Voice+Data August 2012

UNCLE SAM WANTS YOUR DATA BUT CAN HE GET AT IT?

AUGUST 2012 VOL.11 N O .6 PP255003/05951

FLASH — SAVIOUR OF THE I/O UNIVERSE?

UPSIDES OF IPv4 EXHAUSTION

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©iStockphoto.com/Eric Hood

contents

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Regulars

Articles

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A cloudy outlook for storage?

Cloud storage can provide cost savings and increased flexibility. But with security breaches and data sovereignty breeding doubt in customers’ minds, the future of cloud storage is not certain.

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Some thoughts Talk from the top

12 SNIA ANZ 14 From the analysts' table 16 @work Case studies featuring technology from NEC Business Solutions, Logicalis, Fusion Broadband, MyNetFone, Staging Connections and Riverbed.

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Building blocks

The latest products and services driving convergence.

34 In my opinion

24 The dangers of hosting

data offshore

With the US Patriot Act, the DMCA and similar, storing your data with an offshore company may allow foreign entities to rifle

through said data - without your knowledge.

30 The upside of IPv4 exhaustion

With IPv4 addresses running out, organisations are already under pressure to transition to IPv6. But there are some positives to making the move.

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Some thoughts

MOUNTAINS AND MOLEHILLS

A.B.N. 22 152 305 336 www.westwick-farrow.com.au Head Office Cnr. Fox Valley Road & Kiogle Street, (Locked Bag 1289) Wahroonga 2076 Australia Ph +61 2 9487 2700 Fax +61 2 9489 1265 Editor Andrew Collins acollins@westwick-farrow.com.au Contributing Editor Merri Mack mmack@voiceanddata.com.au

Andrew Collins Editor acollins@westwick-farrow.com.au

Chief Editor Janette Woodhouse Publisher Geoff Hird ghird@westwick-farrow.com.au Art Director/Production Manager Julie Wright Art/Production Tanya Scarselletti, Nettie Teuma, Colleen Sam Circulation Manager Sue Lavery circulation@westwick-farrow.com.au

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he IT industry is no stranger to hyperbole. And IT loves to sort things into black and white.

So things are either fantastic, unique game-changing, paradigm-upsetting solutions (for which you should open your wallet and pay top dollar), or they are terrifying boogymen that you should fear (and to dispel them you’ll need to open your wallet and pay top dollar).

There is no middle ground.

Or, at least, that’s what the spin would suggest.

In reality, there are way more molehills than there are mountains. Most things products and problems - will sit somewhere in the middle of this spectrum of good and bad. Very few products deserve a place under “must buy today, at any price,” and very few problems deserve to be given ‘red alert’ status.

Furthermore, each problem and solution will sit in a different spot on the spectrum for every different company on the planet. Few companies will have the exact same list of priorities.

Data sovereignty provides a good example of this hyperbolic, polarising trend. Depending on who you listen to, it’s either the end of the world - and various governments around the globe will soon have access to your sacred data - or it’s absolute nonsense and you should ignore the issue entirely. But the truth is more complicated than that. Throwing your lot

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in with either camp - saying either that it’s the worst thing in the world, or that everyone should ignore the issue - is taking the easy way out.

I won’t spoil the details (head to page 24 to read one opinion about it, then to page 8 to read the full story), but I will say that there is no single perspective that applies to every organisation. There is no simple, one-size-fits-all answer.

There are various reasons why IT loves hyperbole and polarisation.

Firstly, marketing. If a marketer can convince you that a particular thing lies at either end of our spectrum, they’ve made a sale.

Secondly, the media. Instead of representing issues with their natural complexity, it’s much easier to classify a complicated thing as either good or evil.

Both of these are symptoms of one thing: human psychology. The human brain likes putting things into polar categories, because it’s cognitively simpler than assessing every tiny detail of a complex situation. This leaves you with extra brain cycles with which to construct shelter, search for water, pursue prey or find a mate. This concept of cognitive simplicity and polarisation underpins one theory for how various forms of prejudice work.

All of this is worth keeping in mind whenever you hear a statement that lies at either end of the fantastic/ terrifying spectrum.

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Talk from the top

A HERCULEAN EFFORT Merri Mack

How many IT people get to walk along the beach to their workplace? As we shiver in the southern states, Garry Rich takes a 20-minute walk to his office on the Gold Coast. There, as Group General Manager IT, he oversees IT for the Mantra Group, a collection of accommodation providers.

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he Mantra Group includes the Mantra, Peppers and BreakFree properties and resorts, and includes more than 100 properties in Australia and New Zealand.

Rich’s responsibilities encompass the insourced end-to-end provision of IT management for corporate, IT and related businesses. He oversees the four functions that comprise IT: the Technical Assistance Centre, which provides IT support to 3500 users; the IT Operations Team, responsible for data centre, infrastructure and platforms; the In-house Development team, which looks after web development, the booking engine and APIs; and the Application team, with a focus on the Group’s central reservation system.

It’s a complex business, and the rapid growth from 17 properties six years ago when Rich joined to the current 100-plus properties has meant that there have been considerable challenges. Not the least of these is centralising the systems to be able to manage the properties effectively.

A centralised inventory system provides last room availability, according to Rich.

“At times Mantra has added anywhere from 10 to 20 properties at one time, which has thrown up a gamut of IT challenges, including a proliferation of vendors, server sprawl, storage capacity limits and a raft of different IT systems, each of which required simplifying and centralising.

“An excellent team of 38 people over the four IT functions has helped in meeting the challenges,” said Rich.

Faced with storage constraints, business expansion, as well as IT beginning to hit the power and cooling limitations of existing data centre facilities, Mantra Group looked at a greenfields solution. After engaging with several vendors, Rich selected a Cisco/NetApp FlexPod system that virtualised the network, storage and server infrastructure.

“The new equipment has made a huge difference to our energy consumption. We have been pleased with how effective the FlexPod system has been in reducing our power draw. Our power and cooling bills have been reduced and this goes directly to the bottom line.

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"The business has implemented tools to quickly gauge the online sentiment of our hotels and allows us to benchmark against competitive sets. It’s somewhat like a social health check, without becoming a drain on operational resources." - Garry Rich, Mantra Group

“The system has been live for a year now and we have been delighted with the benefits,” said Rich.

Mantra Group has outsourced power and cooling requirements by taking an anchor tenancy in a new data centre facility on the Gold Coast. This means IT can focus on managing the systems, network and infrastructure.

Technology trends such as virtualisation and the cloud are active enablers of the business.

Mobility, social media and BYOD are all embraced

by Rich. Mobility is a point of difference for the Mantra Group, with the Peppers Broadbeach Hotel providing iPads in the rooms for its guests.

Guest feedback is now public, posted on Facebook, Twitter and TripAdvisor. These social media tools influence booking decisions.

“The business has implemented tools to quickly gauge the online sentiment of our hotels and allows us to benchmark against competitive sets.

It’s somewhat like a social health check, without becoming a drain on operational resources,” said Rich.

Rich certainly relishes his role at Mantra Group, particularly the excitement that comes with rapid growth.

“Mantra Group has been willing to try new things. It makes for great exposure to cuttingedge ideas, products and services. I work in a small team of great people who put in a herculean effort to achieve our goals,” said Rich.

Living right on the beach means he and his family enjoy the beach lifestyle. Rich would love to have time to do more cycling but does make time for reading using an e-reader.

Garry Rich joined Mantra Group in August 2005.

In his current role as Group General Manager IT, Rich is responsible for developing and delivering information communication technology, services and infrastructure for the Group. With more than 15 years’ experience in the IT industry, Rich has an extensive understanding of the management of IT systems, hardware, software and data centres. Rich holds a Graduate Certificate in Computing, an MBA as well as numerous industry certifications.

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Cloud storage

A CLOUDY OUTLOOK FOR STORAGE? Andrew Collins

Vendors claim cloud storage offers a range of benefits to organisations, including cost savings and increased flexibility. But with things like security breaches, data sovereignty and the US Patriot Act breeding doubt in customers’ minds, the future of cloud storage is not certain.

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he “cloud” has become one of the most used (perhaps overused) terms in IT discussions today. Vendors and service providers love to explain how the various forms of cloud computing can free your workers from the chains of their desktops, free up the time of your IT staff, and allow you to move your IT spending from CAPEX to OPEX. Public cloud storage tools - remote storage, usually accessed via the internet, paid for in an on-demand fashion - have been available for some years now. Broadly speaking, they all offer remote data storage, are (usually) accessed via the internet and are paid for in an on-demand fashion.

The various tools have naturally fallen into a couple of categories and use cases for the different varieties of cloud storage have become evident.

Use cases While these tools all have the broad strokes in common, they tend to fall into one of two distinct categories, differentiated by the complexity of the services surrounding the storage itself.

Each category lends itself to specific use cases.

Tools in the first category are simple remote storage, with very little in the way of features or services surrounding that, and are often referred to as ‘dumb’ cloud storage. These services really

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only consists of storage located in some remote data centre, and not much else - it’s just a place to store your files that isn’t your office. Customers typically access the storage they’re renting via an API. Examples include Amazon S3, Ninefold’s Cloud Storage and Rackspace’s Cloud Files.

Given that it’s essentially just a remote dumping ground for your data, this dumb service lends itself to less cerebral storage tasks, like simple backup.

It’s commonly accepted that good backup practice involves storing your backups in a different location to your primary storage. After all, backing up your business’s data to a NAS inside your own office is no good if a fire rips through your office, destroying both the backup along with the primary copy of your data. Dumb cloud storage offers a relatively easy way to back up your company’s precious data to a remote location, without the need for ferrying tapes around the place.

Clive Gold, Marketing CTO at EMC, which provides hardware to cloud storage providers, says there are “a lot of organisations who want an off-site backup, who’ve recognised the ‘tape and truck’ is dead and gone, but they don’t have a substantially secure and reliable second site” who are using dumb storage in this way. Dumb cloud storage can also help with recovery after

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a disaster. If such a calamity does wipe out your primary storage, it’s a relatively simple matter to transfer the backup from the cloud back to your new machines.

This sort of storage has applications for content distribution. “eBay is a big user of that. Whenever anybody uploads a photo, it’s stored on that sort of infrastructure,” says Gold.

But according to Dr Kevin McIsaac, analyst at Australian firm IBRS, this category of dumb cloud isn’t all that exciting for most organisations.

“The whole idea about backing up to the cloud - I hear about it from the vendors but nobody’s asking me about it. Vendors are all very excited about it - I don’t get a strong sense of that from my clients,” he says.

He says that there are “some” small and “some” big customers using the technology, but “it’s a niche”.

“The idea of a cloud storage infrastructure that you generically leverage like you leverage a SAN - I don’t see it [happening now or taking off in the future].”

This is because plain storage itself isn’t all that useful. “For large volumes of data, you want to have your compute next to your data.”

As for using dumb cloud storage for backup purposes, it’s hard to find a cloud service that offers a better value proposition than simple tape backup.

“I don’t know that the [dumb cloud storage] prices are that competitive. Tape libraries these days are pretty darn cheap. And if you have two data centres, backing up from one to a tape library in the other is about the cheapest way you’ll ever do a backup.

“On the other hand, if you’re a small organisation and you don’t have that stuff, well, why do you have your infrastructure anyway? Get somebody else to run it and get them to worry about that.

“There are use cases for it, but it’s not a broad use case,” McIsaac says.

A smarter option The second category of public cloud storage comes in the form of collaboration tools. While dumb cloud storage is simply some space for your data in a remote data centre, tools in the second category include a bunch of features around that basic storage, to help workers collaborate.

The most famous example of this category comes in the form of consumer tool DropBox. Users typically download and install a local client, which presents the remote storage as a local directory on the user’s machine. Multiple users across the organisation can each treat it much like they would a local folder, creating and editing files within it, without having to know anything about how it all works. These tools

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"G i v e n t h a t i t ' s essentially just a remote dumping ground for your data, this dumb ser vice lends itself to less cerebral storage tasks, like simple backup."

typically allow users to access previous versions of files saved on the shared drive and include functionality to allow sharing of files with people in or outside of the organisation. They also usually offer a web interface, allowing access to the remote data even on machines that do not have the software installed.

In fact, these collaboration tools are so popular among consumers that they’re starting to bring them into the workplace themselves, using them without the knowledge of IT management. Given the potential for these tools to lead to a data leakage, this causes concern for CIOs and IT managers.

So these enterprise-grade collaboration tools add in the extra features that make CIOs and IT managers happy.

“It gives the best of both worlds. It gives the users the freedom they want, but it gives the CTO some measure of control around versioning, security and monitoring,” says Peter James, Chairman and co-founder of Australian cloud service provider Ninefold.

Both Ninefold and Rackspace offer these enterprise-grade Dropbox alternatives, imaginatively named Ninefold Cloud Drive and Rackspace Cloud Drive.

According to IBRS’s McIsaac, these cloud-based collaboration tools offer a much more interesting proposition for businesses than dumb cloud storage.

“It is storage, but what it really does is serve a really specific purpose, about how to make sure the files I need are available where I need them. It’s not really about ‘storage in the cloud’, it’s about synchronising data across multiple platforms,” he says.

IBRS, itself a small businesses comprising several analysts that work in their own environs, makes use of several such cloud-based collaboration tools, including Sugarsync and Google Drive.

Causes for concern While these tools may offer increased utility or productivity, many businesses still baulk at trusting an outside organisation with sensitive business data. Given that security breaches at large organisations are making headlines more and more frequently, and given that small hosting companies have had wide-scale breaches recently, concerns about such data breaches seem fair enough.

But according to IBRS’s McIsaac, large cloud organisations typically have environments that are more secure than those small companies that experienced breaches.

“If you go to a larger-scale, more professional organisation - like Google, or Microsoft, or Fujitsu, or Telstra - would they have a better environment?

Yes, I believe they would. Would it be bulletproof?

No, probably not. But they’d have more robust processes and such,” he says.

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Cloud storage “What’s required is for the vendors to have standards, or you actually have an audibility clause in your contract. So a third party will actually audit the processes [of the cloud provider] up front, and then ongoing, and give you an opinion about whether or not the processes are sufficient to meet the security or availability guarantees that they make.”

Of all the concerns customers have about cloud storage, data sovereignty is far and away the one most talked about and the one that receives the most press. But opinion is mixed on how relevant it really is.

In simple terms, ‘data sovereignty’ refers to the idea that any data is subject to the laws of the country in which it is stored. So, the idea goes, if you upload a bunch of documents to a data centre located in China, that data is now in the jurisdiction of Chinese law and could potentially be seized by Chinese authorities, should they be allowed to under Chinese law, and should they have reason to look at it.

This would not be the case, the theory says, if you’d kept that data on a hard drive in your organisation’s Australian head office.

Beyond that, the theory says that if the company that stores your data for you is based in another country, your data is again subject to that country’s laws - even if it’s stored in a data centre in your own country.

Much of the noise regarding data sovereignty surrounds the US Patriot Act, an Act of the US Congress that was signed into law less than two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, ostensibly to give US authorities greater power to fight terrorism.

These extra powers make it easier for US law enforcement agencies to extract information from American companies. The bottom line is, if American federal agencies want access to your data for some reason, the Patriot Act makes it even easier for them to get it.

Ninefold’s James stresses the importance of data sovereignty.

“We are Australian owned, as a business, and we are subject only to Australian law. We have all of our data, all of our equipment, based here in Australia. So the data is subject to Australian jurisdiction in terms of the data sovereignty,” says James.

This is important “particularly if you have data that is sensitive, and that could be government data, it could be educational, it could be financial or personal data”.

“If a business has any concerns about where its data could finish up, then it should have its data stored in a data centre that is in Australia, managed and owned by a company that is Australian. That’s the purest and safest way of ensuring

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"If a n Americ a n company wants your data, they go to the Australian courts, and the Australian courts end up coming and taking the data. Or, if it’s an Australian company, ASIC will."

- Kevin McIsaac, IBRS

that you know where your data is, and who has access to it, both physically and by law,” he says.

However, EMC’s Gold suggests that even if a service provider were ordered to hand over a customer’s data to any third party, this data would be meaningless without the keys to unlock it, which, if the cloud provider is set up in the most secure fashion, they would not have. Only the customer would have that ability, as only the customer should have the relevant encryption keys.

“With encryption, the digital rights management and the information controls that we have as part of our security suite, we can have a cloud provider who cannot get access to your data, no matter what,” Gold says. “Practically, it’s impossible.”

Rackspace, a US-based cloud provider whose data centres are located in the US, UK and Hong Kong, says the Patriot Act itself is nothing particularly special.

“It is something that’s standard in every country. It’s law enforcement. If you’re breaking the law, or suspected of breaking the law, any government has the ability to serve a court order, or to request another government that they have a legal enforcement treaty with to serve a court order, to get a hold of that [data],” says Mark Randall, Country Manager for Australia and New Zealand, Rackspace.

“If you are suspected of breaking the law, and the government had a reasonable case against you, then, if they wanted to get hold of your data, it really wouldn’t matter who you were hosting with or which country you were hosting [in],” he says.

IBRS’s McIsaac says: “Quite frankly, if an American company wants your data, they go to the Australian courts, and the Australian courts end up coming and taking the data. Or, if it’s an Australian company, ASIC will.”

In any case, he says, the data sovereignty debate is the wrong argument to have. Instead, consider the difference between security (the chance that your data is leaked to a law enforcement organisation) and risk (the damage to your company should such a leak occur).

In other words, assess the potential damage of having foreign governments combing through your data and weigh that against the benefits of offshore hosting (which may include price).

“Do a risk/cost benefit trade-off. So there’s a very small risk that that data will be made publicly available. What if I could [use cloud storage] in a much better service, at a much lower cost, would the business be willing to have that trade-off?

In most instances, the business would say yes, depending on the data,” he says.

Remember: Voice+Data is not a lawyer! If you’re concerned about foreign entities (including governments) pawing through your data, you should obtain legal advice from an actual legal expert.

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Snia anz

FLASH - SAVIOUR OF THE (I/O) UNIVERSE? Clive Gold, CTO Marketing at EMC and Vice Chair of SNIA ANZ

If you read certain sections of the media you would not be wrong in thinking that flash storage is like ‘the cavalry’ coming over the hill to save the day, but is it going to be the industry saviour?

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here is no doubt that I/O has become the biggest bottleneck in the computing model.

This is as a result of the difference between the performance growths of ‘silicon’ vs mechanical technologies over time. Today, compared to 10 years ago, a CPU produces about 1000x the number of cycles per second, compared to the I/O rate of a mechanical drive, which is essentially the same (2x if you are generous!). Hence the entry of the enterprise flash storage device!

For a few years now, leading storage vendors have been incorporating flash storage into their arrays, as a means to deliver performance, while mechanical disks provide the low-cost storage. With the right amount of automation the cost of storage systems can be reduced, in some cases around the 30% mark. However, there is even more benefit to using flash as a storage medium if we rethink the whole thing. New start-up companies are beginning to engineer storage products from the ground up to use flash as the storage media and the initial results are fantastic.

As an example of this change, consider the RAID mechanism for protecting data. One of the fundamental constructs of the current RAID algorithms is that you are dealing with a set of physical disk drives. The algorithms have therefore been designed to understand the locality of the data, and, in essence, attempt to overcome the physical limitations of physical drives, such as seek times.

Now consider flash memory, where there are no seek times and, in fact, there is no concept of ‘devices’. Add flash and you get more capacity! With these factors in mind, the data protection algorithms can we rewritten to produce better protection with less overhead - certainly dramatically different to the reads and writes that have to be done in a traditional, mechanical disk, RAID system. So what is the downside? Well, this makes performance of

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"New start-up companies are beginning to engineer storage products from the ground up to use flash as the storage media, and the initial results are fantastic."

these devices harder to define. Our training has us looking at seek, access and transfer times on mechanical disks to compare performance metrics, but when it comes to flash devices, the parameters are different. Think about the operation of a flash device in a storage array. When it’s new, and the buffer is empty, and it’s merrily writing to the next cell, everything is working smoothly. Then the buffer fills, and it needs to flush before it accepts new requests. Either that or the flash fills and it has to ‘garbage collect’ to find the cells that can be overwritten. Then, there is the impact of the ‘intelligence’ built into the flash device as well as when and how will it perform these operations.

Each solid state drive (SSD) manufacturer in the past has utilised different measurement methodologies to derive performance specifications for the products they make. Thus, it’s been difficult for buyers to fairly compare the performance specifications of SSDs from different manufacturers. This is the reason SNIA decided to take the complexity out of this situation and to create a series of independent standard conformance tests, which will allow buyers to quickly and accurately compare these devices. The Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification (SSS PTS) defines a suite of tests and test methodologies to measure the performance characteristics of SSDs. The SSS PTS provides performance measurements that may be fairly compared to those of other SSDs measured the same way, in the same environment. For further information visit http://www.snia.org/forums/sssi.

This is just the beginning of a major shift towards flash storage, and as we move into the ‘big data’ world, it is technologies like this which will enable us to make best use of all the data that is available, and make a profound impact on the world we live in!

www.VoiceandData.com.au

from the BI tool growth Natalie Ng, Market Analyst, IDC

In 2011, IT analysis firm IDC estimated the Australian Business Intelligence (BI) software market generated $324.12 million in software licensing and maintenance revenue. This has resulted in a revenue growth of 5.4% from 2010 to 2011 and is forecast to grow at 8.0% CAGR between 2011 to 2016.

“Growth for BI tools in 2011 has been primarily driven by the continuous efforts of Australian organisations to consolidate existing IT infrastructure,” said IDC Market Analyst Natalie Ng. “In addition, there have been more upgrades on existing BI tools seen, as opposed to purchasing newer solutions.

“An end-user survey, by IDC, has found, over the past years, adoption rates of BI tools has increased in importance. Businesses are recognising the benefits BI tools can deliver in an increasingly complex environment and is leveraging them to make intelligent, better-informed business decisions,” said Ng. End-User Query and Analysis software is primarily used for its report building capabilities and has 82.8% share of the BI market. Advanced Analytics software is also a component of the BI market, but a growth inhibitor has been its perceived premium price tag and the insufficient supply of business users with appropriate analytical skills to use such tools.

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In spite of this, Advanced Analytics applications in Australia have 17.2% share of the overall market for BI. “With the forthcoming carbon tax, Australian businesses will look to employ analytic tools in an effort to improve business efficiency to reduce carbon emissions,” said Ng. In the near term, IDC expects prepackaged analytic applications and business analytics appliance offerings to be favoured by SMBs for their ease and low cost of deployment, and SaaS solutions for their low total cost of ownership (TCO).

Home agent market to double Peter Ryan, Practice Leader IT Services Team, Ovum

The number of outsourced home agents will double by 2015 thanks to innovations around security, vertical market expansion and forays beyond the traditional US market, according to analyst firm Ovum.

In its report, ‘Profiting from home agents in CRM outsourcing’, Ovum predicts that the number of agents working more than 20 hours per week will reach nearly 130,000 in the next four years, growing predominantly in the US (88% share).

There will be increased penetration in other English-speaking countries, with Australia being viewed favourably among home agent vendors looking for regional expansion, thanks to its commonalities with US economic and work culture.

Despite this growth, the model will remain ‘niche’ until enterprise concerns

around data security, agent supervision and the difficulties in building ‘team atmosphere’ across a virtual model are overcome.

“Outsourced home agents have garnered a strong reputation for providing end users with robust customer experience, one that ideally drives repeat business and referrals,” said Peter Ryan, practice leader of Ovum IT services team.

“With customer satisfaction and increased revenues identified as key business goals for enterprises, vendors of home agent services are well placed to take on work from enterprises that are more discerning than ever about execution quality and lowering costs.”

“Any firm looking to enter or expand its footprint in the outsourced home agent market should target sectors in which interest in this business model is significant, as well as those that require higher-margin processes, including healthcare and insurancerelated work,” said Ryan.

“Non-voice, multichannel CRM work should also be considered, in order to take advantage of the superior agent quality and sophistication that the virtual model offers.”

Asia Pac contact centres bloom Krishna Baidya, ICT Industry Manager, Frost & Sullivan

Asia Pacific contact centres recorded a 9.7% growth in agent seats, reaching a figure of 2.5 million in 2011.

This number is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.1% to reach 4.0 million by 2018.

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©iStockphoto.com/René Mansi

analysts' table According to Frost & Sullivan, Asia Pacific is expected to demonstrate the highest growth in the global contact centre outsourcing in 2012 and beyond.

The Australian contact centre market experienced moderate growth, with seat numbers growing more than 4% from 2010 to reach 220,000 in 2011.

However, it is expected to witness a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.6% through 2018.

“Businesses are increasingly focusing on a consistent and superior customer experience to serve as a differentiating factor. Coming back from the economic downturn, companies are dedicating greater efforts towards customer satisfaction and retention,” said Krishna Baidya, ICT Industry Manager at Frost & Sullivan.

Australian contact centres are relatively faster in terms of adopting new technology compared to other markets in the APAC region, the analyst firm said. Australian centres have already started to adopt call analytics and monitoring tools, as well as workforce management tools, to streamline their operations and increase productivity.

But while agent numbers are likely to escalate across the region, the market will also experience significant attrition, the firm said. The attrition rates in the Asia Pacific contact centre market will be higher than the rates in other markets due to high stress levels and career opportunities in other industries. In 2011, the average attrition rate for the Asia Pacific contact centre market as a whole was approximately 19.1%.

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Worldwide IT spend to reach $3.6 trillion in 2012 Richard Gordon, Research Vice President, Gartner

Worldwide IT spending will reach US$3.6 trillion in 2012, an increase of 3% over 2011’s figure of US$3.5 trillion, according to analyst firm Gartner.

“While the challenges facing global economic growth persist - the eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery, a slowdown in China - the outlook has at least stabilised," said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner.

“There has been little change in either business confidence or consumer sentiment in the past quarter, so the short-term outlook is for continued caution in IT spending.”

But while the projected growth for overall IT spending may seem meagre, Gartner expects enterprise spending on public cloud services to grow from US$91 billion worldwide in 2011 to US$109 billion in 2012, an increase of almost 20%.

And by 2016, the firm expects enterprise spending on public cloud services to reach US$207 billion.

“Business process as a service (BPaaS) still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by enterprises, but other areas such as platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are growing faster,” Gordon said. Gartner expects IT services spending to reach US$864 billion in 2012, a 2.3% increase from 2011.

industry movements Telecoms consumer protection The Australian and Communications Media Authority (ACMA) has agreed to register the revised Telecommunications Consumer Protections (TCP) Code, which ACMA says will give telco customers greater protection on issues such as bill shock, confusing mobile plans and poor complaints handling.

The Communications Alliance welcomed the decision and simultaneously announced the appointment of Deirdre Mason as the Independent Chair of Communications Compliance the company newly created to foster and monitor industry-wide compliance with the TCP Code.

Mason was previously a director of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO), the Chief Executive of the Committee for Sydney and a long-time Telstra executive. She is one of three directors appointed to Communications Compliance (CC) by the Board of Communications Alliance.

John Stanton, Comms Alliance CEO, said the new TCP Code was the most comprehensive upgrade of consumer protections ever achieved in the telco sector.

“This code heralds a sea change in the telco consumer experience in Australia,” Stanton said.

Michael Lee, Communications Alliance Chair and former Federal Minister for Communications, will also serve on the Communications Compliance Board.

Social network acquisition Microsoft has acquired Yammer for US$1.2 billion, in an attempt to gain inroads into the enterprise social networking market.

The move follows a recent trend in enterprise software, with many vendors adding social elements to their products, seeking to tap into the strong consumer appetite for social networking.

15 // AUGUST 2012

@work

IP PBX BRINGS STAFF OUT FROM UNDER THE DESK

S

ummerland Credit Union has overhauled its call centre and internal communications infrastructure, replacing its ageing telephony system in the process.

The credit union, with its head office and call centre in the northern NSW town of Lismore, was using three brands of PABX across its 13 branches, located from Grafton to Coolangatta, and a brand mix of analog and digital PABX systems. It was difficult to make changes or move handsets without in-depth technical knowledge of each system. And it was also difficult getting support and spare parts for the 13-year-old system at head office, where the call centre was located.

In evaluating three systems as part of an open RFI, Luke Haber, IT Manager, Summerland Credit Union, said: “The design was driven by the operational needs of our staff and had to cater for business expansion. The advanced call centre functionality called for integrated software and an appropriate IP PABX.” The call centre wanted to merge three in-bound teams, improve delivery of incoming member calls and provide advanced automated reporting. The solution also had to factor in the inconsistent capacity and high cost of communications network services in regional Australia.

The company ultimately implemented a solution from NEC. Thanks to the Netlink functionality of the solution, four branches are soon to use the centralised

“It’s easy to track down anyone anywhere in the organisation. Mobile staff like the voicemailto-email integration. All extensions can set up a multiparty conference.”

- Luke Haber

integrated IP telephony network at head office, with 100 staff currently using the system. Twenty agents in the call centre provide internal support and inbound member contact.

It is envisaged the credit union will be able to spread any overflow to other branches to cater for peak loads and future growth. The remaining two branches are scheduled to have the SV8100 communications server with the Netlink feature installed later down the line.

A full line audit and deletion of unused lines is saving Summerland $35,000 per year in rental alone. An internal cabling upgrade has underpinned the installation of the NEC infrastructure. Following implementation, Summerland soon experienced increased call quality between branches and a reduction of faults.

Staff are using and/or customising Presence templates to record their location and availability, meaning calls can be directed quickly and accurately to the most appropriate person. This has led to faster response times for inbound queues and better contact management between staff and members.

“The NEC call centre software maintains accurate service levels with excellent reporting. We have measurable improvements in productivity and accountability for our call centre staff,” Haber said.

As the phone is integrated with Outlook most of the input and interaction is from the PC, which drives the handset. The IP PABX system at head office allows handsets to be moved without reprogramming.

“It’s easy to track down anyone anywhere in the organisation. Mobile staff like the voicemail-to-email integration. All extensions can set up a multiparty conference,” Haber said.

From the perspective of Haber and his four-person IT team, the NEC solution has a very low management overhead, with equipment supplier North Coast Telephone Systems (NCTS) contracted to provide all equipment and software support.

Haber said: “My goal is to have us managing our service providers, not under desks relocating phone handsets.”

NEC Business Solutions Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q271

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www.VoiceandData.com.au

@work

index 18

 College halves phone bill with SIP trunking

22

20

Emergency services resuscitates WAN

20

 Fusing five ADSL2+ lines into one

 Televising the revolution

22

 Diverting traffic with virtualised load balancing



 IP PBX brings staff out

from under the desk 16

Emergency services resuscitates WAN

The Victorian Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA) has upgraded its WAN to a fault tolerance architecture WAN service, in order to cope with increasing call traffic, additional agency responsibilities, strong forecasted population growth across metropolitan, regional and rural Victoria, as well as the relocation of one of three emergency communications centres.

The organisation had to complete the upgrade while maintaining emergency services support to the Victorian community.

ESTA provides the critical link between the community and Victoria’s emergency services organisations (ESOs) through Triple Zero (000) call taking and dispatch. With 24/7 operation, it is one of the few agencies in the world that manages communications for the full range of emergency services including police, fire, ambulance and SES. In addition to providing emergency call taking and dispatch services, ESTA manages

18 // AUGUST 2012

three purpose-built networks to support the needs of the ESOs. These services are: the metropolitan-based Mobile Data Network (MDN); the Metropolitan Mobile Radio (MMR) service; and the Emergency Alerting System (EAS).

The technology network supporting ESTA’s delivery of service is both physical (telecommunications) and virtual (call handling and dispatch processes) and is, therefore, the backbone of providing ESTA’s services.

ESTA elected to augment its network in-house team to support delivery of the upgrade and purchased Cisco infrastructure, for both the WAN upgrade and the data centre relocation, from ICT solutions and services provider Logicalis, who would provide support in the design, provision and build of the new network.

Specifically, ESTA requested consultancy for the upgrade of three metropolitan

and regional emergency communications centres, one of which would be relocated during the course of the year. It also needed to support mission-critical, business as usual at its Network Operations Centre (NOC) and the new network needed enough scale to support ad hoc surges in demand, as required by ongoing projects.

Logicalis delivered the project over a six-month period in late 2011, with 600 ESTA operations staff, at the time, using the network continuously during the upgrade. It also delivered the network in time for the relocation of the emergency communications centre in Burwood East, to avoid additional costs.

Complicated in itself, the centre needed an entirely new design, new physical cabling, testing, production and support. Logicalis provided maintenance and 24/7 management for ESTA’s network through its NetManage infrastructure management service which manages people, processes and technology in combination.

“Given ESTA operates 24/7 emergency support, there was, categorically, no room for failure or error during this project.” said Mark Powell, General Manager of Technology, ESTA. “Many components contributed to its successful delivery, including our internal teams and the network itself.”

“From an external perspective, Logicalis provided precisely the right technology and consultancy to support us in executing a seamless project with multiple government and public stakeholders.

“That’s no mean feat. The best result we needed was no downtime and absolute quality of service to ensure the public could continue to access emergency services at all times.”

Logicalis Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q545

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@work Fusing five ADSL2+ lines into one

Regional school Nowra Anglican College has implemented broadband bonding technology to increase broadband speeds from 11 Mbps to a maximum of 82 Mbps, and an average upload speed of 0.8 Mbps to a maximum of 22 Mbps.

The school has 750 students and approximately 100 teachers, support and administration staff, all of whom require internet access.

According to Andrew Warfield, ICT Manager and Systems Administrator for Shoalhaven Region Anglican Schools, the need for a good internet connection has increased over the last few years. With the existing system, users experienced dropouts and problems with https sites. “Nowra Anglican College is about five kilometres from the exchange, which results in greatly

reduced speeds, even though we do have ADSL2,” said Warfield. “I’m told that for every 500 metres you are from the exchange you lose 20% of the available speed.

“To try and cope with demand, we had four ADSL2+ services with a load balancing firewall/gateway. Our speeds would vary between 4 Mbps and 11 Mbps downlink and 0.8 Mbps uplink.”

The school installed broadband bonding from Fusion Broadband in January this year. The system employs packet-based load balancing algorithms that provide a sum of the connected services in both directions.

Since installing the new system, and adding just one extra connection, Nowra Anglican College can now attain speeds of 82 Mbps downlink and 22 Mbps uplink when using compressible data, and speeds of 25 Mbps when downloading uncompressed data. This is achieved using five ADSL2+ lines.

“We can actually use the internet without it crashing every day. While we still reach peak usage, far more can be done. There is now a single redundant internet connection, greatly reducing complexity and simplifying service management. According to Warfield, the technology will remain relevant even once the NBN is in place.

“Once the NBN hits our front lawn we will still use it for redundancy and aggregation; but until then we will be happy knowing we have the fastest speed we can possibly get in our area.

“Everyone is happy, no one more so than myself. Before this bonding technology there was no other option that was within budget: SHDSL was too expensive and slower; fibre was well out of range; and wireless options were slow and well out of budget as well,” Warfield said.

Fusion Broadband Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q578

College halves phone bill with SIP trunking Arndell Anglican College has reduced its monthly phone bills by 50% and improved its voice service levels, thanks to a new SIP trunking service.

Arndell is a co-educational Primary to Year 12 school located in Oakville and is a member of the Sydney Anglican Schools Corporation.

“As a school we need to provide fast and efficient and reliable service to our parents,” said Rohan Smith, Head of IT Services, Arndell Anglican College.

As the school upgraded its data network in line with its long-term IT strategy, it decided it was also time to upgrade its telephony system.

“We previously had an old Commander PABX which had limited lines and limited features so we were unable to transfer calls effectively to the right locations in a time-efficient manner,” said Smith.

With no call transfer or voicemail features, staff were reduced to taking notes on paper and passing messages around by hand. This affected the school’s ability to provide a high level of service to the community. At the same time, the school found that its call costs were increasing, which led it to look for alternatives.

20 // AUGUST 2012

The school ultimately chose MyNetFone to update its telecommunications services to meet its communications needs. This was done in partnership with Vertel, Arndell’s data provider, which provided a dedicated link for the carriage of IP data and voice traffic.

MyNetFone provides a 20 SIP trunk service and an additional block of 100 direct-in-dial numbers (DIDs). The company also ported some of Arndell Anglican College’s existing PSTN numbers. The new system includes features such as ‘Follow Me’, to redirect incoming calls in case of PBX failure, and ‘Caller ID Overstamp’, displaying the school’s original PSTN number on outgoing calls.

Vertel provided the college with separate VLANs for voice and data. A direct peering arrangement between MyNetFone and Vertel was established via a Layer 3 connection. The college benefits from quality of service with voice traffic staying on-net and avoiding the public internet.

“We moved from five PSTN lines to 20 virtual lines with the MyNetFone SIP Trunk service and have reduced our phone bill by several thousand dollars as a result,” said Smith.

“In addition to reducing the calls costs, we found the most savings were on line rental.

We’re now paying the one fee for the 20 lines as opposed to five line rental charges.”

This amounts to around a 50% saving on phone spend. The savings have been reinvested into other IT upgrades. The college has improved voice communications service levels, making it easier for parents to reach teachers within the college and for messages to be delivered.

MyNetFone Pty Ltd Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q727

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@work Televising the revolution The NSW Teachers Federation was able to connect protestors at its recent Sydney-based stop work meeting to tens of thousands of teachers in regional areas across New South Wales, thanks to webcast technology.

Staging Connections provided the technology to connect more than 50,000 teachers across NSW with their counterparts at the NSW Teachers Federation Stop Work Meeting held on Wednesday 27 June at Sydney Town Hall.

More than 5000 teachers attended the main meeting site at Sydney Town Hall, with the Staging Connections’ team capturing the entire event and webcasting it live to more than 30 regional sites. Teachers throughout NSW met in RSL Clubs, town halls and other meeting areas to join their colleagues via live video feed.

Five cameras captured the action of the event, including speeches from the President of the NSW Teachers Federation, Maurie Mulheron, and members of the educational community. With a team of 19 working on the event, Staging Connections’ five technical directors and

14 crew controlled live crosses to audience members for reactions on what was being said by speakers.

Jason Nicholas, Digital Media Editor for the NSW Teachers Federation, said, “We used to broadcast via Sky Channel into pubs across the state and have now evolved into internet streaming. “It was a very sensitive and confidential event to plan and we felt confident that Staging Connections could maintain a high level of security from our initial discussions to the day itself.”

The live video stream allowed even smaller towns with limited internet connection to receive the high quality of delivery, while other locations watched in HD via adaptive bit rate technology.

“Overall, we were especially pleased with the professionalism of the whole crew,” Nicholas said.

Staging Connections Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q577

Diverting traffic with virtualised load balancing Hosting and managed service provider UltraServe has implemented load balancing software to improve resource utilisation and throughput, while minimising response time and avoiding overload.

Specialising in cloud and managed hosting infrastructure for many high-traffic e-retailer and media sites in Australia, the company required a load balancing solution that would allow transparent growth capability, enabling businesses to scale efficiently and cost-effectively.

“The situation was no longer sustainable and we became quite frustrated with the old and traditional load-balancing technology available. Not only was it old hardware, but also very expensive to maintain,” said UltraServe founder and CEO Samuel Yeats.

In 2011, UltraServe investigated the available load balancing options on the market and, after reviewing a number of vendors, decided on Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager software.

Stingray Traffic Manager is a virtual application delivery controller (ADC) that provides flexibility and a single point of management for accelerating applications hosted on servers. It also equips network operators and developers with Riverbed Stingray TrafficScript software to create traffic management rules using global load balancing, bandwidth management, rate shaping and service level monitoring.

UltraServe integrated Stingray Traffic Manager into its cloud infrastructure and developed an autoscale functionality that allows its clients to automatically provision servers in response to load.

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Since the implementation, UltraServe has noticed significant improvements to productivity and performance.

“Stingray has allowed us and our customers to scale more efficiently, at a much lower cost. A significant cost saving was experienced, which we are able to pass onto our customers,” said Yeats.

“Our customers are finding that they can achieve cost savings of 30 to 40% using the Stingray autoscale functionality to scale infrastructure in response to demand,” said Yeats. Customers are now also able to do anytime, anywhere upgrades and updates with a single download and licence key.

“A key promise of cloud computing is the ability to innovate at reduced risk and cost. The flexibility of being able to scale up and down licensing allows the product to be used for short-term campaigns, market testing and innovation without the barrier of a significant capex investment,” said Yeats.

UltraServe and its customers have found that moving from physical load balancing appliances, with limited internal scalability, to a virtualised Stingray environment has created a very agile platform.

“In using the platform, our customers have been able to grow seamlessly up to 300%. Many start with a basic Stingray solution, then add features and scale out to a clustered active load-balancing environment, as required,” said Yates.

Riverbed Technology Australia Pty Ltd Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q711

www.VoiceandData.com.au

Data sovereignty

©iStockphoto.com/ewg3D

THE DANGERS OF HOSTING DATA OFFSHORE Carlo Minassian, Founder & CEO, earthwave

Hosting your data in the cloud offers several benefits for organisations, including easier file sharing among employees, easy remote backup and, in some cases, cost savings. But with the US Patriot Act, the DMCA and similar, storing your data with an offshore company may allow foreign entities to rifle through said data - without your knowledge.

C

loud is often presented as a cure-all for data storage, because it combines ease of access with low cost. In addition, cloud offers the seeming security of housing precious information off-site in purposebuilt facilities not susceptible to natural disasters and power outage.

This perception has become so widespread that organisations, including many in government, are rapidly moving parts or all of their operations to the cloud. While there are indications that some of the large early adopters, like IBM, are reconsidering the parameters (they recently forbade employee access to Dropbox and Apple’s iCloud), the momentum to the cloud is unlikely to be stopped, because the imagined savings are just too attractive.

Two years ago, the federal government in the United States began to urge its agencies to embrace a ‘cloud first’ approach when it came to IT procurement. The goal was to lower costs, and today they are saving about US$5.5 billion every year. Given recent projections, if cloud first was adopted even more widely, those savings would rise to US$12 billion - almost the equivalent of NASA’s annual budget.

With numbers like this, it’s no surprise that cloud is becoming so dominant. It’s also no surprise that IT managers’ concerns are frequently shunted aside, especially when ‘hard’ savings numbers are weighed against security risks that are difficult - if not impossible - to assign a dollar figure.

But these concerns must not be pushed aside.

Any organisation - government or private sector

24 // AUGUST 2012

- that doesn’t become fluent in data security, is taking a sizeable risk. This is especially true if that organisation is based in Australia.

While there are numerous issues around cloud and data security, I want to focus on two of the most important: data sovereignty and the value of keeping things onshore.

Foreign law There is a strong out-of-sight/out-of-mind component to the cloud. It might seem like stating the obvious, but when your data is in the cloud, it is actually a ‘resident’ of a particular country. As such, it is governed by the laws of that country and those laws might be very different, and significantly less friendly, than those of Australia.

Michael Chertoff, the former head of the US Department of Homeland Security, has argued forcefully that organisations that handle private data should keep it onshore. Chertoff experienced first-hand how quickly data sovereignty can devolve into a legal wrangle that puts critical and private information at risk. As a result of sweeping antiterrorism legislation, US law required that international airlines provide access to traveller information. From the European perspective, America was asking for protected information about its citizens.

This situation led Chertoff to conclude that data sovereignty and cloud goes well beyond protecting classified information and military secrets. He made a vivid point that can be applied to Australia: “At all levels of government,

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we store the working-day information that helps government function: email exchanges, calendars and the like. The scope of our government’s data holdings is as wide as the expanse and reach of government, and likely contains information that touches upon all aspects of American life [including driver’s licences, real estate data, birth and death records, etc].”

Chertoff was saying that it’s easy to forget just how big the scope of data storage is today.

Some of it might be non-critical, but much of it is genuinely precious and needs to be treated like any other commodity. Where that commodity is stored and who has access to it matters a great deal.

Chertoff’s observations also apply to Australia, ironically in part because America’s own sweeping laws make offshoring Australian data in the United States something to avoid. Both the Patriot Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) have shown just how data stored in the United States is vulnerable to law enforcement intrusions.

The Patriot Act means that your data can be accessed and you probably will never know - in fact, in some cases, providers might not be allowed to tell their customers of such access.

Moreover, US companies usually readily comply with even informal requests, known as National Security Letters (NSL), for such access to data.

Similarly, enforcement of the DMCA has led to dramatic cloud-shutdowns like the Megaupload case that should have made anyone using similar services reconsider moving to another data storage solution. After all, while Megaupload was targeted for music and video piracy, a study by Palo Alto Networks showed that the service had greater use on corporate networks than Dropbox, YouSendIt and Box.net combined - all currently seen as ‘legitimate’ cloud providers.

Moreover, US-owned companies will also be forced to comply with these laws even if they are housing data in Australia. But the reality is that there are many bilateral agreements between Australia and the United States. If the US wants particular data, that data will often be given to them on a silver platter, regardless of whether or not it is being housed in a US-owned data centre.

But the issue of data sovereignty goes beyond the United States. Many leading organisations are starting to recognise that the country where data is stored is critical. Financial organisations tend to be especially sensitive to these issues because of regulatory issues. Andrew Stokes, Chief Scientist of Deutsche Bank Global Technology, recently said, “There are so many regulators and regulations - we need to be safe. Every geography has its own unique sector and laws.”

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A familiar environment

"Both the Patriot Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) have shown just how data stored in the United States is vulnerable to law enforcement intrusions."

For most Australian organisations, there are substantial advantages to storing data onshore in an environment that is politically, economically, financially and even geologically stable and familiar.

This involves business continuity (BC) concerns.

After all, the organisation can better assess the robustness of data centres, especially when it comes to disaster recovery (DR) scenarios.

The Brisbane floods and the bushfires in Canberra drove the point home that you need your DR facilities in different locations, because having two data centres in the same geographical region can still lead to prolonged downtimes. But, again, onshoring allows for the organisation to assess the best approach from a DR angle.

Additionally, on-shoring permits organisations to benefit from strong local security certifications such as ASIO T4, DSD HP and PCI DSS, which are essential for the highest level of data protection. The ‘human factor’ and physical proximity is also critical. It matters that an organisation can see where their data physically resides, that they can visit data centre sites, get to know the people delivering their services and have access to senior engineers in their time zones.

Arguably, the starting point for data security begins well before you start worrying about data sovereignty. Government agencies and any organisation with sufficient reason to care about data security need to know that: • data is being identified, classified and protected both physically and electronically; • any person who may handle the data has appropriate security clearances; • there is a defence-in-depth strategy in place; • threat detection and response, not just data protection, is practised; and • the three postulates of security (confidentiality, integrity and availability) are being enforced.

While most, if not all, onshore cloud providers will fall down on these counts, those organisations that are scrupulous about their data can and should find private cloud providers that can meet their rigorous specifications. The cost might be higher and the ROI difficult to calculate, but data security means too much to be lost in the current rush to the cloud.

Carlo Minassian is the founder and CEO of earthwave, an Australian provider of managed security services, security-as-a-service and ‘clean pipes’. Since starting the company in 2000, Minassian has helped establish earthwave as a security service provider serving hundreds of Australian businesses. He and his team blog at http://www.earthwave.com.au/blog/.

25 // AUGUST 2012

building blocks THE PRODUCTS & SERVICES DRIVING CONVERGENCE

storage BACKUP AND RECOVERY EMC has announced NetWorker Unified Backup and Recovery Software 8.0. The software has been enhanced with a streamlined architecture for improved performance and scalability. It also offers integration with EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems, broadened support for Microsoft applications and multitenancy management which enables cloud service delivery.

A ‘Client Direct’ feature enables NetWorker clients to backup directly from the application client to disk, improving performance by up to 50%. DD Boost integration with the NetWorker client brings benefits to backup workloads while enhancing Data Domain system performance. Benefits include lower network traffic, integrated management with clonecontrolled replication, and automated configuration, monitoring and reporting capabilities.

Microsoft data protection is enhanced with new capabilities for SQL Server, including support for SQL Server 2012 and Granular Level Recovery for Exchange, SharePoint and Hyper-V. EMC Corporation Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q618

UNIFIED STORAGE The ReadyData 5200 is a unified storage product targeted at SMBs and SMEs and includes cloud-managed data replication as a standard feature. The device is suitable for SMB virtualisation environments.

Users can leverage thin provisioning in virtual environments, replicate files and databases to offsite locations, and recover data from unlimited point-in-time snapshots, via a graphic-based user interface.

The device enables disaster recovery to limit downtime in the event of a network failure.

The product offers thin provisioning, compression and deduplication of block (SAN) and file (NAS) data; replication over 128-bit SSL connections for block and file data; unlimited snapshots for block and file data; and can scale up to 60 drives and 180 TB total capacity.

It features two 10 GbE ports and mixed configurations of SATA, SAS and SSD drives; backup software compatibility with major vendors like Symantec, Acronis, CommVault, StorageCraft, Veeam and Quest; virtual network interface support for powerful network traffic management; and virtualisation vendor certifications from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.

Netgear Australia Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q609

MODULAR TAPE LIBRARY Oracle’s StorageTek SL150 modular tape library is a scalable tape library designed to meet the archiving and data protection needs of mid-sized and growing businesses.

The modular tape library scales from 30 to 300 slots and up to 900 TB of capacity, giving users room to grow in a single tape library while reducing service, installation and capital expenditure costs.

The tape library offers management via a GUI, built on Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Linux. Users can view and navigate drive, library and media information, without dealing with cumbersome file structure drill-downs, and capacity can be added quickly, using the library’s USB-based auto-discovery system to find new expansion modules.

The tape library supports a range of open systems environments. Operating systems and platforms include: Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Database Appliance, Oracle’s SPARC and Sun x86 servers and Oracle’s Sun Storage.

Oracle Corporation Australia Pty Ltd Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q709

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ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT OpenText Extended ECM Version 10 for SAP Solutions includes support for the SAP customer relationship management (SAP CRM) and SAP supplier relationship management (SAP SRM) applications, among numerous other enhancements.

The solution has been designed to help enterprises improve customer interaction efficiency by consolidating support documents, such as contracts or email correspondence, in one place and making them available through the SAP CRM user interface. On the supplier side, it extends SAP supplier relationship management with vendor collaboration and content management inside the procurement processes of an organisation.

The addition of a social stream, called OpenText Pulse, allows team members to track, and quickly jump to, the most up-todate content. It also allows people to connect to each other and see the status of content updates from across the organisation. This allows knowledge sharing and transparency as content is changed or added within core business processes driven by SAP solutions.

Other new features include enhanced workspace access and permission control based on SAP roles and authorisations, integration with the Microsoft Windows desktop and Office applications, access to content via the SAP NetWeaver technology portal and advanced OCR capabilities for scanned documents (searchable PDF).

OpenText Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/N419

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BUILDING BLOCKS VIRTUALISED DATA CENTRE

MEDIA SERVER

Nutanix enables users to virtualise a data centre without requiring a SAN. It eliminates the need for network storage while still delivering the enterprise-class performance, scalability and required data management features.

The hardware and software solution provides complete server and storage capabilities required to run virtual machines and store their data. The building block approach allows users to start with what is needed and add additional blocks as needs grow to scale-out a single system.

Features include: out-of-the-box capabilities - up and running in 30 min and easy scale-out; elimination of network storage resulting in an immediate 40-60% reduction in CAPEX, while providing highly advanced shared-storage capabilities; a smaller, more efficient converged architecture for server and storage translates to measurable OPEX reduction in administration, power and cooling costs.

Interaction Edge is a combined gateway, media server and SIP proxy appliance designed to streamline enterprise IP telephony deployments.

The device provides gateway capabilities enabling connections between traditional trunk lines and voice-over-IP networks, and adds media server and SIP proxy functionality in a single appliance.

By combining functionality onto a single appliance, enterprises and contact centres can simplify IT management and reduce costs.

The product is designed to work with Interactive Intelligence’s IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center CIC. The media server offloads the CIC application server by handling all audio processing for improved reliability and performance. Its SIP proxy helps to more effectively route calls between servers in enterprise IP telephony environments for increased operational efficiencies and remote survivability.

The gateway capabilities of the device are available in one-, two-, four- and eight-span increments for flexible scalability.

Matrium Technologies Pty Ltd

Interactive Intelligence Australia

Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q347

Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q352

RG6 RG11 RG58 RG142 RG174 RG179 RG213 RG316 LMR series Leaky cables and more ®

U.FL SMA BNC TNC N Type F Type and more

‘LMR ® is the registered trademark of Times Microwave Systems’

Ampec Technologies Pty Ltd

Unit 1, 63-79 Parramatta Road, Silverwater, NSW 2128 Tel: +61 2 8741 5000 E: sales@ampec.com.au W: www.ampec.com.au

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27 // AUGUST 2012

BUILDING BLOCKS MOBILE DEVICE MANAGEMENT ManageEngine Mobile Device Management is a module of DesktopCentral, an enterprise desktop management solution. Mobile Device Management extends centralised IT administration to any iOS device, allowing businesses to use a single system for managing all of their desktop computers, laptops, iPhones and iPads.

Employees increasingly expect to handle their routine emails and communications on their personal devices, whether they are in the office or working from home. Mobile Device Management features allow IT administrators to perform device scans, generate asset management reports, modify device configurations and ensure corporate information and data policies are followed.

Security functionality built into the solution allows the IT team to remotely lock the iOS device or remotely erase data stored on the device in the event of theft.

Asset tracking information can be automatically collected and reported, including app inventory, security settings, device hardware details and security certificates that have been installed.

Zoho Corporation Private Limited Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q486

VIRTUAL CONTACT CENTRE Telstra Global has announced its global Virtual Contact Centre (VCC) solution.

The service offers companies access to a multichannel customer service experience with a single service level agreement. With the service, companies can scale their contact centre capabilities to accommodate initiatives such as new product launches, trials or peaks in customer demand, with no long-term commitment or new licence fees.

Accessed via Telstra Global’s Secure IP VPN, the VCC software can be updated or changed to update campaign scripts, add agents to different campaigns or activate remote agents. It also offers real-time CRM integration to direct customer calls to the right operator regardless of the contact channel used.

Organisations can pay for the service based on usage or flat fee.

Telstra Corporation Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q613

28 // AUGUST 2012

IM SECURITY Symantec Instant Messaging Security.cloud (IMS.cloud), with support for Microsoft Lync, is now available.

The product helps organisations that communicate using instant messaging platforms address their security and compliance issues.

IMS.cloud is designed to scan every IM sent to or coming from an organisation. Incoming messages, including attachments are scanned for viruses, worms and URLs which may lead to malicious Web sites.

All incoming and outgoing messages are also matched against the organisation’s acceptable use policies. Any message that is malicious or suspicious or violates corporate policy is automatically blocked and the user is notified.

The solution includes a content control engine, malware protection, malicious URL detection, automatic message logging and configurable disclaimers. It helps meets regulatory compliance by logging message transcripts. Cloud-based archiving is available for organisations with more stringent compliance needs.

The solution is cloud based, meaning no on-premise hardware and minimal software is required.

Symantec (Australia) Pty Ltd Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q612

www.VoiceandData.com.au

BUILDING BLOCKS SOFTPHONE MyNetFone Desktop is a softphone application that offers voice and video communication on both Windows and Mac computers. The application utilises open standard SIP communication protocols.

The application is suitable for small to medium-sized businesses keen to leverage advanced phone features such as Microsoft Outlook integration and videoconferencing from a single user interface, without the up-front cost of feature-rich hardware or the inconvenience of multiple software applications.

Key features include the ability to record voice and video calls; add contacts during calls; and manage, sort and filter up to 3000 contacts. In addition, it lets the users rearrange the layout of the phone interface and hide the dial pad when not in use, allowing them to maximise their desktop space.

Remote workers can set up their laptop in any location with internet access and have a ‘remote office’, be part of call groups, be reached via 4-digit extension from the head office and get voicemail and voicemail to email.

Employees working from home can be integrated into the company phone system and call hunt groups, without the expense of buying and shipping a desk phone to their home.

Enterprise features designed for business users include Auto Answer, workgroup capabilities and full auto provisioning with MyNetFone.

MyNetFone Pty Ltd Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q614

RADIO FOR ENVIRONMENTS CONTAINING POTENTIALLY EXPLOSIVE GAS AND DUST TR Hirecom has available to rent the Motorola MTP850Ex TETRA ATEX and IEC Ex, a suitable two-way radio for environments containing potentially explosive gas and dust.

Features include: IP64 (Cat 2) rating; can be operated in gas zones 1 and 2 classified hazardous areas (Ex ib IIC T4); can be operated in dust zones 21 and 22 classified hazardous areas (Ex tD A21 IP6x ib D21 T90°C).

TR Hirecom hires two-way radios and systems including IS/FM/ATEXrated radios for the security, events, construction, manufacturing and petrochemical industries. Its rental range includes: analog portable and mobile two-way radios; Motorola MotoTRBO digital portable and mobile two-way radio; trunked and digital radio systems; iridium satellite phones; complete radio systems. The company also provides consulting and planning services.

TechRentals Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q496

SOCIAL VIDEO The Polycom HD video software is a group social video chat application that allows users to access their contact lists in popular consumer social platforms, including Facebook, Skype and gTalk (Google video), and conduct HD video chats regardless of the applications the other participants are using, or where they are.

Because the app combines contact lists from Facebook, Skype and gTalk, users can see who is online and invite them to an HD video chat simply by dragging or selecting them. Participants receive the video chat invitation within their preferred messenger interface and they can simply click and join from within their browser - without downloading anything.

The free version of the app supports HD video chat with up to three participants, as well as screen- and document-sharing so users can have face-to-face conversations while, for example, viewing a spreadsheet in a budget plan.

Polycom Global Pty Ltd Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q608

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29 // AUGUST 2012

IPv6 IPv6

©iStockphoto.com/pictafolio

THE UPSIDE OF IPv4 EXHAUSTION Alan Way, International Development Manager, Spirent Communications

With the pool of available IPv4 addresses about to run out, organisations are already under pressure to transition to IPv6. But this transition isn’t necessarily a burden: there are some positives to making the move, including increased network performance and efficiency.

I

n the build-up to IPv6 Day, and since, a lot has been written about the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. The pool of unallocated addresses has run out, and the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) will soon exhaust their local pools - Asia has already done so. For now, all new internet services will continue to require IPv4 addresses to access legacy addresses, but supplies will not last for long - despite temporary measures such as recovery of unused public addresses and the use of public Network Address Translation (NAT).

By 2015, 17% of the internet is predicted to use IPv6, with 28% of new internet users running the protocol.

Even if a business is confident that, for the time being, IPV4 plus NAT will give it all the visibility it needs, other factors could still force it to adopt IPv6 sooner than expected. For example: a growing number of national governments are applying mandates for IPv6 readiness. Also many new applications and services are being designed for a new generation of devices such as sensors, appliance-based controls, power management (smart grid), 4G wireless/LTE that are only just beginning to migrate to the internet and amounting to a surging demand for extra addresses - necessarily IPv6 because of the sheer numbers, predicted by companies such as IDC, Intel and Cisco to reach 15 billion intelligent, internet connected devices by 2015. Also, even if IPv6 devices can reach the company website via NAT, it could still miss key customer information based on web server logs which require native IPv6. With pressures such as these being touted, IPv6 migration can begin to feel

30 // AUGUST 2012

like yet another depressing burden on an already overstretched IT team. So let us, for a change, ‘accentuate the positive’ and ask if there might not be other benefits to look forward to, positive reasons to consider the move to IPv6? Yes, there are significant performance benefits of moving towards IPv6 that are often overlooked. It’s not just about addressing, it can actually put a little vroom into your network - a V6 under the bonnet really is preferable to a V4 if you are looking for added performance. In this case it can even be more efficient.

Checksums and efficiency IPv6 is a much more structured, streamlined and efficient protocol than IPv4. IPv6 routers need not waste their precious resources calculating checksums on IP packets. Why bother, when the upper layer protocols already have protection in place? UDP, TCP and ICMPv6 all have checksums to protect the data and, along with the checksum at the MAC layer, do we really need another checksum? I don’t think so and neither did the designers of IPv6.

Fragmentation and packet length Fragmentation is another task retired from router functionality. End points within the network have to maintain their packets within the MTU provided by the router - but with IPv6’s fixed length packets, these busy routers no longer have to reconstitute packet sizes to fit the pipes. Instead the routers can continue to focus on their primary task of directing packets to the correct destination.

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Unlike IPv4’s varying packet lengths, IPv6 has a fixed packet length of 40 bytes. So the Header Length field for IPv4 is no longer present in IPv6, because we know it is going to be 40 bytes.

This makes processing the packet much more efficient from the router’s perspective. There is still a field to describe the payload length, but this now also includes the packet options or extension headers. Again this helps improve the efficiency of the routers. With few exceptions, options are passed transparently through the router with no processing required.

So what are the exceptions that will have to be processed by the router? A few packets will have the hop by hop extension header in the very first position set to ‘0’ - indicating that the extensions following have to be processed by the router. This could, for example, indicate a router alert or jumbo gram - a very large packet anything up to 4 GB in length. But these options will only be handled on an exception basis, and that frees up a lot of resource within the router. Unlike IPv4 options, they do not have to be processed at every hop.

And don’t forget the flow label The flow label is a 20-bit field at the top of the IPv6 packet - seldom used to date, but bringing the promise of much improved quality of service.

Unlike differentiated services, it could deliver a more assured quality of service, similar to RSVP. Differentiated services, such as assured forwarding, rely on good human engineering at the initial network design because, for example, the QoS provisioning is largely static so, if the network is oversubscribed, certain applications such as VoIP could degrade voice quality across the entire network for all users. With the use of the flow label, however, we can implement a much more dynamic model that could more effectively mimic the PSTN. Rather than degrading the service for all users, we can provide a ‘busy’ signal when there is no longer sufficient resource within the network to guarantee a minimum QoS. Generally the source will allocate a unique flow label for a given flow, maintaining the same destination address and source address for the life of the flow. A specific service level agreement (SLA) can be requested when the flow is initiated: if the network agrees to the requested SLA, such as throughput and latency, then this SLA will be maintained for the duration of the flow.

Experimental use of the flow label One experimental use of the flow label showed that a tremendous improvement in throughput could be achieved in high latency communications more prone to errors - such as satellite communications. One enterprising user modified their TCP stack to bypass the TCP slow start rules - the

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"There are significant performance benefits of moving towards IPv6 that are often overlooked. It’s not just about addressing, it can actually put a little vroom into your network."

rationale for this was that, if the network has an agreed SLA due to the flow label negotiation, there would be little need to go through the TCP slow start process, or drop the throughput by 50% on account of occasional packet loss.

Although I was not able to get direct copies of the test results you can get a very good idea of the improvement from the diagram above showing results recorded by a Spirent Test Center comparing the performance of: • On the left, stateless data (no TCP slow start or 50% drop in throughput due to packet loss).

• On the right, normal TCP traffic following the TCP slow Start rules.

Notice how much more the TCP traffic is affected due to a mere 3% packet loss. The results shown are mimicking a comparison of a modified TCP stack using the flow label with an unmodified TCP stack. This unmodified stack could also be operating with a flow label, while the modified TCP stack could still be used to recover lost packets and ensure the integrity of the traffic flow.

Conclusion So here’s yet another reason to migrate to IPv6.

It is not just a question of a need for IPv6 readiness to be visible to, and communicate with, a growing population of new IPv6 addresses out there - there are also significant performance benefits to be gained by running IPv6 on your internal network.

What can we look forward to in this respect? One customer I know that has made the full migration is already reporting a 300% overall improvement as a result of the sort of efficiencies described above. I look forward to seeing the results of further tests along these lines - what might IPv6 do for your company network?

Matrium Technologies Pty Ltd Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q212

31 // AUGUST 2012

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This white paper gives an overview of UC deployment to help you achieve the best results. Download now!

For these and more White Paper downloads, visit www.VoiceandData.com.au/white_papers

32 // AUGUST 2012

BUILDING BLOCKS LOSS TESTING Available to rent, the Kingfisher KI78010 singlemode APC light source and KI7600 power meter work together to test loss on singlemode optical fibre systems. Testing at 1310, 1550 and 1625 nm with a test tone feature provides continuity and fault finding functionality.

Good measurement accuracy is provided by the emitter offering a <0.1 dB reconnection repeatability.

Autotest allows the power meter to automatically detect which wavelength is being tested.

Features include: good optical power stability; SC, FC and ST interchangeable connectors; long battery life; compact and lightweight for field use; flexible real-time PC reporting software.

TechRentals also offers a configuration and download service for this product.

TechRentals Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q493

FIREWALL OPERATING SYSTEM Fireware XTM 11.6 includes performance and management enhancements that help administrators define, review and enforce network policies.

The release is available for all WatchGuard XTM models and offers simple definition of user rules in Citrix and Terminal Services. It provides single sign-on so that users coming through Citrix XenApp or Microsoft Terminal Services environments don’t require any additional authentication steps.

The user authentication page has been updated to support smartphones (Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile), enabling mobile users to be identified for use in policy management and reporting.

Reputation Enabled Defense, the cloud-based URL reputation service that protects web users from malicious web pages, has been updated to include new phishing and malware information feeds from PhishTank and MalwareDomainList.

Firewall throughput has been increased on all XTM 5 and 8 Series models, by as much as 50% in some cases.

Report Manager has been updated to include a dashboard and a single set of reports for both PCI and HIPAA. It now provides one-click access to information needed for compliance requirements.

The number of VLANs on XTM 3, 5 and 8 Series platforms has been increased. New diagnostic capabilities help users to troubleshoot VPN interoperability and connectivity issues.

New tools to help simplify the understanding and maintenance of policies as defined on the firewall, including On-line Policy Checker, which helps to quickly simulate and understand how traffic is handled through the firewall. Users can enter IP address and port combinations to determine which firewall rule is triggered and whether traffic will be allowed.

WatchGuard Technologies Inc Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q606

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BUILDING BLOCKS PROTOCOL TESTING FOR ETHERNET AND GIGABIT ETHERNET VALIDATION The Investigator protocol testing solution for ethernet and gigabit ethernet validation encompasses the physical layer all the way through the upper layer protocol debug. It is a protocol analyser, traffic generation, impairment tester and BER tester.

The hardware captures every bit on the line to ensure complete verification and accurate reporting. The software included with Investigator provides a full range of characterisation data, as well as advanced debug capabilities such as triggering and filtering.

Investigator for Ethernet encompasses a full line-up of test components to thoroughly test an ethernet link.

TelecomTest Solutions Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q200

POWER DISTRIBUTION The Aten NRGence PDU series is a line of eco PDUs (power distribution units), eco sensors and energy boxes.

The devices provide real-time power management control and energy-saving efficiency for IT managers by enabling them to upgrade current IT resources quickly and cost effectively. The use of dynamic Rack Cooling Index (RCI) and Return Temperature Index (RTI) by zone, as well as eco Sensor software in conjunction with sensor-enabled eco PDUs, gives IT managers the means to assess, diagnose and estimate how and where energy can be saved.

The PDUs offer remote power control combined with real-time power measurement, allowing IT managers to control and monitor the power status of devices attached to the PDUs - either at the PDU device or outlet level - from any location via a TCP/IP connection.

With a ‘Lock n Plug’ design, users can lock server plugs onto PDUs to secure power connection, preventing power plugs from dropping off.

Charts can display power usage trends in real time or according to day, month, season or year. Four models are available, varying by outlet type and the measurement of PDU or outlet power: PE6108, PE6208, PE8108 and PE8208.

Anyware Corporation Contact info and more items like this at wf.net.au/Q611

THINK IP SURVEILLANCE THINK D-LINK Key IP Camera Features* • Sony Exmor 1/2.8” 3 Megapixel CMOS progressive sensor • Full HD resolution (1920x1080) up to 3M (2048x1536) • H.264, MPEG-4, and MJPEG compression with multi-streaming • DC iris varifocal 3.1 mm (W) to 8 mm (T) F1.2 CS mount lens • Built-in removable IR-cut filter for day/night surveillance • WDR to handle strong light sources • SD Card slot for on board storage • 2-way audio support • Digital Input/Outputs for integration with sensors and alarms

Key benefits of D-Link's end-to-end video surveillance solution include:

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Wireless Tech (Australia) Pty Ltd +61 2 8741 5080 | sales@wirelesstech.com.au

www.VoiceandData.com.au

33 // AUGUST 2012

In my opinion

CONWAY’S LAW Justin Butcher, Analyst, IBRS

©iStockphoto.com/DNY59

HOW YOUR SYSTEMS GOT IN A MESS All too often, IT workers are handed a messy and mysterious IT system devised by someone else, a system with no rational structure, little documentation and no explanation of how it got so bad. Conway’s Law can help explain how the system got to that point and help to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.

C

IOs, architects and managers responsible for IT systems often wonder - how did we end up with this mess? There’s no decent documentation. No one seems to be responsible for the apparent lack of any rational architecture. A lot of stuff is “due to historical reasons”. Of course, this would never have happened under your watch, but now it’s your responsibility to make some sense out of it. If your system represents a substantial investment, it stands to reason that you’ll want to understand why it was designed the way it is before you take any radical action to change it.

If you’ve ever been in this predicament, give a thought to Conway’s Law. Nine times out of ten it will give you some very useful clues. The law might sound abstract, but it’s actually quite simple and well worth understanding.

Melvin Conway said in 1968 that “organisations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organisations”.

This ‘law’ has practically unlimited application.

In terms of ‘enterprise systems’ (business, applications, information or technology), here is how it can help: Find out what the organisation structure of the design team was. Did separate teams or individuals design different components or facets?

What were the boundaries or bottlenecks in the communication processes involved in design?

The clues to the design rationale will often become clear at this point.

Were five specialists responsible, each designing one aspect or component of the system? Then you will likely find five subsystems or components each

34 // AUGUST 2012

"Were five specialists re s p o n s i b l e , e a c h designing one aspect or component of the system?

Then you will likely find five subsystems or components each with a set of responsibilities and minimal dependence on the other components."

with a set of responsibilities and minimal dependence on the other components. Each designer was responsible for making his or her own part of the system work.

It’s likely that no one consciously made a decision to break the design into five components, but that’s the result. It may be that the five people involved were the established experts or they may have been given management responsibility for discrete service delivery areas. Whatever the reason, it probably doesn’t make sense when the people have moved on or the organisation has restructured.

Apply Conway’s Law next time you get stuck with a problem like this. Understanding the rationale for the system design will ensure that you don’t repeat the mistakes and means you have a whole new insight into how it can be improved, maintained and managed. It provides you with the ability to learn from the mistakes of others, which is always better than repeating them.

As Einstein said: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Justin Butcher, Analyst at IBRS, is an advisor specialising in enterprise architecture, solution architecture, business systems analysis and complex systems procurement. He is an experienced enterprise architect and technology architect with more than 10 years’ experience in federal government. Butcher provides insights into the practical application of enterprise architecture to address real issues that face modern enterprises. He focuses on the strategic alignment of technology to business goals and objectives, drawing on experience in software engineering, infrastructure solution design, data architecture and large project architecture leadership.

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