NetEvents Garmisch 2012 - blog part two

Peter Hall, Ovum: Managing Change Within the Enterprise

Peter Hall opened the discussion by outlining out the complex role of the CIO, whose job includes managing strategic projects, managing growing endpoints, more network performance demands, threats, evaluating new technologies such as cloud, and responding to growing CEO expectations with less budget.

The panel was asked what the challenges were, in their opinion. Charles Ferland, VP at IBM Systems Europe, said that networks were not just about speed but needed to be smarter. Brett Johnson, VP at AboveNet, said that his customers now ask about latency where they didn't five years ago and that this was a big trend. Carolyn Crandall, marketing VP at Riverbed, said that performance was about the end user, whether an employee or website visitor and that change needs to have a purpose.

Daniel Beazer, analyst at Tier1 research said: "What we see is a process of creative construction (see Schumpeter) as telcos race to the bottom with prices. Everything is commoditised - Wedgwood did this with crockery. This is a feature of the market."

They were then asked to what extent CIOs relied on their service providers, rather than managing change in-house. Ferland said the problem of performance was "not always about adding bandwidth but managing the system dynamically as workloads move around from server to server, from datacentre to datacentre across the globe."

Johnson said: "Performance is big issue, along with scalability and flexibility, even for apps of the future with unknown requirements. That's why we built a direct connect platform to Amazon, bypassing the public Internet, which gives enterprises options."

Crandall said: "Enterprises still need to do tape backup - they don't want to change their software but still want to back up to the public cloud. They also want to do management such as load balancing."

Rob Bamforth, Quocirca: smart security solutions for tomorrow's networks

Focused on security, Bamforth opened by remarking that gadgets are on the march. "There's a lot of use of devices in the enterprise, especially in people-oriented businesses," he said. "Tablets are used to access corporate data across the globe, not just in North America. This means you need to have the confidence in your ability to protect that data." He pointed out that that ability is high for email but much lower for other types of data repositories, such as USB sticks and mobiles. How can CIOs keep data safe?

From the panel, Pascal Oetiker, EMEA director, NetIQ, said that management of users in today's cloud should be seamless and controlled. Markus Nispel, technology strategist at Enterasys, said: "One CIO I met recently said he was measured by how fast he could give up control." Franz Kaiser, regional director at Fortinet said: "We aim to give back control to IT manager." Thomas Hemker, security strategist at Symantec said: "We take a holistic approach - it's about securing data assets. We can do hosted security solutions, as it's important to be able to use cloud providers such as SaaS securely, so we will see more cloud firewalls in future."

Can CIOs take back control? Nispel said the driver behind the BYOD phenomenon was new apps so security managers need to look at which ones need protecting. "We are going cloud," he said. "We at Enterasys have Box.Net, we use Google Apps and Gmail, and our expense control is in the cloud."

Oetiker said: "My marketing managers run their own P&L centre and use their own credit cards to buy services. Then the problems start. Businesses need to be able to do this kind of thing for a short while then move out of the application and get the data back. You also need a way of connecting users to cloud applications and authenticate them properly, as this gives you control and allows you to use SaaS."

Hemker there was a need for single sign-on or improved authentication. There was discussion about and agreement on the need for control of apps on the network and access control to secure them.

To a question about remote kill capabilities for remote devices, Nispel said: "You can install software on the device, for example, or use network access controls and monitoring, or use Exchange plugins for email. It's tough to install a wipe application on all devices because of the wide variety of OSes and hardware." There was broad agreement.

Carolyn Crandall, Riverbed: Next wave of Consolidation

This guest speaker presentation opened the second of the event's two days. Presenting Riverbed's Virtual Server Infrastructure, Crandall said: "This is something that has not been done before."

She explained how VSI combined concepts from virtual desktop infrastructure and server virtualisation to allow server images to be projected from a central location and linked using Riverbed's WAN optimisation technology, so providing improved security and control. She said that Riverbed technology had resolved customer objections about booting servers over the WAN, fear of what happened when the WAN went down, and about performance over the WAN.

"The product is called Granite," she said. "It can be a separate box or run in one of our Steelhead appliances, and you can boot in under one minute over the WAN." She said VSI brings advantages of lower TCO and a hard ROI, complete consolidation, happy end users and better performance, and rapid service deployment.

Crandall concluded with four case studies where customers had saved money and time deploying VSI technology. "Not everyone will want to do this as it's an architectural change," she said. "But at least now they have a choice."

Daniel Beazer, Tier1 Research: Change in the Datacentre

Beazer opened the discussion with information about the growth of data in the datacentre. "One problem is that the cloud is expensive," he said. "It's just like a hire car, it's much more expensive to hire by the day than the week."

From the panel, Andreas Lemke, Alcatel-Lucent cloud solutions manager said: "By 2014, 80% of apps will be in the cloud, so we see a strong trend of apps moving there. This means we need to develop the technology to set apps up in the datacentre.

John Rollason, senior manager product solutions at NetApp said: "We see the move towards cloud and if you define it as shared virtual infrastructure, yes, data keeps growing. We see us taking more orders and partnering with BT and others, as end users don't want to run their own infrastructure. We will have fewer customers but the workloads will increase massively."

Paul Griffiths, global consulting engineer at Riverbed, said: "People are looking for choice and want to choose where to host their apps for business, whether temporary, or test and dev, or production apps. We will follow the customers' data and provide a LAN-like experience."

Sven Klindworth, head of BT Advise Compute, said: "The trend is towards much bigger datacentres than the past, for example look at BT's new facility in Frankfurt. But is one per continent enough? Customers want to see the datacentre and the flashing lights on the servers and go there with their auditor and see where their data is."

Beazer introduced server-huggers -- managers who did not want to relinquish their servers -- pointing out that there were good reasons why branch offices wanted to hang onto their systems, not least to grant some autonomy from the "insane" orders that came from HQ. Backing up to tape was of a similar order, he said.

Rollason said: "There's no logical or financial reason to backup to tape but it takes a very long time for enterprise IT to change. But over next 10 years, there will be a 4,000% growth in data which means that things have to change - it's not efficient to keep going as we do."

Klindworth said: "In financial services companies, they use the latest technologies but the CIOs say that all this new tech always comes on top so no old system ever gets switched off. They still have systems to send customers statements that were programmed 30 years ago and which run on old mainframes."

Griffiths said: "Server huggers are minimising the risk by hanging onto servers, they know that the data is the crown jewels and their jobs might be at risk if they don't take care."

Discussing data privacy issues, Lemke said: "Europe is more conservative, compared to the US or India. We need to take the concerns about security and performance in the cloud seriously and comfort people that our solutions can work or improve on the current situation, and help them save costs. In a tough economy if you can save admin or datacentre costs by going to the cloud people will do it."

Lemke answered an audience question about how to ensure that data doesn't end up in the hands of the US government as a result of the Patriot Act. He said: "We can ensure that your data is safe -- but the Patriot Act compels companies to hand over data even if the data lives outside the US. So you need to ask who your data / cloud provider is. Most companies want to keep their data in the local country so the cloud provider needs to be in the country."

Rollason said: "Many people assume that the server-hugger's silo is secure but there's more risk from end users doing things that you don't want them to do - such as cloud leakage - and we've seen people who have servers removed go and buy servers from Amazon. Also there's a lot of data loss down to internal issues eg rogue employees."

NetEvents APAC Press Summit ,Thailand - Day 2 Highlights

Datacentre transformation “changes economies and business models” claims John McHugh at NetEvents 2011 APAC Summit

2-day Summit climaxes with visionary advice for surviving 2012

November 22nd, Phuket, Thailand: John McHugh gave the closing keynote at NetEvents 2011 APAC Press Summit at the Indigo Pearl, Phuket, Thailand today. Taking a year of challenging and insightful presentations from NetEvents summits across the globe during 2011, McHugh distilled the essence of what will become critical issues for CIOs in Asia over the next few years. His advice rounded off the 2-day conference which included debates on current industry issues and trends plus round table press and analyst briefings attended by an audience of top execs from Arista Networks, Brocade, Extreme Networks, Fortinet, Blue Coat Systems, HP Networking, MEF, Niometrics, Sourcefire, UIH, IDC, Gartner, Analysys Mason, Market Clarity, Ovum, Forrester Research and others.

“The trend towards datacentre transformation is inexorable - it will change economies and business models", said McHugh, counted among network world’s “top 50 most powerful people in networking” and known for his insight and sharp analysis of trends. "This past year, business leaders have worked in an environment full of challenges for the future. They will be thinking about risk," he said, arguing that IT was or should be transformational, especially given the growth of new end-user devices that offer new ways of workforce provisioning. On storage, he said: "we are feasting on more information – it’s important because the CIO needs to lead the strategy around information”.

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Closing-Keynote-transcript.pdf

The day began with Ian Keene, Vice President, Gartner introducing a HEAD 2 HEAD challenge between another of this year’s hottest Silicon Valley start-ups, Arista Networks, and three of the biggest global names in networking – Brocade, Extreme and HP – with a multimillion dollar virtualisation deal on the table – who takes the prize? This was an key opportunity for Arista – one of the hottest new names in Silicon Valley – choosing the NetEvents Summit as the launch pad into the APAC market for their Extensible Operating System (EOS™) based platform. Douglas Gourlay, VP, Arista Networks, emphasised the importance of openness: "People don't want a large, flat, layer-two network, and smart network engineers don't want to build or operate them”. He introduced EOS as a ground-breaking network operating system with single-image consistency across hardware platforms, and modern core architecture enabling in-service upgrades and application extensibility.

Other key highlights:

- John McHugh, CMO & VP, Brocade, hit back with: "our presentations are like our networks - faster than Arista!" He went on to argue: "80% of network traffic will be going east-west, not north-south as the network was designed to work. Brocade’s fabric gets rid of one aggregation layer to save power, and consolidate your edge layer to create a universal touch point for most of your datacentre devices."

- Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks, said: "Everything is converging on Ethernet with no more separate network technologies for HPC, SANs and data."

- Erik Papir, Worldwide Director, HP, said: "You need to look at the overall infrastructure in the datacentre not just the network. Compute power and storage are going to be critical to enable the instant-on enterprise."

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Head-2-Head-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Head-2-Head-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Arista-H2H-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Brocade-H2H-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Extreme-Networks-H2H-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-HP-H2H-presentation.pdf

The second session Ethernet's role in the Cloud, was introduced and chaired by Matt Walker, Principal Analyst, Ovum. Key highlights included: highlights:

- Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks: "How do you take things like group identities into the cloud?"

- Deb Dutta, VP Asia-Pacific, Brocade: "You need a cloud ID that allows you to demarcate your domain in the cloud and migrate from one SP to another."

- Nan Chen, President, MEF said it was “working on an ID standard so you can classify VMs and assign them priorities."

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateII-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateII-presentation.pdf

Session III – From Desktop to Smart Devices – implications for infrastructure, management & security – was introduced and chaired by Tim Dillon, AVP Asia Pacific End User & Mobility Research, IDC. Key highlights included:

- Jonathan Andresen, product and solutions director APAC, Blue Coat Systems: "Cloud security is the first line of defence. Catch malware in the cloud and you don't let it into your network."

- Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks: "Security should be multi-level and omni-present."

- Shara Evans, CEO, Market Clarity: "End-user devices are insecure because they get left in taxis. So the network needs to understand who the user is, as they may not be authentic."

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateIII-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateIII-presentation.pdf

NetEvents contact:

Helen Whitworth

Tel: +44 (0)870 760 6464

Email: helenw ‘at’ netevents.org

NetEvents APAC Press Summit Day 2 - November 17th

Day two of the NetEvents conference in Phuket, Thailand, opened with a fantasy.

Ian Keene, VP at research firm Gartner, pretended to be a late CIO at a company that was late at adopting cloud computing. With the help of panellists Douglas Gourlay, VP Arista; John McHugh, VP & CMO, Brocade; Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks; and Erik Papir, Worldwide Director, HP, all of whom pitched for his 'business', Keene had to decide how to upgrade his datacentre. Fellow analysts Tim Dillon, AVP APAC End User & Mobility Research, IDC and Michael Barnes, VP Research, Forrester, acted as consultants to help him make his decision.

Gourlay said that Keene's company's IT dept was not innovating or creating value for the business. He suggested that Keene should ask any vendor of datacentre network fabrics if their technology was open and if you could replace parts of their solution with products from another vendor. "People don't want a large, flat, layer-two network," he said. "Smart network engineers don't want to build or operate them - vendors are trying to lock you in."

For Brocade, McHugh quipped that "our presentations are like our networks - faster than Arista." He went on to argue that "80% of network traffic will be going east-west, not north-south as the network was designed to work. Our fabric gets rid of one aggregation layer to save power, and consolidate your edge layer to create a universal touch point for most of your datacentre devices."

Merchant said that today, everything is converging on Ethernet with no more separate network technologies for HPC, SANs and data. "Flat networks are better, with active-active paths so that recovery is under 50ms," he said. "You need 40Gbps for the aggregation layer, and you cannot be tied into a proprietary technology - so you need an open fabric."

Papir argued: "You need to look at the overall infrastructure in the datacentre not just the network. Compute power and storage are going to be critical to enable the instant-on enterprise." He went on to say that a framework to address business needs such as cloud deployment can enable end to end virtualisation. "It can consolidate management systems, and we are open," he said. "We work with you to ensure interoperability is not a problem."

Keene asked for help to be more green and use less energy. All the vendors promised to radically cut power consumption radically, and reduce the rack space needed. Merchant said that Extreme would help with analytics too and that his company would provide tools to examine the network down to the level of individual virtual machines.

The 'consultants' asked the vendors how they could help Keene drive change inside his organisation. All promised consulting services, along with free trials using virtual machines.

The discussion moved to applications and it was generally agreed that some applications will be suited to cloud, while others will not, depending on the workload. It was agreed that critical data should be kept local for the time being at least.

At the end, the audience of press and analysts were asked to vote on which vendor they would choose, a poll won by Arista with 34%, closely followed by Brocade with 32%, then Extreme Networks at 18% and HP 16%.

The next debate, Ethernet's role in the cloud, was opened by Matt Walker, Principal Analyst, Ovum, joined by panellists Deb Dutta, VP Asia-Pacific, Brocade; Shehzad Merchant; Nan Chen, President, MEF; and Passakorn Hongsyok, Director International Business from the Thai service provider UIH.

Walker defined the term cloud and sized the cloud services market at $233 billion by 2016. As a telecoms analyst, he pointed out that cloud is not a core focus for telcos but said that they can benefit from the connectivity gap, as the last mile is an issue.

He explained the benefits of Carrier Ethernet as flexibility, scalability, diversity and redundancy, describing it as a facilitator of the cloud. "Ethernet now the de facto access standard," he said.

Asked if there was scope for smaller telcos, Hongsyok said that Ethernet business was growing rapidly and that customers want rapid deployments.

Merchant highlighted the challenge of dealing with IT management tools and policies. "How do you take things like group identities into the cloud?", he asked.

Dutta talked about the importance of standards so that customers could develop an exit strategy from a cloud provider's facility. "You need a cloud ID that allows you to demarcate your domain in the cloud and migrate from one SP to another," he said.

Chen said that the MEF "was working on an ID standard so you can classify VMs and assign them priorities."

The final debate of the day concerned the trend from desktop to mobile devices and asked what are the implications from infrastructure, management and security perspectives?

The panel for this debate consisted of Jonathan Andresen, product and solutions director APAC, Blue Coat Systems; Shehzad Merchant, Extreme Networks; and Shara Evans, CEO, Market Clarity.

It was opened by Tim Dillon, IDC, who described the dominance of mobile devices in Asia-Pacific, using examples of airline crew and corporate execs using tablets. "Market growth will come from applications, a lot of which are downloaded from the cloud. There's no single OS in the enterprise any more," he said. The problems this raises include complexity and security.

Andresen said that network managers wanted to know how mobility was developing in their enterprise, and that they want to know what it will do to their network. "Video can swamp the network," he said.

Merchant said that the network needs to understand who the user is and what they are trying to do, and that security should be multi-level and omni-present.

For Evans, end-user devices are insecure because they get left in taxis. "The network needs to understand who the user is, as they may not be authentic," she said.

Andresen argued that putting data in the cloud enhanced security. "Cloud security is the first line of defence," he said. "Catch malware in the cloud and you don't let it into your network."

Brocade's chief marketing officer and VP John McHugh rounded out the final plenary session of the event with a keynote entitled NetEvents 2011: The Takeaways.

"This year, business leaders worked in an environment full of challenges for the future. They will be thinking about risk," he said. He argued that IT was or should be transformational especially given the growth of new end-user devices which offer new ways of workforce provisioning.

On storage, he said that "we are feasting on more information - its important because the CIO needs to lead their strategy around information.

"CIOs can't opt out," he said, as questions from the CFO and CIO will drive transformation while on-premise datacentres will be prime locations for years to come as datacentres virtualise. Crucial to the process is the network which is not yet robust enough. However, he said, "the trend is inexorable - it will change economies and business models."

On datacentre network fabrics, McHugh predicted that in next six months, over 50% of CIOs will be deploying a network fabric in their datacentre, and that it would be part of a converged infrastructure.

On outsourcing and the cloud, McHugh described his early days as a production engineer at HP when the decision had to be made to outsource production to Singapore. "Ultimately, HP started looking at quitting a capital-intensive practice because someone at the top had the vision and understood that trends, directions and options needed that leadership. It's now ridiculous to think we wouldn't have moved forward. The cloud is the same. The biggest risk is that the competition does it first."

He was then interviewed onstage by editorial director Manek Dubash, who asked about storage architectures, datacentre transformation, and network reliability, among other things.

The meeting then broke for lunch, resuming with scheduled meetings between press and vendors.

A list of links to the NetEvents APAC Press Summit Day 2 Transcripts, Presentations and Photos can be downloaded from this URL:

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/NetEvents-APAC-Press-Summit-Nov-2011-Day2-URLs.pdf

(Transcripts will be available within 24 hours)