complex IT environments. But you can prepare yourself, like we did. A similar incident with the old IT infrastructure would have ended much, much worse. Imagine not being able to give to your customers the responsiveness and service levels they have come to expect, possibly for several days. That’ will to hurt you, if not downright kill you. Our investment in mirrored storage (offsite/onsite) together with the collaboration with uptime group paid itself off right then and there. Together with the people from uptime group, we are now in the process of scripting most of the corrective actions required during such an incident, thereby further reducing downtime to less than an hour.”

What does the future hold for essent.be?

Essent.be will remain committed never to lose sight of customer satisfaction. In a market where the consumer is king, essent.be believes that this vision is critical. “We will vigilantly fight for what we truly believe is every customer’s right: affordable AND sustainable AND reliable energy. This is not an easy fight in a market with well-established energy suppliers. “I am convinced that an IT department can make a huge difference with regard to the outcome of this battle, and I consider myself extremely lucky to be surrounded by an inspiring team and trustworthy suppliers,” says Mr. Rousseau. Essent.be will continue to expand and improve all possible channels to get closer to the customer, via the “My Essent” platform, online presence, social media, call center technology, etc. As new and exciting technologies, such as smart meters, will pop up in an every changing energy landscape, one of the major challenges ahead will now be how to handle massive amounts of data. Exciting times!

Koen Rousseau, IT-manager

This reference can be contacted upon request. Please contact your uptime group account manager if interested. www.essent.be www.uptimegroup.be

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SEE YOU NEXT TIME

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1,584,567

Business Operations Per Second: Unparalleled Cisco Server Performance.1

34% Industry-Leading Database Performance

34% Faster

2

Cisco Unified Computing System

Unparalleled Application Performance with Cisco Servers.

Outperforms RISC by

Find out more at cisco.com/servers

On Java Applications 3

57%

With Intel ® Xeon® processors For more performance information, visit cisco.com/go/ucsbenchmarks.

1. Based on SPECjbb2005 benchmark on Cisco UCS C220 M3 server at 1,584,567 BOPS, 792,284 BOPS/JVM. 2. Based on TPC Benchmark C Results on 2 Processor Systems. Cisco UCS C240 M3 High-Density Rack Server with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Standard Edition One, 1,609,186.39 tpmC, $0.47/tpmC, available 9/27/12 compared to IBM Power 780 Server Model 9179-MHB with IBM DB2 9.5, 1,200,011.00 tpmC, $0.69/tpmC, available 10/13/10. 3. Based on SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark with 8 total Java EE Server processors on Cisco UCS B440 M2 servers at 26,118.67 EjOPS compared to RISC-based IBM Power 780 at 16,646.34 EjOPS. SPEC®, SPECjbb®, and SPECjEnterprise® are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. TPC Benchmark C® is a trademark of the Transaction Performance Processing Council (TPC). The performance results described here are derived from detailed benchmark results available at http://www.spec.org and http://www.tpc.org as of 1-15-2013. ©2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. All third-party products belong to the companies that own them. Cisco, the Cisco logo, and Cisco UCS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco.

Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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