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A CIRCULAR NETWORK ECONOMYA responsible approach to managing the network hardware lifecylce

PRIVATE CLOUD ORVIRTUAL DATA CENTRE?What’s best for your business?

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LET THE NETWORKING COMMENCE!Discover the winners of the 2015 NetworkComputing Awards inside!

GUARDING THEVALUABLESWhy we need a newapproach to IT security

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CONTENTS

4 MARCH/APRIL 2015 WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK

CONTENTS

NETWORKcomputing

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 5

EDITOR’S COMMENT......................3A modern IT curse is lifted

COMPANY NEWS............................6Market Dynamics: making sense of the market

NETWORK NEWS............................7Moves, adds and changes

VERSION X......................................8The latest networking news

ARTICLES GUARDING THE VALUABLES..........12By Mark Edge of Brainloop

THE SILICON SAFETY NET.............13By Andrew Avanessian of Avecto

THE HIDDEN RISK OF HTTPS............14By Corey Nachreiner of WatchGuard

HYPERSCALE THINKING -EXPONENTIAL RESULTS....................15By Jason Phippen of SUSE

IN WITH THE NEW, BUT...................18By Nicholas Dimotakis of Virtual Instruments

VIRTUAL AND PHYSICALORCHESTRATION............................20By Reuven Harrison of Tufin

WEB SCALE NETWORKING..............21By Brian Lavallee at Ciena

CYBERCRIME: A TAX ONINNOVATION..................................27By Mike Stute of Masergy

MASTERCLASSES EMULEX CONSIDERS OURNETWORKING FUTURES.....................22

PAESSLER ON THE THE FUTURE OFNETWORKS IN THE CONTEXT OFCLOUD COMPUTING......................26

PRODUCT REVIEWSCYBEROAM CR1000iNG-XXP...................23WATCHGUARD FIREBOX M440.............25

SOLUTION FOCUS................10In a new regular feature, Editor Ray Smythconsiders the use of cloud deployment in thecontext of network management tools

PRIVATE CLOUR VERSUSVIRTUAL DATA CENTRE........16Data security expert and MD at BeamingSonia Blizzard explores the differencesbetween a private cloud and a virtualdata centre

A CIRCULAR NETWORKECONOMY.........................24Askar Sheibani, CEO of Comtek, exploresa more responsible approach for themanagement of the network hardwarelifecycle

LET THE NETWORKINGCOMMENCE!........................28The 2015 Network Computing Awards wereheld on March 19th at The Hotel Russell inLondon. Find out who bagged the trophiesthis year in our special awards round-up!

SOFTWARE DEFINEDNETWORKING.......................18Our SDN focus explains the importance ofauditing and monitoring in SDN deploymentsand considers how to make the transition to asoftware defined environment a smooth one

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WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK MARCH/APRIL 2015 15NETWORKcomputingNETWORKcomputing

OPINION

Every storage administrator knows thatdata volumes can only move in onedirection, and that's upwards. Wherever

you turn, from the media to tech analysts likeGartner and IDC, to the storage vendorsthemselves, the talk of continuous data growthis ubiquitous. Data, we are told, is big, and weare warned that it's going to get bigger still.The growth in data volumes is so huge that theindustry has borrowed a mathematical term todescribe it, and now you rarely hear aboutdata volume growth without it being qualifiedas exponential, which to use anothermathematical term is logarithmic. Anexponential increase refers to growth based onvalues at a point in time, but more colloquiallyit essentially means runaway growth.

When the rate of increase goes up by anorder of magnitude at every step, the originalnumber quickly becomes huge. Only a fewshort years ago we reckoned in gigabytes.Gigabytes became terabytes and terabytesbecame petabytes. You probably know what ayottabyte is, and you won't be at all surprised ifquite soon you are dealing with one. The datagrowth curve is exciting for us, both asprofessionals and as citizens: even if only a tiny

fraction of the claims made for big data arerealised, we can all expect to see someamazing scientific advancements. Meanwhile,if the promised cures for cancer don'tmaterialise, and all we get is an enhancedonline retail experience, we'll still beexperiencing the reality of ever increasing data.Of course, all that additional storage won'tcome cheap because as the volume of datastored increases, so too will the costs. If wekeep buying storage in the same way as wealways have done then those costs will riseexponentially as well.

Nowhere is this truer than with the massivehyperscale providers of public cloud, likeAmazon, Google and Microsoft. Scaling upthe world's biggest data centres to deliverworld-class services requires massive levels ofinvestment. Even the smallest of unit costsavings can generate competitive advantagewhen applied at massive scale. Faced with thesame challenges of ever-increasingrequirements in compute power and storage,the hyperscaler quickly reached the sameconclusions - as far as possible they had to getrid of expensive proprietary hardware,replacing it with cheaper commodity products.

They had to lose expensive proprietary storagemanagement software in favour of opensource and virtualise the storage and networkas well as the servers, creating in the processthe world's first software defined data centres,the servers, storage and the infrastructure allvirtualised and software controlled.

Most storage administrators can only dreamof bringing to bear the kind of budget andexpertise deployed by the likes of Amazon, andoutside of public cloud providers and telcos,the software defined data centre will continueto be more dream than reality for some timeyet, but enterprise-class, robust, open sourcestorage virtualisation is available now.

Software defined storage eliminates the needfor expensive proprietary hardware and cangenerate cost savings of 50 per centcompared to traditional arrays and appliances.Storage based on the free, open sourcestorage platform Ceph, frees administratorsfrom dependence on expensive managementsoftware, merges cloud storage seamlessly withon-premise, and is portable across over 200Open Stack cloud service providers. With opensource virtualised storage you can changecloud suppliers more easily and avoid riskymigrations or long project timescales. At thesame time you can cut costs both on premiseand off, and totally avoid vendor lockdown.Shouldn't you be thinking like a hyperscaler?

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HYPERSCALE THINKING - EXPONENTIAL RESULTSJASON PHIPPEN, HEAD OF GLOBAL PRODUCT MARKETING AT SUSEEXPLAINS THE OPEN AND SHUT BUSINESS CASE FOR SOFTWAREDEFINED STORAGE

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