Value Journal | Issue 16 | November 2017

Issue 16 // November 2017

DELL EMC INTRODUCES ALL-FLASH STORAGE SYSTEMS Major platform upgrades to high-end and mid-range storage systems deliver best-in-class performance, value and economics.

Dell EMC has announced the availability of its updated storage portfolio refreshed with enterprise-grade capabilities designed to provide IT departments with the technology they need to modernize their data center and begin their journey to transform IT. Recently, Dell EMC had extended its entry-level SC Series offering with the

affordable new SCv3000 arrays, which are available to customers across the Middle East. This extended portfolio provides access to advanced storage technology for businesses of all sizes and budgets. In addition, regional organizations will be able to procure the previously announced XtremIO X2.

“With these new breed of high-end and mid-range storage portfolio, Dell EMC is bringing

best-in-class performance, capabilities, value and economics to customers,” said Ossama El Samadoni, Director of Sales, Modern Infrastructure Team, Dell EMC. “The power and speed are unparalleled, but more importantly, customers of every size, every budget and every stage of IT Transformation can harness the power of enterpriseclass storage to move their business forward.”

The SCv3000 hardware platform is significantly upgraded compared to the previous-generation SCv2000.

New 6-core Intel processors, 2X the memory and 3X greater bandwidth result in a 50 percent performance boost, with tested maximums up to 270,000 IOPS. SCv3000 arrays are customerinstallable, lowering start-up costs, but are also supported by Continued on page 3

Huawei introduces ‘Boundless Computing’ strategy to drive DX The strategy comes as the result of the firm’s commitment to creating greater, more tangible value for customers leading digital transformation.

Huawei has launched its Boundless Computing server strategy to drive digital transformation for the Middle East’s businesses.

The strategy comes as the result of Huawei’s commitment to creating greater, more tangible value for its customers pioneering the digital transformation. As part

of the announcement, Huawei demonstrated two inclusive technologies at the recently concluded GITEX Technology Week 2017: FusionServer V5 and the Atlas intelligent cloud hardware platform. The former, powered by Intel Skylake processors debuted in the region recently.

Boundless Computing is Huawei’s answer to ensuring new smarter and more connected next-gen technologies are given the infrastructure and high-power support they need to be alwayson, always-secure. This type of computing aims to bring hardware closer to data sources and reduce

Alaa ElShimy, Huawei ME

the need for additional layers of overlying software.

Atlas was introduced as a way Continued on page 3

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

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3 COLUMN: REDefined

From page 1

From page 1

Dell EMC... a full range of ProSupport and ProDeploy services, including “Plus” versions – as well as the new Optimize advanced services option.

Like other SC products, SCv3000 Series offers an expanding range of Dell EMC hardware and software integrations including VMware vSphere plugin support, along with support for VMware Virtual Volumes. Support for Dell EMC data protection, storage management and availability products including Data Domain, PowerPath, RecoverPoint, VPLEX, ViPR and more assure customers their SCv3000 arrays will continue to drive mixedworkload success in a variety of changing ecosystems,

Huawei... both now and as their businesses evolve.

According to the firm, with all the advanced capabilities starting at a street price of under $10,000, “SCv3000 is simply a great value for the most costconscious customers.”

XtremIO X2 is the ideal platform for workloads that benefit from deduplication and integrated copy data management (iCDM) for large-scale snapshots, such as VDI and development/test use cases.

Dell EMC has engineered X2 to be even more efficient in storage capacity and AllFlash performance, at a price as low as one-third of its predecessor.

of utilising AI to power this HPC (High Power Computing). The technology rides on the advantages of key technologies to deliver new levels of hardware resource utilisation and adapt more flexibly to service demands.

Huawei’s FusionServer V5 includes integrated solutions that the firm claims can help businesses in the region boost the overall computing efficiency of their data centers.

Alaa ElShimy, Vice President and Managing Director, Huawei Enterprise, ME, said, “The release of our ‘boundless computing’ server strategy and series solutions empowers our clients to be a creative force in their industry, bringing new value through efficient, smarter computing.”

Microsoft ignites digital transformation The company demonstrates the power of the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge at GITEX 2017.

Microsoft demonstrated the power of its intelligent cloud in concert with the intelligent edge, at the 37th GITEX Technology Week at the Dubai World Trade Centre’s International Convention Centre.

Microsoft’s GITEX focus this year is “Ignite Your Digital Transformation” through showcasing its innovations for all workloads and industries ranging all the way from education to healthcare, and manufacturing to retail - that are

allowing millions of organizations worldwide to engage customers, empower employees, optimise operations and transform products and services. Spanning across Productivity, Business Intelligence, Security, Cloud, Mixed Reality, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things, the exhibits included Intelligent Cloud, Modern Workplace, Windows 10 Creators Update and Devices, and the Partners Zone. Microsoft’s

professional network provider LinkedIn also showcased its Sales Navigator combined with the power of Dynamics 365 to empower sales teams in building strong relationships.

“Digital transformation has extraordinary potential for businesses and organizations of all scales and industries,” said Sayed Hashish, Regional General Manager, Microsoft Gulf.

“It has the power to automate the mundane and give a freer hand to natural innovators, through the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge. Our continued participation at GITEX, demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to Dubai, the UAE and the wider region by showcasing our portfolio of innovations - empowering organizations to achieve more”.

Being solutions-centric

By Kunal Singh, Server, Storage and Networking Head, Redington Value

The enterprise storage and servers segment has evolved greatly over the last few years. Partners have to go beyond the traditional product-based approach to offer a comprehensive solution to meet the customer’s requirements.

There is also a large influx of small to medium IoT firms that can help address the challenges faced by organizations across different functions and industries. We believe collaborating and building a model around cloud and IoT offerings will be the way forward for partners in the coming years.

With the advent of cloud and virtualization technologies, legacy systems integrators are now attempting to construct their business models around these opportunities. In the meantime, we are seeing an increasing number of ‘born-in-the-cloud’ partners and ISVs who are making an impact in the cloud segment.

As the cloud opportunity in the Middle East is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years, it’s critical for the channel to develop the required model and in-house expertise to present cloud offerings to their customers.

We believe that the channel partners’ ability to identify their model of value-add in the cloud era must be at the center of their roadmap and vision.

At Redington Value, we are ensuring we are leading the space with innovation. For example, our state-of-the-art solutions center, Red Vault, showcases technologies addressing different business outcomes across verticals. Our consulting arm, Citrus Consulting is supporting partners on building the cloud roadmap for end-users.

We aim to continue collaborating with vendors on comprehensive solutions around IoT and Smart City solutions.

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Fortinet: 50% of ME IT decision-makers believe cybersecurity is not a top priority The research also highlights that the transition to the cloud will in turn make security a growing priority.

Alain Penel, Fortinet

Fortinet has revealed that almost half of the IT decision makers (ITDMs) at 250 plus employee organizations in the Middle East believe that cybersecurity is still not a significant priority for board members despite high profile

cyberattacks continuing to occur according to findings of Fortinet’s latest Global Enterprise Security Survey. The research also highlights that many IT professionals believe that the transition to the cloud as part of their organizations’ digital transformation will in turn make security a growing priority.

“Over the years, we’ve seen that cybersecurity has become a key investment for organizations, with more and more C-level executives considering it as part of their broader IT strategy,” said Alain Penel, Regional Vice President, Middle East, Fortinet. “As organizations now embrace digital transformation and turn

to technologies like the cloud, cybersecurity is no longer just an IT investment but a strategic business decision. In today’s digital economy, I expect the trend we’ve seen at the board level to accelerate with security being treated as a top priority within an organizations’ broader risk management strategy. By doing so, companies will be in a better position to succeed in their digital transformation efforts.”

One of the research highlights was that 47% of IT decision makers believe that IT security is still not a top priority discussion for the board. This doesn’t seem to affect budgets since 54% of enterprises stated

AWS to open data centers in the Middle East by 2019 New AWS infrastructure will enable customers to run workloads in the region and serve end-users with even lower latency

Andy Jassy, Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it plans to open an infrastructure region in the Middle East by early 2019. The new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch. Currently, AWS provides 44 Availability Zones across 16

infrastructure regions worldwide, with another 14 Availability Zones, across five AWS regions in China, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, and a second GovCloud region in the US expected to come online by the end of 2018. AWS will also launch an AWS Edge Network Location in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the first quarter of 2018. This will bring Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF to the region and adds to the

78 points of presence AWS has around the world.

“As countries in the Middle East look to transform their economies for generations to come, technology will play a major role, and the cloud will be in the middle of that transformation,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services.

“Some of the most gratifying parts of operating AWS over the last 11 years have been helping

As countries in the Middle East look to transform their economies for generations to come, technology will play a major role, and the cloud will be in the middle of that transformation.”

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that they spend over 10% of their IT budget on security, which is a high investment. 69% of the surveyed respondents said their IT security budget has increased from the previous year. Now, IT decision makers feel strongly that cybersecurity should become a top management priority with 87% of the respondents saying that the board should actually put IT security under greater scrutiny.

Three key drivers for cybersecurity becoming a top priority include increase in security breaches and global cyberattacks, increased pressure from the regulators and transition to the cloud as a catalyst for security priorities.

thousands of new companies get started, empowering large enterprises to reinvent their customer experiences, and allowing governments and academic institutions to innovate for citizens again. We look forward to making this happen across the Middle East.”

In January 2017, AWS opened offices to serve its rapidly growing customer base with a presence in Dubai, UAE and Manama, Bahrain. Another investment AWS is making for its customers in the Middle East, and around the world, is to run its business in the most environmentally friendly way. AWS said it chose Bahrain in part due to the country’s focus on executing renewable energy goals and its proposal to construct a new solar power facility to meet its power needs. The Bahrain Electricity and Water Authority expects to bring the 100 MW solar farm online in 2019, making it the country’s first utility-scale renewable energy project.

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Splunk brings Machine Learning to mainstream with new solutions at .conf2017 The firm announces Splunk Enterprise 7.0, Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) 3.0, Splunk User Behavior Analytics (UBA) 4.0 and updates to Splunk Cloud.

Richard Campione, Splunk

Splunk has announced expanded machine learning capabilities across its product portfolio with the release of Splunk Enterprise 7.0, Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) 3.0, Splunk User Behavior Analytics (UBA) 4.0 and updates to Splunk Cloud. The company also introduced an updated suite of solutions that apply analytics and machine learning to fraud and cloud monitoring use cases.

The announcements were made

at .conf2017: the 8th Annual Splunk Conference.

“Machine learning is critical to customer success and to the evolution of Splunk. Our seamlessly integrated capabilities open up machine learning to everyone, enabling our customers to better predict future outcomes and more effectively analyze their data,” said Richard Campione, Chief Product Officer, Splunk. “Splunk Enterprise 7.0 and Splunk Cloud powerfully deliver mission-critical answers faster and easier than ever before.”

Splunk Enterprise 7.0 and Splunk Cloud help customers better monitor, investigate and gain intelligence with their

data, while delivering massive improvement in performance and scale. With these enhancements, customers can use the Splunk platform to predict future IT, security and business outcomes through integrated machine learning techniques backed by powerful, extensible algorithms.

These machine learning advances enable users to collect, prepare, transform, explore, visualize and publish data insights.

Splunk also announced new, advanced machine learning capabilities for its existing premiumpackaged solutions, including: • Splunk ITSI 3.0: The latest version of Splunk ITSI

Splunk Enterprise 7.0 and Splunk Cloud powerfully deliver mission-critical answers faster and easier than ever before.”

revolutionizes event monitoring by combining service context with machine learning to help identify existing and potential issues, prioritize restoration of business-critical services and deliver analytics-driven IT operations.

• Splunk UBA 4.0: The new version of Splunk UBA enables customers to create and load their own machine learning models to identify custom anomalies and threats via Splunk UBA’s new software development kit (SDK).

• Machine Learning Toolkit: Free to any customer, the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit (MLTK) is a data science application that anyone can use to predict future IT, security and business outcomes. Recent updates include machine learning model management, which integrates user permissions via an intuitive user interface.

Splunk is also announcing updated solutions to tackle specific customer security needs such as ES Content Update, Security Essentials for Fraud Detection, Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring, Insights for Ransomware and Booz Allen Hamilton Cyber4Sight for Splunk.

Veritas announces Veritas Cloud Storage New software-defined storage innovations enable and optimize machine learning intelligence to help customers extract more value from their data by making it proactive, predictive and actionable

Veritas Technologies has announced Veritas Cloud Storage, a new software-defined storage solution designed for massive amounts of unstructured data. This storage solution enables customers to apply analytics, machine learning and classification technologies to stored

data, which can help customers extract much greater value from their data, delivering better business outcomes and exceptional customer experiences. Veritas Cloud Storage can also help organizations accelerate their data center transformations with flexibility, agility, lower costs and no vendor lock-in. To complement this launch, Veritas also announced the Veritas Access Appliance, an integrated software-defined storage appliance that offers long-term data retention with multi-cloud capability.

These solutions are available in the coming quarters.

“With the unprecedented growth of data driving a new wave of storage demands, it is imperative that enterprises deploy a software-defined

storage strategy that is optimized for cost, performance and agility,” said David Noy, Vice President, Product Management, Veritas. “Customers also need to deploy software-defined storage solutions that turn dormant data into intelligent insights, helping businesses offer better customer experiences while delivering strong business outcomes. As one of the early pioneers in softwaredefined storage, Veritas has a rich heritage in this space that spans more than 25 years and with these latest innovations, we are helping customers address modern-day data challenges head-on.”

Building on the Veritas 360 Data Management platform, Veritas Cloud Storage enables enterprises adopting

both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructures to realize a variety of benefits including massive scalability, intelligent data management, better business outcomes and customer experiences and exceptional access to data globally.

Veritas Access Appliance allows enterprises to easily replace outdated or sub-optimal storage, including tape storage, with a simple, long-term, cost-effective integrated offering that combines the Veritas Access software with pre-tested and configured hardware in an easy to consume form factor. It includes benefits such as highly scalable software-defined storage, multi-cloud capabilities, cost-effective data retention and exceptional archiving integration.

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GITEX 2017

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EVENTS

Barracuda Cloud Bootcamp - Dubai - 4 October

HPE Synergy Blitz Day - Dubai - 18 October

Micro Focus Partner Enablement Session Dubai - 24 October

Fortinet Partner Meet - Dubai - 25 October

Splunk4Rookies Workshop - Dubai - 29 October

VMware EUC Workshop - Bahrain - 29 October

Microsoft - Partner Roundtable - Kenya - 4 October

Dell EMC - Partner Enablement Session Kenya - 11 October

StorageCraft Technical Bootcamp - Oman - 2 October

Avaya - Partner Enablement Session Kenya - 13 October

VMware - Sponsorship Event - Ghana - 25 October

Oracle - Big Data and Business Analytics Session Uganda - 17 and 18 October

Red Hat- Partner Event - Al Khobar-18 October

Cisco - Service Event - Nigeria - 12 October

Microsoft CSP - Launch Event - Riyadh - 25 October

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Oracle introduces AI-powered intelligent bots to its Mobile Cloud offering Oracle Mobile Cloud brings open, scalable and intelligent services to web, mobile applications and chatbots.

Amit Zavery, Oracle

Oracle has announced a major update to Oracle Mobile Cloud, featuring artificial intelligence (AI)-powered intelligent chatbot capabilities. Expanding Oracle Cloud Platform’s leading mobile portfolio, the new capabilities offer

organizations a multi-channel platform, deep analytics that can link key stakeholder experiences across bots, mobile applications and web, as well as simplified bot development features. Using this powerful portfolio, enterprises can better engage with customers and employees across today’s most popular messaging platforms.

“As user behavior has dramatically shifted to mobile and messaging platforms, it is critical enterprises evolve to support stakeholders’ preferred channels,” said Amit Zavery, Senior Vice President, Product Development, Oracle Cloud Platform. “By using Oracle Mobile Cloud, businesses will be able to continue

strengthening these relationships, even as users might be moving away from engaging on websites and traditional mobile applications to messaging channels.”

Leveraging a powerful AI foundation comprised of machine learning, cognitive and knowledge services, dialog and context, and deep learning, the updated Oracle Mobile Cloud enables enterprises to build applications that can automate more engaging conversations at scale. Additional features of the new Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise include: • Enterprise integration that allows customers to deliver real value to end users with access to back end data, user identity and

transactional systems • Access to key insights allowing businesses to identify areas of friction, funnel traffic and analyze user paths • Bots-to-human hand-offs creating seamless side-routing to humans or external systems with context transfer, and back to bot abilities as needed • Completely integrated lifecycle management including development, testing, version control and integration with CI/CD • Through Oracle Cloud, a complete solution at lower cost that decreases complexity and offers access to a broad range of leading SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services.

SonicWall unveils new wireless, mobile and wired network security products The new launches accelerate speed thresholds for the firm’s Automated Real-Time Breach Detection and Prevention Platform across wired, wireless and mobile networks.

Bill Conner, SonicWall

SonicWall has announced an unprecedented range of advanced network security products and services that accelerate speed thresholds for its Automated Real-Time Breach Detection and Prevention Platform across wired, wireless and mobile networks.

“In a modern, hyper-connected world, there are no compromises,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. “Our customers, and their end users, expect the best in real-time security, performance and analytics — regardless of network, device or physical location.

This automated, real-time breach detection and prevention platform ensures organizations can build smart security postures while meeting the speed, performance and cost-of-ownership demands of today’s businesses and their users.”

The platform enhancements include more than 50 new SonicOS features, a new high-performance firewall, a series of new 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless access points, an intuitive cloud analytics application and advanced secure federated

single sign-on (SSO) capabilities.

Highlighted by a modern, intuitive interface, SonicOS 6.5 offers advanced networking and connectivity capabilities to optimize system availability, while scaling firewall performance to deliver uncompromised, uninterrupted threat protection for all connected networks.

SonicOS 6.5 has a suite of wireless features that enables security and connectivity for mobile users. Multi-domain authentication support also provides a simple and fast way to manage and enforce security policies across an entire organization.

SonicWall has unveiled the new SonicWall Network Security Appliance (NSA) 2650 firewall, which delivers automated, real-time

breach detection and prevention, as well as TLS/SSL decryption and inspection, over multi-gigabit wired and Wave 2 wireless networks.

SonicWall Cloud Analytics is a new cloud application that is delivered as a service to customers and partners. It provides deep real-time visibility, insight and alerting for network traffic, user behavior and device activity from a centralized dashboard.

To extend SonicWall security from wired and wireless networks to remote users, SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 12.1 provides secure, policy-enforced access to email, file servers and corporate applications using federated SSO to both cloud and on-premise resources from authorized devices.

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Fidelis introduces integrated security platform for ADR Elevate enable organizations to gain complete visibility of all alerts, speed their alert response times, and increase the effectiveness of their security operations teams.

John McCormack, Fidelis

Fidelis Cybersecurity has announced availability of its new Fidelis Elevate(TM) automated detection and response (ADR) platform.

According to the firm, Elevate empowers security operations

teams to automatically investigate, validate, enrich and respond to detections across all networks and endpoints. With Elevate, organizations gain complete visibility of all alerts, speed their alert response times, and dramatically increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their security operations teams.

“Too much data and not enough information characterizes many security operations teams,” said John McCormack, Chief Executive Officer, Fidelis. “Unlike other solutions, Fidelis Elevate brings together network and endpoint telemetry, metadata, execution context and machine learning to deliver actionable

compromise intelligence. This approach reduces the time required for manual investigation and validation, and enables organizations to automate their responses. With Elevate, security operations teams dramatically increase their efficiency and effectiveness, often by 10-20x.”

Fidelis Elevate relies on three core tenets to prevent modern attacks from stealing or destroying corporate data: Completeness: Engineered for complete visibility across network and endpoints, Fidelis Elevate delivers a complete, integrated and unified intelligence layer that automates operations and response.

Visibility: Fidelis Elevate provides unique depthof-field visibility that automatically ingests and analyzes packets, sessions, and content traversing the network, while doing the same for processes, memory and files on endpoint.

Visibility is both real-time and historical, and spans all ports, protocols, and operating systems.

Automation: By automating the actions and insights of three roles—a skilled analyst, a threat hunter and an incident responder—Fidelis Elevate delivers these key security skillsets in a faster, more sustainable manner, and alleviates issues caused by alert fatigue and today’s skills shortage.

Fidelis Elevate is available, both from the cloud or in traditional on-premises deployments.

Red Hat debuts versatile SDS for cloud-native applications Latest version of Red Hat Container-Native Storage enables end-to-end storage for all core OpenShift applications and infrastructure, with a three-fold increase in persistent storage volumes per cluster

Ranga Rangachari, Red Hat

Red Hat has announced Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6, with support for containerized applications and infrastructure in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform clusters. Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6 comes on the heels of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, the latest version of the firm’s enterprise-grade Kubernetes

container application platform.

Red Hat Container-Native Storage, built upon Red Hat Gluster Storage, is integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and uniquely serves storage out of containers. Red Hat Gluster Storage is enterprise-grade, durable, more secure and well-suited for the hybrid cloud as it supports both on-premise or public cloud deployments. These attributes make it ideally suited to Red Hat Openshift Container Platform deployments.

Red Hat Container-Native Storage can eliminate the need to have an independent storage platform, enabling customers to achieve one integrated container platform that can span the hybrid cloud with greater efficiency and cost savings, a streamlined user experience, single

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control plane and a single point of support.

Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6 has the following new features: • Versatile storage platform for containers enabling customers to manage, scale, and upgrade their storage needs using a single control plane helping customers to achieve greater storage efficiency and cost savings.

• Support for all core infrastructure elements of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, including its registry, logging, and metrics.

• Three-fold increase in the number of applications and microservices deployed on a single storage cluster.

Ranga Rangachari, Vice President and General Manager,

Storage, Red Hat, said, “As enterprises deploy containers, many see a need for storage solutions designed specifically for these types of systems. Red Hat Container-Native Storage, optimized for multi/hybrid cloud deployments with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, offers that. The addition of support for a broad range of storage workloads, the support for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform’s core infrastructure pieces, and increased persistent volume density are key features to help customers support present and future datacenters, and all further strengthen the tight integration of Red Hat ContainerNative Storage with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.”

Securing the Cloud Generation We Are The Cloud Generation. The Cloud Generation is everyone who lives and works in this unique era— as computing breaks the boundaries of desktops and data centers to embrace the mobile, social, global, crowd-sourced, always-on realities Copyright © 2017 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved.

of modern life. It’s a time when critical data, applications and infrastructure are shifting from “behind the firewall” to “running on the cloud.” Some of us are “all in.” Some are only 20% there.

Yes, it’s liberating. And yes, it’s chaotic.

Symantec is here to help.