ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Savitha Bhaskar, COO, Condo Protego.
Tarek Helmy, Regional Director Gulf and
Middle East, South and East Africa of Nexans
Cabling Solutions.
enables informed decisions to be made,”
points out Shehata.
CIOs should also be clear on the
data they require from datacentre
administrators and operators.
Administrators and operators would
be more focused on tactical analysis of
the datacentre, whereas the CIO will be
looking at a more strategic level. Hence
the data required and how it is presented
will be different to what an operator or
administrator would typically generate.
“An example of this is capacity
management and planning, which is a
major component of decision making that is
lacking in the region and is never accurate,
from all the interactions we have had with
various organisations,” cites Shehata.
On the other hand, channel partners are
also being challenged to evolve to provide
more add-on services to administrators
and operators to differentiate themselves.
With the commoditisation of the IT
hardware as well as software layers,
differentiation may only be achieved
18
through value-added services. Another key
performance requirement in the region,
as well as globally, is the availability of
the datacentre. Since data never sleeps,
neither should datacentres and, as
such, availability is key. How to achieve
availability is where the differences
arise. In the region, the focus has been
on designing datacentres that are highly
available through redundancy in the
infrastructure and seeking Tier III or IV
certification, whereas availability may
also be achieved through adoption of
better technology with multiple lower Tier
datacentres sharing the workloads and
providing a seamless fail-over.
There are projects underway globally,
where the Open Compute Project is
influencing the design and implementation
of datacentres to achieve better efficiency at
all levels of the infrastructure, both passive
and active. OCP has not been considered in
the region at all yet. One of the key factors
of OCP also allows for speed of deployment
of datacentres, which is also a key factor
that may differentiate one datacentre from
the other, which may also drive forward the
adoption of pre-fabricated or modular built
datacentres in the region.
Ageing datacentres
“When many UAE business leaders think
of their datacentres, the first thing that may
come to mind is a major cost and hurdle
to innovation. But in the rapidly-growing
digital economy, modernised datacentres
can be the key business differentiator,” says
Savitha Bhaskar, COO, Condo Protego.
In the UAE, which has among the
strongest mobile device penetration and
growth rates regionally and globally,
customers and consumers expect all aspects
of their daily lives to be mobile-enabled.
This is not an abstract concept since more
than half of global business leaders say they
are experiencing digital disruption, or a
complete industry digital transformation.
All of these mobile devices, mobile
applications, sensors and social media are
creating a tsunami of data for which many
UAE organisations are unprepared.
“Outdated datacentre infrastructure
cannot handle this increase in the amount
and types of data, and organisations are
at risk of losing their competitive edge in
the digital economy,” points out Savitha.
Modernised datacentres, which run on all-
flash storage or software-defined storage,
can allow organisations to bring services
to market four times faster, quadruple
the number of apps being supported,
and reduce datacentre downtime by 96%
according to EMC. Converged and hyper-
converged datacentre infrastructure:
assembled in a factory and wrapped,
stacked and packed in a box that can
be easily scaled up, are key for driving
datacentre innovation.
“Still, not every UAE organisations
is ready for this datacentre leap of faith.
Channel partners need to guide customers
in their digital transformation, modern
datacentre needs, and upskilling staff,
and be set to drive success in the digital
economy,” stresses Savitha.
Modern day tools
Boosted in the region, datacentres now need
to support new business models. The vast
majority of the traffic is not caused by end
users, but rather by datacentres and cloud-
computing workloads used in activities
that are virtually invisible to individuals.
Datacentre infrastructure now extends
beyond bricks and mortar walls with servers
getting consolidated and virtualised.
Massive volumes, speed, accessibility
and longevity of data are key drivers for
the transformation of datacentres in the
Middle East. Cloud computing is one of
the main technologies driving this change.
One of the fundamental principles of
the datacentre of the future, both globally
and in the Middle East, will be the ability
to dynamically deliver business critical
applications. Virtualisation of physical
datacentre infrastructure has built a
flexible foundation for many enterprises.
Attention is now turning to enabling
centralised visibility of all applications and
systems in order to control performance
and service management.
“An end-to-end datacentre solution
should be able to integrate computing,
storage, networking, virtualisation and
management into a single platform and
more efficiently support evolving business
applications. To meet these diverse
requirements, Cisco offers the Unified
Datacentre platform”, explains Mohannad
Issue 12
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