< Previous By reducing backup and recovery process time, errors and issues, Veeam’s solution allows the IKK Group’s IT team to invest efforts and time into enhancement projects. With Veeam, it isn’t just their solutions but also their support that can boost customer satisfaction - you get 24/7 support for incidents whenever needed. If we had to rate Veeam’s regional support, that would be a 5 stars service most of the times; still we are eager for better cooperation and success stories with Veeam’s team in the future.” Ayman Mansour, IT Infrastructure Department Manager, Issam Khairy Kabbani Group of Companies made possible by Veeam ONE, which provides the centralised IT team with comprehensive monitoring and analyt- ics for their virtual and physical envi- ronments. This has enabled them to op- timise resource planning and maximise utilisations of existing investments as they scale their IT infrastructure. Highlighting the value of Veeam’s Instant VM Recovery, Mansour de- scribes how this feature ‘saved the day’ when his company’s portal (Microsoft SharePoint) service, failed. Despite this being almost two terabytes in da- tabase size, the team could restore the portal service shortly because Veeam’s solution enabled them to load an im- age while the full restore proceeded smoothly in the background. As a result, users were barely aware of any issue and could carry out all functions without significant impact. Similarly, a number of similar ser- vices for IKK Group companies have been streamlined thanks to Veeam, states Mansour. “Whereas our old so- lution took days to restore data, and demanded considerable time and ef- fort from our IT team to address errors, Veeam’s has transformed this experi- // CASE STUDY / ISSAM KHAIRY KABBANI GROUP // WWW.NETWORKMIDDLEEAST.COM /// 20 / NETWORK MIDDLE EAST / MARCH 2020 With Veeam, it isn’t just their solutions but also their support - you get 24/7 support for incidents whenever needed. CLIENT The Issam Khairy Kabbani Group of Companies (IKK Group) was established nearly half a century ago. Starting operations in its native Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, the Group has expanded in scope and geography to serve a host of industries, including trading and manufacturing, and specialised contracting services for the diversified construc- tion sectors. Today, some 14,000 staff work in 42 independent IKK companies, spread over many divisions, branches and outlets in more than ten countries. The Group’s showrooms, sales offices, factories and R&D offices can be found across the MENA region. ence,” says Mansour. “End users don’t realise things are happening, and their experience remains seamless,” he adds. Equally beneficial has been the rela- tionship that the IKK Group’s IT team shares with Veeam. From their very first engagement, the commitment and expertise of Veeam’s regional team was evident to IKK Group’s centralised IT team, who appreciated their ability to deliver dependable, 24/7 support. “With Veeam, it isn’t just their so- lutions but also their support that can boost customer satisfaction - you get 24/7 support for incidents whenever needed. If we had to rate Veeam’s re- gional support, that would be a five stars service most of the times; still, we are eager for better cooperation and success stories with Veeam’s team in the future,” explains Mansour. Given that the IT team was no long- er spending a lot of time addressing is- sues or following up on support tickets, Mansour states that the efficiency of his IT team has increased. Further to this, systems admins have seen an ‘im- provement’ in their ability to deliver business continuity and availability of services, and annual data restoration downtimes have dropped. “The beau- ty of Veeam is that when you come in the morning, every light is green. So, you’re assured that backups are taking place smoothly,” he says. The IKK Group’s centralised IT team have been quick to turn the new solution features, and the rapid ac- cess to quality support and expertise they receive from Veeam, into an op- portunity to focus on initiatives and enhancements that deliver business values. One such avenue has been the strengthening of data and storage se- curity. “Veeam is working with us to implement best practices and enhanced features for data protection. This will enable us to greatly strengthen our resilience to possible malware, which are very significant threats to any busi- ness,” adds Mansour. Under the direction of the Group’s chairman Sheikh Hassan Al Kabbani and the corporate management, led by IKK groups’ CIO Mr Zohdi El-Saadi, the centralised IT team is currently pre- // CASE STUDY / ISSAM KHAIRY KABBANI GROUP // MARCH 2020 / NETWORK MIDDLE EAST / 21// WWW.NETWORKMIDDLEEAST.COM /Use of machine learning has helped improve the accuracy of transit time predictions by 74%. With Veeam, it isn’t just their solutions but also their support that can boost customer satisfaction, says Mansour. paring an off-site backup centre. During the transition, the Group has been uti- lising (as a pilot phase) cloud storage op- tion to manage data migration through the cloud. “Veeam’s compatibility with the offerings from major cloud vendors has meant that integration is seamless, allowing a rapid and effective data mi- gration,” says Mansour. On completion of this project, the Group may expand its off-site backup facility into a partial Disaster Recovery (DR) site based on management needs and decision. “Today, Veeam is one of the pillars of our service availabil- ity and business continuity strategy. If the corporate management decides to establish a DR site, we shall use it an opportunity to extend our relationship with this reliable technology provider,” Explains Mansour. BUSINESS BENEFIT Among the various benefits was an in- crease in efficiency, enabling system engineers to focus on high-value initia- tives. By reducing backup and recovery process time, errors and issues, Veeam’s solution allows the IKK Group’s IT team to invest efforts and time into enhance- ment projects that deliver significant business benefits. This includes imple- menting production and backup data se- curity best practices and access control strengthening to mitigate the threat of malware and cyber risks. Introduced instant recovery and cut restore times - Recovery of large ter- abyte (TB) sized VM servers in short time is now possible, services are restored in minutes as backup images can be instant- ly loaded while the full restore smoothly executes in the background. This deliv- ers a seamless experience for thousands of users, across the Group’s entities, who rely on the availability of data and servic- es to carry out their job functions. Proved 30% more cost-effective than the legacy solution - Instead of basing fees on TB, Veeam pioneered the per-socket licensing model in which costs only grow as the IT environment grows. With the IKK Group’s environ- ment expanding as its business grows, Veeam’s licensing model has proved to be 30% more cost-effective than the previous solution. VENDOR Veeam provides backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management. The vendor offers a single platform for modernising backup, accelerating hybrid cloud and securing your data. Our solutions are simple to install and run, flexible enough to fit into any environment and always reliable. // CASE STUDY / ISSAM KHAIRY KABBANI GROUP // WWW.NETWORKMIDDLEEAST.COM /// 22 / NETWORK MIDDLE EAST / MARCH 2020DATA CENTRE SPECIAL REPORT March 2020 Next wave of DC cabling //28 DCI networks //33 Data centre security //34 TUESDAY 31ST MARCH WALDORF ASTORIA, THE PALM ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 2020 For sponsorship enquiries: Benjamin McGladdery | Sales Manager Tel: +971 4 444 3227 Email: benjamin.mcgladdery@itp.com For table sales and event enquiries: Anthony Chandran | Table Sales Executive Tel: +971 4 444 3685 Email: anthony.chandran@itp.com To celebrate 14 years of recognising excellence within the ever growing aviation sector in the Middle East, Aviation Business is pleased to bring you the Aviation Business Achievement Awards 2020. Winners will be announced in categories celebrating the best of the best within regional and international airlines, airports and aviation support organisations. For more information, visit www.aviationbusinessme.com/awards or contact one of our team today. To celebrate 14 years of recognising excellence within the ever growing aviation sector To celebrate 14 years of recognising excellence within the ever growing aviation sector in the Middle East, in the Middle East, Aviation BusinessAviation Business is pleased to bring you the is pleased to bring you the Aviation Aviation Business Business Achievement Awards 2020.Achievement Awards 2020. Winners will be announced in categories celebrating the best of the best within Winners will be announced in categories celebrating the best of the best within regional and international airlines, airports and aviation support organisations.regional and international airlines, airports and aviation support organisations.regional and international airlines, airports and aviation support organisations.regional and international airlines, airports and aviation support organisations. For more information, visit For more information, visit www.aviationbusinessme.com/awards www.aviationbusinessme.com/awards www.aviationbusinessme.com/awards www.aviationbusinessme.com/awards or contact or contact one of our team today.one of our team today. SHORTLIST REVEALED! GOLD SPONSOR CATEGORY SPONSOR For event enquiries: Teri Dunstan | Events Manager Tel: +971 4 444 3227 Email: teri.dunstan@itp.com For nomination enquiries: Joe Peskett | Editor, Tel: +971 4 444 3305 Email: joseph.peskett@itp.comThe data centre is ever evolv- ing, adding new demands with respect to its infra- structure and operations. It is thus essential to design one that delivers optimum performance and network reliability to meet today’s and tomorrow’s needs. Improvements in network connec- tivity have led to the consolidation of branch offices into centralised data centres either in EDCs, public cloud platforms, or SaaS applications. The arrival of 5G, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and machine learning have increased the need for edge computing, which processes data close to the point of generation. This ensures that data is processed quickly even in low latency environ- ments, and addresses privacy con- cerns that crop up when data is taken all the way to the server. The traditional data centre needs to evolve to an open architecture that directly ties to the cloud. Public and hybrid clouds are here, and they will stay. The reason is simple. Public clouds provide software-defined networking, compute, and storage, making it easy to set up networks and a variety of configurations with a sim- ple web-based admin console. Virtual private clouds with secure connectiv- ity to enterprise data centres help in setting up hybrid clouds easily. Today data infrastructure needs to be re-architected to address the growing scale and complexity of workloads, applications and AI/ IoT datasets. These constructs will involve multiple tiers of workload- optimised storage as well as new ap- proaches to system software. On the consumer side, video traf- fic and OTA traffic has increased by leaps and bounds, and even faster networks have had a tough time keep- ing up with the increased traffic. This has led content delivery networks to cache and serve both static and dy- namic data, and accelerator networks to accelerate the traffic via the fastest path between endpoints. While cloud computing has tra- ditionally served as a reliable and cost-effective means for connecting many devices to the internet, the con- tinuous rise of Internet of Things and mobile computing has put a strain on data centre networking bandwidth. Edge computing technology is now emerging to offer an alternative solu- tion. This involves placing comput- ing resources closer to where data originates or the “edge.” This reduces the need to transfer data back and forth between centralised computing locations such as the cloud. We can expect strong growth in read-centric applications in the data centre, from AI, machine learning, and big data analytics to a variety of business intelligence and accessible archive workloads. These are driving a diverse set of performance, capac- ity, and cost-efficiency demands on storage tiers, as enterprises deliver increasingly differentiated services on their data infrastructure. To meet these demands, data centre architecture will continue advancing toward a model where data storage solutions will be consist- EDITOR’S NOTE Dawn of a new decade THE TRUSTED SOURCE FOR NET- WORK NEWS AND ANALYSIS CONNECT WITH MORE THAN 30,000+ INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS ently provisioned and accessed over fabrics, with the underlying storage platforms and devices delivering to a variety of SLA’s, aligned with specific application needs. Sarah Rizvi Editor sarah.rizvi@itp.com // SPECIAL REPORT / EDITOR’S NOTE // MARCH 2020 / NETWORK MIDDLE EAST / 25// WWW.NETWORKMIDDLEEAST.COM /The amount of data generated by 2025 is set to rise to 175 zettabytes and as such data centres will continue to play an essential role in the storage, compu- tation and management of information. Major tech companies are continuing to invest in new data centres by buy- ing land near power sources for future sites. Across a wide range of industries — from healthcare to finance to manu- facturing — companies rely on data centres to support the growing crea- tion and consumption of data. However, IT budget spend on data centres has reduced as per analysts. With Gartner predicting a massive shift away from traditional data centres, what does the future of data centres look like? SMBs have evolved from renting physical servers, to virtual machines, to SaaS applications, to finally function as a Service or serverless computing platforms. The terms for renting have been reduced in scope and time, with contract cycles coming down from months to minutes. This trend will continue to gain popularity as SaaS ap- plications are more cost-effective and take less time to get to market. Shailesh Davey, vice president, Mana- geEngine and a co-founder of Zoho Corp explains how data residency regulations have made it mandatory to retain data in enterprise data centres (EDCs) for larg- er enterprises to stay in compliance. But even larger enterprises are mov- ing to the public cloud or SaaS applica- tions to deliver a better customer expe- rience and leverage big data analytics, like analysing customers’ social media The future data centre is essentially software defined, borderless, dynamic and makes up a critical part of the Data Fabric circle of data management. As organisations start moving workloads back from public to hybrid clouds, it is important to look at the ar- chitecture itself. Is it open enough to allow seamless data mobility? Is data gravity being addressed? What are the cost implications? Are data efficiencies available in the hybrid cloud? What is the security posture that needs to be in place? Has data classification been done? Is data tiering being reviewed as part of the data management life cycle? And lastly, does the design lend itself for multi-cloud architecture? Having said that, the success of a hybrid cloud Evolution of the traditional data centre data. The data within EDCs is con- trolled within a private network, and connects to the data in the public cloud using secure tunnels. This hybrid cloud setup enables enterprises to access data stored both publicly and privately, helping them stay compliant. According to Fadi Kanafani, man- aging director and general manager – Middle East, NetApp, this shift in the data centre industry was anticipated few years ago. Hence, NetApp is ad- vising its customers to stop building data centres and invest in building a Data Fabric instead. “Although the traditional data centre as we know it will see a downward spiral, it will not disappear. It will go through an evo- lution driven by business outcomes. IT budgets for data centres are going down and Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will shut down their tradional data centres. With future projections indi- cating a massive shift away from traditional data centres, Network Middle East exam- ines what the future of data centres looks like Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will shut down their tradional data centres. // SPECIAL REPORT / MARKET FOCUS // WWW.NETWORKMIDDLEEAST.COM /// 26 / NETWORK MIDDLE EAST / MARCH 2020 /be monitored and analysed for proper functioning of the data centre. Wher- ever data is generated in huge quan- tities, there is a good opportunity to utilise AI/ML technologies to detect anomalies and provide predictive in- sights and what-if analysis. Alert gen- eration, error recovery procedures, and preventive actions can be automated based on past data. AI/ML technolo- gies can also work in tandem with the on-call technicians to recover from un- foreseen situations. AI initiatives tend to be a very high resource-consuming practice due to high computational power required and the rendering of the data needed for machine and deep learning. NetApp has teamed up with Nvidia, the leader in GPU computing, to help accelerate business outcomes through a validated design in a converged architecture. “This approach can help data scientist become productive in a matter of days instead of weeks and months – while, administratively the solution becomes all containerised to ensure simplicity and agility. Although, these architec- tures are mainly on-premise, the plat- form is open to integrate with the cloud to augment resource requirements whenever needed, adds Kanafani. Hybrid cloud isn’t necessarily about separating workloads between private cloud and public cloud. It works in a particu- lar application use case where you can take best advantage of each platform, says Saifuddin of Western Digital. For larger enterprises to stay in compliance, data residency regulations have made it mandatory to retain data in enterprise data centres). But even larger enterprises are moving to the public cloud or SaaS applications, says Davey of ManageEngine. strategy will directly tie into the design of the Data Fabric architecture and ser- vices that have the answers to all these questions – and many more. Khwaja Saifuddin, senior sales di- rector, Middle East at Western Digital points out that hybrid cloud isn’t neces- sarily about separating workloads be- tween private cloud vs. public cloud. “A hybrid cloud works in a particular ap- plication use case where you can take best advantage of each platform. So, for example, if you have an application that requires a petabyte or more of storage capacity then it is not a good candidate for cloud hosting due to the cost. Up- loads to the cloud are generally exempt from bandwidth charges, which means you can upload your data, process it, re- trieve the result, then delete it to avoid the storage fees,” adds Saifuddin. By hosting the data locally, you can migrate your compute resources from one hosting provider to another, with- out worrying about migrating the data. The result is an extremely agile multi- cloud environment, where you have access to the widest array of cloud ser- vices possible, while cutting costs and protecting yourself from vendor lock- in all at the same time. Davey further highlights that to sup- port a successful hybrid cloud implemen- tation, some important considerations are availability of low latency connec- tivity to multiple public cloud networks, identity and access management, same procedures followed by the DevOps team across both the public and private cloud environments and development of ex- pertise to run virtual routers. Scope for AI in data centres AI is now being realised in real-world use cases including manufacturing, security, farming, automotive, health- care, education and businesses. The ability of devices and objects interact- ing through Internet of Things to pour even more data allow for greater rea- soning and reaction. AI is playing an increasing role through machine learning, adds Saifuddin. “Those in automotive, EDA, and research employ real-time data analytics and machine learning work- loads every day. At the core of these emerging workloads are increased adoption of in-memory databases and clustered databases that benefit more immediately from low latency storage.” Cloud applications and network, storage, and HVAC equipment gener- ate a lot of telemetry data, and need to The future data centre is essentially software defined, borderless, dynamic and makes up a critical part of the Data Fabric circle of data management, says Kanafani of NetApp. // SPECIAL REPORT / MARKET FOCUS // MARCH 2020 / NETWORK MIDDLE EAST / 27// WWW.NETWORKMIDDLEEAST.COM /The next wave of Cabling // SPECIAL REPORT / FUTURE OF CABLING // WWW.NETWORKMIDDLEEAST.COM /// 28 / NETWORK MIDDLE EAST / MARCH 2020 /Networking cabling infrastructures need to evolve in this age of digital transformation. Network Middle East examines what the key considerations are to ensure least dis- ruption to business before upgrading data centre networks // SPECIAL REPORT / FUTURE OF CABLING // MARCH 2020 / NETWORK MIDDLE EAST / 29// WWW.NETWORKMIDDLEEAST.COM /Next >