ST1701

STORAGE
^
The UK’s number one in IT Storage
MAGAZINE
January/February 2017
Vol 17, Issue 1
THE MONEY PIT:
Are your data protection policies ‘throwing
good money after bad’?
GROWTH STRATEGY:
Big Data gets bigger
ALL-FLASH ARRAYS:
Changing the rules of the storage game
PRODUCT REVIEWS:
QSAN, Compuverde
PRESSURE SENSITIVE:
Data centre resiliency
COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS

PRESSURE SENSITIVE:
Data centre resiliency
January/February 2017
Vol 17, Issue 1
CONTENTS
STORAGE
The UK’s number one in IT Storage
^
MAGAZINE
CONTENTS
THE MONEY PIT:
Are your data protection policies ‘throwing
good money after bad’?
GROWTH STRATEGY:
Big Data gets bigger
ALL-FLASH ARRAYS:
Changing the rules of the storage game
PRODUCT REVIEWS:
QSAN, Compuverde
COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS
Comment.....................................4
MAKING CONNECTIONS
08
News..........................................6
Datto acquires Open Mesh
Quantum keeps an eye on security
TECHNOLOGY:
ALL-FLASH ARRAYS....................8
The all-flash array is altering the rules of storage, argues Troy
Alexander, Systems Engineer at Tintri
REVIEW:
COMPUVERDE VNAS.................11
12
EVENT PREVIEW:
CLOUD EXPO EUROPE..............12
REVIEW: QSAN XCUBESAN
XS3226D.....................................16
CASE STUDY:
SOLIHULL SCHOOL.....................17
19
RESEARCH:
DATA PROTECTION................….18
New research suggests that data protection policies are little
more than a 'money pit' for many organisations
CASE STUDY:
CALOR GAS..................................19
PRESSURE SENSITIVE?............20
The growth in cloud services is putting increased pressure on
data centre resiliency, suggests Adrian Barker, General Manager
EMEA at RF Code
24
STORAGE AWARDS 2017.......22
This year's Storage Awards are already on the horizon - Storage
magazine editor David Tyler reminds readers why it's so important
to make their voices heard
CASE STUDY:
ASTRAZENECA..........................24
28
BIG DATA GETS BIGGER............26
Jason Beeson, Commercial Director at Hammer, looks at how
the changing volumes - and types - of data will impact the
storage sector
www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards Jan/Feb 2017
^
STORAGE
MAGAZINE
3

COMMENT
EDITOR: David Tyler
david.tyler@btc.co.uk
NEWS EDITOR: Mark Lyward
mark.lyward@btc.co.uk
REVIEWS: Dave Mitchell
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SALES/COMMERCIAL ENQUIRIES:
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lyndsey.camplin@btc.co.uk
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stuart.leigh@btc.co.uk
MANAGING DIRECTOR: John Jageurs
john.jageurs@btc.co.uk
DISTRIBUTION/SUBSCRIPTIONS:
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christina.willis@btc.co.uk
PUBLISHED BY: Barrow & Thompkins
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©Copyright 2017
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MAKING CONNECTIONS
BY DAVID TYLER
EDITOR
Welcome to our first issue of 2017, which contains a broad mix of product
reviews, case studies, insights and opinions from across the industry. Tintri's
Troy Alexander puts forward a strong case for how a combination of VMaware
storage and flash arrays are changing how IT infrastructures are architected and
managed. Alexander argues: "The accelerating performance, cost and operational
benefits are on a path to make (flash) the dominant storage medium in the near future.
But like any technology, integrating it successfully into virtual infrastructures is not a
trivial exercise. The choices made on how to do this can have long-lasting
repercussions on IT optimisation."
Elsewhere in this issue you'll find Hammer's Jason Beeson offering his perspective on
the impact on the storage sector of the ever-growing volume (and variety of types) of
data being produced by all of us in an increasingly connected world. The Internet of
Things is creating vast warehouses of information collected from sensors and
'intelligent' devices - yet only a tiny proportion of this data is currently being effectively
analysed and used. According to the 'Worldwide Semi-annual Big Data and Analytics
Spending Guide' from IDC, worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics are
set to grow from $130.1 billion in 2016 to more than $203 billion in 2020.
As big data gets bigger, it is on the storage industry to find ways to make that data
accessible - and more importantly, useful - to organisations. As Beeson says: "What is
truly amazing is that less than 0.5% of all this stored data is ever analysed and used to
its maximum effect. That's where the opportunities lie, not just for the businesses who
own the data to better understand customer behaviour and preferences, but also for
those who operate in the data storage sector."
And if reading articles like these leaves you feeling like you don't know where to start
in trying to address these issues, we'd suggest you look no further than next month's
Cloud Expo event at London's ExCel. One of the world's biggest and most
comprehensive IT shows, this year's event encompasses not just Cloud, but IoT, Data
Centres, Security and Big Data. So, pretty much the same as the wish-list your CIO
keeps waving at you in those meetings, right? Storage magazine will be there, of
course - and you probably should be too.
Articles published reflect the opinions
of the authors and are not necessarily those
of the publisher or of BTC employees. While
every reasonable effort is made to ensure
that the contents of articles, editorial and
advertising are accurate no responsibility
can be accepted by the publisher or BTC for
errors, misrepresentations or any
resulting effects
4
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STORAGE
MAGAZINE
Jan/Feb 2017
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NEWS
SKYHAWK SOARS WITH PCIE SSD
Western Digital Corporation have
introduced the new SanDisk Skyhawk
NVMe-compatible PCIe SSDs, which offer
advanced NAND flash storage, a new
high-performance PCIe Gen 3 SSD controller,
the company's proprietary
Guardian Technology platform and the
industry standard NVMe 1.2 protocol.
By utilising the fast and highly flexible
PCIe interface, they deliver nearly triple
the sequential performance of comparable
enterprise SATA SSDs, enabling IT
managers to address the rigorous workload
demands of these environments with
fewer devices and a smaller physical
hardware footprint compared to systems
built with SATA-interface based SSDs.
Other features include:
• Offers up to 3.84TB of storage capacity
in a U.2, 2.5-inch small form factor
NetApp has introduced its new all-flash
FAS (AFF) A700s array along with a
new All-Flash Guarantee that ensures up to
5X storage savings, depending on workload.
"IT transformation is a hot topic for organisations
of all sizes with a goal to put data at
the heart of their businesses," said Simon
Robinson, research vice president at 451
Research. "NetApp's new AFF solutions offer
any customer, regardless of size, the ability to
deliver data management capabilities for different
environments. Now any company can
leverage NetApp's AFF solutions to help
them adapt to the largest and most disruptive
IT shift in history."
• Compliance with industry standard
NVMe 1.2 protocol with in-box drivers for
all major operating systems
• Optimised for read-intensive and
mixed-use workloads (Up to 1,700MiB/s
sequential read and 1,200 MiB/s sequential
write).
www.sandisk.com
NEW ALL-FLASH ARRAY FROM NETAPP
The AFF A700s is part of the AFF all-flash
A-Series, which includes the A200 entry-level
system, A300 midrange system and A700
high-end system. With an NVMe fabric-ready
clustered architecture running NetApp
ONTAP, it offers 15TB SSDs and 32Gb Fibre
Channel and 40Gb Ethernet connectivity
options. The Guarantee provides a workloadspecific
efficiency guarantee that scales up to
a 5:1 data reduction ratio. Customers get the
storage efficiency and capacity NetApp
promises, or the company will cover the costs
to make up the difference. The guarantee is
available for the entire AFF family.
www.netapp.com
DATTO DO NICELY
Datto has acquired Open Mesh, an innovator
of cloud-based networking solutions.
The Open Mesh suite of data networking
solutions, including wireless access points
and switches, joins the Datto Networking
Appliance (DNA) to give MSPs the opportunity
to expand their offerings to include comprehensive
network continuity and reliable
access solutions for the thousands of businesses
they serve.
As the first network continuity device built
by a business continuity company, DNA
offers a combined router, WiFi and 4G
failover, unified threat management and
more. Following a year of global expansion,
Open Mesh is Datto's second acquisition
after Backupify, purchased in 2014. The
combined company, its ongoing innovation
and accelerated growth furthering Datto's
aim to deliver complete business continuity
under a streamlined platform.
www.datto.com
CMS DRAM DEAL
CMS Distribution has announced a new
partnership with CORSAIR. With a
strong channel network across UK and
Ireland, CMS Distribution will promote
CORSAIR's wide range of innovative range
of DRAM, power supplies (PSU) and cooling
systems. Mike Buchanan, Director of
Sales, UK & Benelux at CORSAIR said, "We
are excited to announce this new partnership
with CMS Distribution, working with us
to further grow our components and memory
business through opening a broadened
customer base and introduction to new
market segments."
"We have partnered with CORSAIR to complement
our increasing component portfolio.
Corsair are hugely respected within the
industry and their leading edge technology
will help CMS establish themselves within the
gaming community," said Daniel Pell,
Commercial Manage at CMS Distribution.
www.cmsdistribution.com
^
6 STORAGE
MAGAZINE
6
Jan/Feb 2017
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NEWS
A HYBRID FUTURE?
Tegile Systems has released the findings of
a study carried out on its behalf by technology
market research provider Vanson
Bourne. The poll asked a total of 200 IT
decision makers in the UK and Germany
'What actions are you planning to take over
the next three years to future-proof your data
centre storage performance?' The survey
found that between now and 2020:
• Across the two countries an average of
48% of respondents are planning to maintain
hybrid storage systems. This is split as
38% in the UK and 58% in Germany.
• A significant 62% across all IT decision
makers polled are planning to add cloud
services, with the figures breaking down as
55% in the UK and 68% in Germany.
Among the implications of these results are
that Germany is again ahead of the UK in
terms of the adoption curve, and that the
move to the cloud and related need for cost
management are likely to be driving factors
behind the growth of hybrid and flash storage
respectively.
• Approximately one in three (29%)
respondents are planning to introduce flash
arrays in their environments. Specifically the
figures revealed in the study come to 30%
for the UK and 27% for Germany.
• When looking at specific vertical markets,
unsurprisingly organisations in the IT
space tend to lead the adoption trend for
hybrid storage (70%) and cloud services
(85%), ahead of segments such as financial,
manufacturing and retail.
• Whilst in the UK 48% of companies
with 1,000 to 3,000 employees are planning
to maintain a hybrid storage system,
this figure drops to 28% when staff numbers
are above 3,000.
• The size of the organisation also seems
to affect the introduction of flash arrays with
34% of UK respondents from teams of
1,000 to 3,000 planning to add this technology
over the next three years, against
26% in larger businesses.
www.tegile.com
KEEPING AN EYE ON DATA DEMANDS
Quantum has expanded its storage solutions
family and technology partner
ecosystem for video surveillance and security.
With the new Xcellis Application Director
E, customers in low camera-count environments
can now run video management systems
(VMS) or analytic applications with
directly attached storage. In addition,
Arecont Vision, AxxonSoft and Digifort have
joined the Quantum Advantage Partner programme,
enabling them to test, qualify and
integrate their VMS technology with
Quantum storage offerings for enhanced
customer benefits.
With the addition of the Xcellis Application
Director E, Quantum's product portfolio for
video surveillance infrastructures can now
scale from as few as ten cameras to tens of
thousands. Xcellis Application Director solutions
also enable VMS applications to connect
directly to QXS Series disk storage or as
clients in an Xcellis environment powered by
Quantum's StorNext data management. As a
result, users can access data without adding
to network
www.quantum.com
FIRST MN SERIES HDD FROM TOSHIBA
Toshiba has announced its first MN Series
HDDs, bridging the gap between topend
enterprise capacity HDDs and entrylevel
desktop HDDs, while still delivering
7,200rpm rotational latency performance.
The MN Series offers up to 8TB capacity in
a 3.5-inch form factor for a broad range of
file and object storage applications. The
new drives boast a 6 Gbit/s SATA interface,
7,200 rotational speed, 1,000,000 hour
MTTF[ rating, and a rated annual workload
of 180TB transferred.
"Many customers with predominantly file
oriented and fixed-content sequential write
and read workloads are looking for costeffective
capacity for moderate workload
storage applications", said Noriaki
Katakura, General Manager of Toshiba
Electronics Europe, HDD Business Unit.
"With our new MN Series HDD models we
are providing a workload range within the
high workload data centre work-horse
Enterprise Capacity HDDs and relatively
low workloads associated with client HDD
models."
The initial MN Series HDD models are
available in 8TB, 6TB and 4TB capacities.
Targeted applications include mid-level,
entry-level and small office/home office
(SOHO) NAS storage enclosures, remote
office backup and archival storage, and
home multimedia data archive and fixedcontent
object storage.
www.toshiba.semicon-storage.com
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^
STORAGE
MAGAZINE
7

TECHNOLOGY: ALL-FLASH ARRAYS
CHANGING THE RULES OF THE GAME
THE ALL-FLASH ARRAY IS ALTERING THE RULES OF STORAGE, ARGUES TROY ALEXANDER, SYSTEMS
ENGINEER AT TINTRI
It should come as no surprise that storage
platforms have seen accelerated
innovation over the past 15 years. Turning
the traditional storage status quo on its head,
specialised storage and cloud solutions offer
deduplication, inline compression, dramatic
cost/GB reductions and exponential
performance growth. One of the latest and
most significant changes has been the
broader adoption of flash.
Flash provides a quantum improvement on
the value storage has to an organisation's
agility. In the early days, accessing its 10x
advantages in performance, power and
density meant an associated 10x increment in
cost/GB. This effectively relegated flash to
very high-end applications and only where
absolutely required. However, in a very short
span of time, flash has seen a dramatic 80%
cost reduction leading to the development of
economically viable all-flash arrays (AFA).
For virtualisation and the cloud in
particular, high-performance applications
have been challenged even further by HDD's
limitations, especially around performance
and latency. Flash provides the performance
and latency capabilities needed to overcome
these restraints.
One of the key benefits of virtualisation is
the flexibility it provides for dynamic
allocation and placement of VMs through
vMotion and DRS. But this dynamic
reconfiguration groups LUNs and volumes
together; it doesn't operate at the VM level.
This gives rise to the I/O blender effect, which
causes contention and hinders performance.
Flash addresses these issues to some extent
but the underlying challenges of mapping,
LUNs/volumes and similar legacy constructs
remain. As the evolution toward flash as an
independent storage tier continues, here are
five critical considerations in choosing an allflash
array and how VM-aware flash changes
the game in one big use case: optimising
your virtualised platform.
Rule 1: Controller determines flash array
performance
To scale a HDD storage platform, the
traditional approach is to add more capacity.
However, this equals more complexity, more
^
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MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY: ALL-FLASH ARRAYS
cost, more power/space and more chance of
failures. Because flash boasts high
performance and low latency, it eliminates
once-necessary data placement tricks from
the controller. Adding shelves to all-flash
arrays does deliver more capacity but it may
not deliver a consistent increase in
performance/IOPs.
Much of the bandwidth of a HDD controller
is consumed managing reads and writes to
overcome or mask latency inherent in the
technology. This is also a reason for suboptimal
flash performance when it is simply
bolted on to a traditional HDD architecture.
Flash-optimised architectures avoid this pitfall
by abandoning legacy HDD structures.
Rule 2: Data reduction
In-line data reduction services like
deduplication, compression and cloning can
have a significant effect on latency for HDDs,
so these services are often relegated to outof-band
storage functions. However, because
of the near-instantaneous responsiveness of
flash, data reduction comes free and is
expected. This has resulted in inline data
reduction techniques being essentially
mandatory for all-flash arrays today.
Rule 3: Integration with cloud management
orchestration platforms
The best data reduction for a virtual system is
achieved through solid integration with the
hypervisor. This can be as basic as supporting
VAAI, VMware's standard storage API for array
offloading, to avoid significant levels of data
traffic. Other useful VMware integrations
include VASA, storage policy-based
management (SPBM), storage I/O control
(SIOC) and VAIO. As a rule of thumb the more
of these integrations a vendor supports, the
greater the cost savings for users. As
integration with multiple cloud orchestration
platforms becomes critical, one has to look for
a vendor that has done the integration and is
on the HCL to set the stage for achieving
higher levels of performance and data
reduction from flash.
Rule 4: Commodity hardware vs. customised
platforms
Initially, flash was deployed either as standalone
SSDs on a local host or as proprietary
hardware such as a PCI-e card. Today, flash
architectures have integrated around two
different paths. One is built on custom
hardware and squeezes every bit of
performance possible out of the technology,
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STORAGE
MAGAZINE
09

TECHNOLOGY: ALL-FLASH ARRAYS
"Flash opens up a range of new possibilities, especially in a VM-aware storage
(VAS) infrastructure. New features layered on top of flash can provide
guaranteed VM performance and VM-level QoS, real-time actionable VM-level
analytics and tight integration with the virtualised application and cloud
ecosystem. This results in the greatest ROI from cloning, thin provisioning and
advanced data management."
built around QoS. This architecture can
provide end-to-end insight of a virtualised
environment, supplementing hypervisor latency
data to provide detailed, VM-specific visibility
that allows admins to see and operate at the
granular level. This helps to quickly identify
where any issues arise offering rapid
troubleshooting speeds.
but typically at a significant price premium. The
second is built on a platform that can ride the
cost curve of commodity flash and off-the-shelf
hardware supported by robust architectures
and data services. As the cost/GB of flash falls
under the cost curve for HDD, this second
option makes dramatically better economic
sense for all but the most specialised and/or
cryptic workloads.
Rule 5: Software-defined innovation requires
flash performance
The performance and latency benefits of flash
can dramatically improve innovation at the
software layer, something that can be missed if
the only goal of flash is as a high-performance
data repository. Simply bolting on flash as a
cache to an existing HDD-based platform can
provide some level of performance
acceleration but at significant economic and
opportunity cost. Flash opens up a range of
new possibilities, especially in a VM-aware
storage (VAS) infrastructure. New features
layered on top of flash can provide
guaranteed VM performance and VM-level
QoS, real-time actionable VM-level analytics
and tight integration with the virtualised
application and cloud ecosystem. This results
in the greatest ROI from cloning, thin
provisioning and advanced data
management.
ADVANCING THE FIVE CORE STORAGE
RULES WITH VAS
A technology designed around VAS can
leverage flash benefits and is ideal for any type
of hardware architecture. VM-aware storage
guarantees VM and application performance
The way to deliver all these benefits for
virtual environments is through an all-flash
array appliance. Specifically an appliance
containing both controllers and storage media
onboard with always-on inline data reduction
services, enhanced by integration with leading
hypervisor and cloud managers such as
vSphere, vRO, SCVMM and OpenStack.
Scaling up is simplified by adding more
arrays, avoiding potential performance
degradation from adding shelves to an
existing controller. By leveraging commodity
hardware supporting innovative software and
VM-aware storage, a vendor with those
technologies at hand can offer very aggressive
pricing for all levels of capacity.
Like virtualisation before it, flash is remaking
how IT infrastructures are architected and
managed. The accelerating performance, cost
and operational benefits are on a path to
make it the dominant storage medium in the
near future. But like any technology, integrating
it successfully into virtual infrastructures is not a
trivial exercise. The choices made on how to
do this can have long-lasting repercussions on
IT optimisation.
More info: www.tintri.com
^
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MAGAZINE

PRODUCT PRODUCT REVIEW
COMPUVERDE VNAS
With the promise of big
costs savings and
greater flexibility,
software defined storage (SDS)
architectures are rapidly gaining
traction in today's data centres.
Not all SDS solutions are the
same though, and Compuverde's
vNAS offerings stand out as not
only truly flexible but also
incredibly simple to deploy.
Central to vNAS operations are
nodes, which comprise physical systems or
virtual machines running the Compuverde
software. These are assigned to vNAS
clusters and an important consideration is
that all nodes have identical roles, so there
is no single point of failure.
The file system spans all cluster members
and is fully scalable as extra nodes can be
added on demand. Their hardware
attributes are combined into the whole for
increased capacity, reduced latency and
greater performance.
Each node should have two high-speed
network connections where one
communicates privately with all other
nodes and the second provides public
access to the cluster file system. Node
redundancy can be added and
performance increased as vNAS supports
link aggregation across multiple adapters.
Cluster management is handled by a
lightweight utility that supports Windows 7
upwards. Its intuitive interface provides a
single pane of glass for all configuration
and total visibility into node, cluster and
file system operations.
The node software is deployed as an ISO
file where it installs CentOS Linux
preconfigured and ready to go. We
installed it on a number of Hyper-V VMs
and bare-metal systems where it took less
than 10 minutes per node and only
required us to provide a node name and
choose its system disk.
Clusters require a minimum of three
member nodes which the management
console automatically discovers once the
software is loaded. Cluster creation is
simple as we selected each node,
configured its public and private networks
and chose its local disk devices for general
storage and caching.
Storage is configured by creating a file
system, entering a unique domain name
and choosing from 23 erasure encoding
schemes for the desired redundancy level.
Shares are provisioned by adding new
folders within the domain and choosing
from SMB, NFS, OpenStack Swift, Amazon
S3 and iSCSI protocols.
The console provides a wealth of
information about cluster and node
usage with detailed real-time
graphs of read, write and IOPS
activity. The multi-tenancy feature
also allows you to create multiple
file system domains in the same
cluster each with their own set of
users and shares.
For IP SANs, we provided target
names, chose encoding schemes for
each one and attached LUNs of the
desired size. Unless you select
anonymous access, CHAP
authentication is applied and requires a
username and password from the database
maintained by the console.
We tested failover by running Iometer on
a mapped share and then taking a node
offline from the console. Compuverde's
virtual IP failover came into play as it
transparently moved the address from the
offline node to an active one. All
operations were transferred seamlessly to
the functional node with Iometer showing a
miniscule drop in performance. More
importantly, all shares and iSCSI targets
remained fully accessible during our tests.
Compuverde offers a wide range of
options as the scale-out license supports
bare metal systems, the hyper-converged
version works with all popular hypervisors,
metro clusters synchronously mirror across
different physical locations while the
hybrid cloud model supports globally
distributed clusters.
Product: vNAS
Supplier: Compuverde
Sales: info@compuverde.com
Web site: www.compuverde.com
VERDICT: Enterprises tempted by the allure of SDS should consider Compuverde's vNAS as it is remarkably easy to deploy
and capable of using commodity hardware. The simple yet efficient architecture offers five 9s reliability and you can try vNAS
before buying as Compuverde offers a free version with a generous 20TB plan.
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^
STORAGE
MAGAZINE
11

2017 EVENT PREVIEW: PREDICTIONS
CLOUD EXPO EUROPE 2017
THE MAIN EVENT
CLOUD EXPO, EUROPE'S BIGGEST, BEST ATTENDED AND MULTI AWARD-WINNING CLOUD AND
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SHOW IS EVEN BIGGER AND BETTER FOR 2017: STORAGE MAGAZINE
FINDS OUT MORE
Over 18,000 technology buyers
and influencers came to ExCeL
London in 2016. This year,
alongside Smart IoT, Cloud Security, Data
Centre World and Big Data World, the
Cloud Expo Europe show hosts 500
leading international technology
exhibitors and 600 speakers.
With free entry, delegates can learn
from global business experts as well as
leaders of innovative UK and
international start-ups. You will also hear
from peers from your own industry, on
discussing best-of-breed technologies onstage
and how they have used them to
digitally transform their business.
Access an exhibition of 500 leading
suppliers, a world-class conference
programme and a host of exciting event
features:
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MAGAZINE

2017 EVENT PREVIEW: PREDICTIONS
CLOUD EXPO EUROPE 2017
Be inspired by over 600 top experts,
including number 1 rated CIOs,
acclaimed global cloud leaders, gurus
from Box, BT, Google, McLaren
Technology Group, Microsoft, Paypal,
Spotify, Twitter and Vodafone, all
speaking in a compelling conference
and seminar programme, which
covers all the major technology and
business issues
Learn from dozens of real
practitioners from blue chip
companies, service providers and
leading organisations including
Financial Times, ITV, LEGO, Lloyds, LV
and the Ministry of Defence.
Access a record 500 cutting-edge
suppliers showcasing the latest
technology solutions and services,
including AWS, Commvault, Docker,
Gamma, IBM, Intel, Interoute,
Navisite, NTT Communications, Pure
Storage, Salesforce, Samsung, T-
Systems, Trend Micro, VMware, Veeam
and Western Digital.
Network with thousands of your peers,
industry visionaries, leaders and
DATA CENTRE WORLD
For powering, for cooling, for connecting and for securing, Data Centre World is the only space to be.
Be inspired by industry leaders, practitioners and visionaries, sharing their extensive wisdom. We've lined up case studies from Tech
leaders such as: Ge Critical power, Groupon, Gigacom Benelux BVBA, Symphony Ventures, Flextricity, Imperial College London, Spotify,
BT and many more!
Meet face-to-face with over 500 leading global suppliers of data centre technologies including Huawei, Riello, Huber + Suhner, Carel,
Siemens, Schneider, Rahi Systems, Brand-rex, Anixter, Minkels, Munters, ABB, Finisar, Rittal and MPL Technology Group, to name a few.
Take a tour of our very own Global feature Green Data Centre - retuning to the London flagship event for the second time and situated
in the middle of the show floor, showcasing the latest green products in the market.
Benefit from our new multiple content areas - come and find the answers to everything concerning power and energy efficiency, design
and build, physical security, robotic automation, fire and security and data centre routing and switching. In short, come and meet your
data centre of the future.
BIG DATA WORLD
Big Data World is a practical 'how to' event, with content designed to help data and business data professionals shape your big data
strategies. The world-leading conference will offer insight, best practices, ideas and techniques that you can take back to your office and use
across your own Big Data projects
Be inspired by dozens of case studies from blue chip companies, start-ups, service providers, the public sector and leading enterprise
organisations.
Source ideas, inspiration, products and services from suppliers including Qlik, Splash, Alteryx, Proxem, Dataiku, Differentia consulting,
Time Tender and many more!
Gain the latest insights from more than 80 big data thought-leaders, business and government leaders and global visionaries including
Booz Allen Hamilton's Kirk Borne, IBM's Evangelist Jeremy Waite, Skype's Mike Hyde, Spotify's Will Shapiro, eBay's Davide Cervellin, and
Google's Juan Felipe Rincon, to name just a few.
www.storagemagazine.co.uk
@STMagAndAwards
Jan/Feb 2017
^
STORAGE
MAGAZINE
13

2017 EVENT PREVIEW: PREDICTIONS
CLOUD EXPO EUROPE 2017
people who have faced - and overcome
- the same challenges as you.
Brand new: DevOps Live, sponsored
by Docker, which will uncover how
DevOps and Containers can boost
business performance, and Agile
Networks, where you can see firsthand
how SDN & NFV are better
suited to meet the dynamic compute
and storage needs of today.
Visit our industry-leading sister events,
again all for free: Data Centre World,
Cloud Security Expo, and Smart IoT
will all be taking place at the same
time in the same place, along with our
brand new launch event Big Data
World.
No other UK business IT event is bigger,
better attended and packs more leading
educational content into 2 unmissable
days - all at no cost.
The events all take place on the 15-16
March 2017 at ExCeL, London, and are
free to attend for all technology and
enterprise professionals. For more
information or to register for free tickets
visit the website below.
More info: www.cloudexpoeurope.com
CLOUD SECURITY EXPO
No one implementing cutting-edge cloud technology can afford to ignore security. Secure your cloud with confidence, save yourself money,
time and hassle by employing the latest breakthroughs and business-winning technology.
Learn from dozens of real practitioners from blue chip companies, service providers and leading organisations including Aviva,
Canadian, Imperial Bank of Commerce, Shell International, Twitter and UBS.
Access 80 cutting-edge suppliers showcasing the latest technology solutions and services, including Active Reach, Algo Secure, Avast,
CensorNet, DOS Arrest, GlobalSign, Landesk, NSFocus, Trend Micro and Zenedge.
SMART IOT LONDON
You know the what of 'things'. You probably understand the why of 'things'. What you need to fully grasp now is the how of 'things'. That's just
what Smart IoT London will guide you in. Wherever you are on your IoT journey - whether you're exploring how to become a data-centric
business, or you are looking at the next steps of securing, analysing and integrating this data with your existing or new applications and
processes - Smart IoT London is the only place to be
Be inspired by dozens of case studies from blue chip companies, start-ups, service providers, the public sector and leading enterprise
organisations, such as Aviva, British Gas, BT Americas, Google, ITV, PayPal, Twitter and Vodafone.
Gain the latest insights from IoT thought-leaders, practitioners and visionaries including Ray Wang, Founder of Constellation
Research, Thyssenkrupp Elevator AG's CEO Andreas Schierenbeck, Amyx's CEO Scott Amyx, and O2 IoT Project lead Vinnett Taylor
to name a few.
Determine how you can harness the power of the Internet of Things - whether you are interested in practical business applications,
connectivity and location technology, big data and analytics, security, platforms, applications or innovation - there's something here
for everyone.
Make the most of product demos, start-up pitches, speed networking, evening drinks and interactive event features such as the Urban
IoT Showcase, all offering a large dose of innovation.
^
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MAGAZINE

PRODUCT REVIEW REVIEW
QSAN XCUBESAN X3226D
QSAN Technology has a fine
reputation in the enterprise storage
market as its extensive range of
arrays offer extreme value with no
compromises on features. The latest
XCubeSAN XS3200 series takes this to the next
level by delivering high-performance all-Flash
storage at a price Tier-1 vendors can't hope to
compete with.
On review is the XCubeSAN XS3226D which
scores even more points as its 2U chassis has
26 SFF drive bays - two more than most other
competitors. Hardware redundancy looks
good as along with two hot-plug fans and
PSUs, the dual controllers run in active/active
mode and support optional cache-to-flash
backup modules.
Each controller has a fast quad-core Xeon D-
1500 series processor teamed up with 4GB of
DDR4 cache memory field expandable to
64GB. Each controller comes with dual
embedded 10GBase-T iSCSI data ports and
has room for two host expansion modules.
QSAN offers a good range of host cards with
quad-port 16Gbps FC, 10GbE SFP+ and
Gigabit on the menu. Note that the second slot
has a maximum bandwidth of 20Gbps so only
supports the 10GbE and Gigabit host cards.
The controllers are endowed with 12Gbps
SAS3 backplanes and these services extend to
their dual mini-SAS expansion ports. QSAN's
XD5300 series of disk shelves can be
connected to the head unit over dualredundant
links with the XS3226D supporting
up to 10 shelves and 286 drives.
For testing, we loaded up 26 400GB Micron
SAS3 SSDs. We had no problems deploying
the array in the lab as QSAN's QFinder
located it for us and provided direct access to
its web interface.
The new SANOS 4 web interface provides
easy access to all features. Storage is
provisioned by placing selected drives into
pools and choosing from eleven RAID array
options. During pool creation, you can choose
thick or thin provisioning and set the preferred
controller. Volume creation is just as easy as
you pick a pool, decide on a size and set it for
data storage or as a backup target for the
integral cloning and replication operations.
Volumes are protected with snapshots which
run on-demand or regularly at scheduled
intervals. Existing snapshots can be exposed as
new read-only or read/write targets and
assigned to specific hosts using the handy
auto-map feature.
For performance testing, we used four Xeon
E5-2600 v4 rack servers equipped with
QLogic dual-port 16Gbps FC adapters and
running Windows Server 2012 R2. We
configured two RAID10 pools with two
volumes each and mapped them to all ports
on both controllers to create high-speed
32Gbps MPIO server links.
Running Iometer on one server returned fast
sequential raw read speeds of 3,132MB/sec
and a cumulative total for all four of
11,851MB/sec - very close to QSAN's claimed
12,000MB/sec. For write speeds, we saw a
cumulative 6,839MB/sec across all four
servers - shy of the claimed 8,000MB/sec but
impressive nonetheless. The all-Flash array
shone in our random read and write tests as
Iometer reported only slightly lower speeds
than those of our sequential tests.
I/O throughput is also excellent with one
server hitting nearly 400,000 IOPS for
sequential read operations using a 4KB block
size (note also all these figures were achieved
under snapshot conditions).
Failover is transparent and near-instant as
after pulling the secondary controller out to
simulate a failure, our Iometer tests continued
unabated with uninterrupted access to all
volumes. Full redundancy was established less
than 20 seconds after we plugged the
controller back in and we saw Iometer
throughput return to full MPIO speeds after a
few minutes.
Product: XCubeSAN XS3226D
Supplier: QSAN Technology
Sales: sales.uk@qsan.com
Phone: 01582 968818
Web site: www.qsan.com
Price: XCubeSAN XS3226D, 2U 26, Dual, 2x
10Gb/s RJ45 Onboard £6,399 ex VAT
Extras: Host Cards (x2) - 4 port, 16Gb/s FC
(£1,299) or 4 port, 10Gb/s iSCSI (£699)
VERDICT: QSAN's affordable XCubeSAN XS3226D will have Tier-1 storage vendors very worried. It delivers high levels of
redundancy along with seamless failover and makes high-performing all-Flash arrays a reality for SMBs.
^
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MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: SOLIHULL STUDY
SCHOOL
ACCELERATED LEARNING
SOLIHULL SCHOOL IS ABLE TO BACK UP MORE DATA, FASTER, THANKS TO ARCSERVE UDP
of production data, with 3 recovery points
stored on disk, using only 7TB of backup
disk storage. Archives now happen every
month, and the School has found UDP to
be a really reliable and well featured
product, especially for disaster recovery.
Founded in 1560 and on their
present site since 1882, Solihull
School is a leading, co-educational,
independent day school. The school's
central aim is to provide for every pupil as
rich a life as possible. Teaching is
excellent and examination results speak
volumes about the progress that pupils
make in their studies.
For many years Solihull School had been
backing up data with Arcserve Backup
r17, a traditional tape backup software
solution, but the IT team were increasingly
aware that this system was not working
well: backups were much bigger than they
needed to be and tape management was
very resource intensive.
Additionally, long term archiving of
backups was a challenge and they also
had to be very selective when configuring
backups - it just wasn't always possible to
backup large data files such as video and
images, due to the performance of the
existing system.
The School was already aware of Cristie
Data, having worked with them in the
past. Cristie had supplied their Nexsan
disk based storage systems and they'd
found Cristie's support and expertise on
these systems to be excellent. Over time,
a strong relationship had developed
between the two companies. Cristie
suggested the School look at Arcserve's
latest backup technology, Unified Data
Protection (UDP), which would give them
a lot more in terms of performance,
storage efficiency and functionality.
Cristie gathered all of the pre-install
information required and then carried out
a site visit to install UDP, get it configured
and get the backups running. Everything
was completed in a day, and the
implementation went very smoothly
without any problems.
Since installing Arcserve UDP the School
now doesn't need to be so selective on
what data gets backed up and when. After
the first full backup, UDP backs up block
level changes, with source-side data
deduplication. This means the amount of
data backed up each night is far less than
with the file level backups done
previously, which has enabled the School
to protect significantly more data, with no
increase in backup times.
The School is now able to protect 30TB
"With UDP we've managed to get the
backup size down to a really good level
for us," commented Lee Richardson,
Server Manager (ICT) at Solihull School.
"We can archive our data a lot easier and
we can now backup much more data than
we could previously."
Restore times are very much improved as
the School can hold a lot more data on
disk based backup storage, meaning
restores don't have to be taken from tape.
"We had to go back to tape once before
to retrieve data, and it took forever,"
continues Richardson. "Now, everything is
much quicker with UDP. We've recently
moved data from our standalone HyperV's
into a cluster and that plugs directly into
UDP, so we're backing up even more data,
including all of our HyperV's. It's excellent,
we've never been able to backup this
much data. Arcserve UDP is so fast and
so reliable."
The School is also impressed with the
support they've received, both from Cristie
and from Arcserve. "Any problems we've
had, we've contacted Cristie and they've
been really knowledgeable and really
helped us out," explains Richardson.
"Cristie give us a timeframe and if they
are unsure of anything themselves, they've
put us directly in contact with Arcserve
who have been very responsive. And if we
need any new components or anything
else delivered, it always arrives the next
day - I can't fault that."
More info: www.cristie.co.uk
^
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MAGAZINE

RESEARCH
RESEARCH: DATA PROTECTION
THROWING GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD
NEW RESEARCH SUGGESTS THAT DATA PROTECTION POLICIES ARE LITTLE MORE THAN A 'MONEY PIT'
FOR MANY ORGANISATIONS
core defences that would mitigate more than
just this specific threat."
In order to provide data visibility and
controls organisations desire, the study
states, "It's time to put a stop to expense in
depth and wrestling with cobbling together
core capabilities via disparate solutions."
Almost 90% of respondents desire a unified
data security platform. Within such a
solution, 68% see the value of data
classification, analytics and reporting to help
reduce risk. Additional criteria also include
meeting regulatory compliance (76%),
aggregating key management capabilities
(70%) and improving response to anomalous
activity (66%).
While data breaches destroy customer
confidence, impact revenues, attract
large regulatory fines and cost C-
levels their jobs, 76% of data security
professionals believe in the maturity of their
data security strategy, according to a new
study. Despite heavy investments in a variety of
data security tools as part of their strategy,
93% report persistent technical challenges in
protecting data.
"The data security money pit: expense in
depth hinders maturity," a January 2017 study
conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf
of Varonis, finds organisations "focused on
threats rather than their data and do not have
a good handle on understanding and
controlling sensitive data." The fragmented
approach to data security exacerbates
vulnerabilities and challenges, and 96% of
these respondents believe a unified approach
would benefit them, including preventing and
more quickly responding to attempted attacks,
limiting exposure and reducing complexity and
cost. The study goes on to highlight specific
areas where enterprise data security falls short:
62% of respondents have no idea where
their most sensitive unstructured data
resides
66% don't classify this data properly
59% don't enforce a least privilege model
for access to this data
63% don't audit use of this data and alert
on abuses.
David Gibson, Vice President of Strategy and
Market Development with Varonis,
commented, "Many point products are
designed to mitigate specific threats. If they're
used tactically, instead of supporting a strategy
that improves the overall security of data, they
can not only cost a lot of money, but also
provide a false sense of security. Ransomware,
for example, exploits the same internal
deficiencies that a rogue or compromised
insider might - insufficient detective capabilities
and over-subscribed access. Too many
organisations look for tools that specifically
address ransomware, but neglect to buttress
Gary Hayslip, Chief Information Security
Office to the City of San Diego, states, "One
of the greatest challenges a CISO faces
involves data. It is incumbent upon our team
to understand not only how our stakeholders
work, conduct business and use data, but also
what applications the stakeholders require;
what data is important to them; and which
data if compromised would critically impact
the ability of the organisation to conduct
business. Varonis gives insight into the flow of
data throughout my 24 enterprise networks."
In summarising the findings, Forrester
writes, "A platform can help to address
concerns and challenges that have sprouted
from trying to make use of many disparate
tools, freeing up resources to allow for
greater focus on ensuring that firms have the
correct policies, procedures and remediation
actions in place to meet business and data
security strategy objectives."
The study surveyed 150 data security
professionals in the U.S. and Canada. It is
available for download at the URL below.
More info: www.varonis.com/forrester-2017
^
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MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: CALOR GAS
VDI REVIVED
A 'PARKED' INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT HAS BEEN REVIVED, RESULTING IN IMPROVED PERFORMANCE,
RELIABILITY AND MANAGEMENT
Aproject to deploy a virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI) solution at
Calor Gas, the UK's leading
supplier of liquid petroleum gas (LPG) has
gone live after Atlantis Computing was
able to deliver a 35 percent end user
performance improvement over their
existing storage solution. The solution,
running on the Citrix XenApp environment
with Atlantis HyperScale and USX storage
is also 28 percent cheaper than their
existing solution.
Calor Gas is responsible for more than
900 office-based employees and remote
workers, so both high performance and
concrete reliability are critical for core
business operations. Atlantis HyperScale
and Atlantis USX have been deployed to
build, support and manage Calor Gas'
new virtualised IT environment.
In the initial project trials, Calor Gas
evaluated the VDI deployment based on
Citrix XenDesktop, but significant
performance issues in its existing SAN
arose. Calor Gas needed a VDI solution to
support resource-intensive applications and
specialist software on a regular basis for
remote development and external
contractors, which would have required
extending the SAN.
"We needed to increase our storage
performance to cope with the 'bursty'
traffic that is typical in a VDI
environment, but expanding our existing
storage wasn't cost effective at all," says
Andy Browne, infrastructure manager at
Calor Gas. "We initially parked the entire
VDI project as a result."
Deploying Atlantis HyperScale offered
Calor Gas a cost effective solution, which
combines compute and storage into a
"Atlantis Computing designed a solution for Calor Gas
that provides a fully redundant storage solution.
Through continual replication of both HyperScale
appliances to Atlantis USX virtual platform, Calor Gas
has a highly effective disaster recovery and business
continuity solution along with a high performing
reliable VDI."
single appliance, developed, supported
and maintained by a single vendor. "The
Atlantis HyperScale appliance evens out
the peaks and gives the consistent
performance needed in a VDI
environment," said Browne.
"An organisation like Calor Gas requires
constant high performance and reliability, and
we are pleased Atlantis could play an
important role in delivering this solution," said
Chris Plant, EMEA vice president at Atlantis
Computing. "We continually look to transform
user experience for customers working with
Citrix. This achievement demonstrates how
well these solutions can work together to
increase business performance."
Calor Gas installed a second Atlantis
HyperScale appliance for the new virtual
desktops to support the heavy workloads of
power users. HyperScale works to provide
consistent performance in a VDI
environment, which typically fluctuates in
traffic. Atlantis Computing designed a
solution for Calor Gas that provides a fully
redundant storage solution.
Through continual replication of both
HyperScale appliances to Atlantis USX
virtual platform, Calor Gas has a highly
effective disaster recovery and business
continuity solution along with a high
performing reliable VDI.
More info: www.atlantiscomputing.com
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^
STORAGE
MAGAZINE
19

OPINION
OPINION: DATA CENTRE RESILIENCY
PRESSURE SENSITIVE?
THE GROWTH IN CLOUD SERVICES IS PUTTING INCREASED PRESSURE ON DATA CENTRE RESILIENCY,
SUGGESTS ADRIAN BARKER, GENERAL MANAGER EMEA AT RF CODE
The flood of digital content, internet
traffic, Big Data and eCommerce has
had a dramatic effect on data centres
in recent years. One of the most
significant trends to date is the meteoric
rise of cloud computing.
Cisco is forecasting 83% of data centre
traffic in the next three years will be generated
through cloud computing. Is that really
surprising? Businesses of every size are
utilising Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), PaaS
(Platform as a Service) or SaaS (Software as a
Service) offerings. Data centres have had to
physically transform in order to meet
availability demands.
With fundamental business tasks now
dependent on an uninterrupted service from
the data centre, the spotlight is on the issue of
downtime. This is more than just a financial
consideration. If a business cannot access its
cloud and hosted services it seriously risks a
loss in productivity and the potential for a
major impact on its commercial reputation.
DOWNTIME DEBACLES
Software company SSP Worldwide came
under fire in September 2016 when its SaaS
solution suffered an outage. The system is
used by 40% of the UK's brokers to track
insurance renewals amongst other services.
The downtime, which was said to be caused
by a data centre power outage, lasted almost
two weeks, by which time brokers had made
their frustrations known online. Their concerns
included loss of business and risk of action
from the Financial Conduct Authority.
Another incident saw Salesforce suffer an
outage attributed to a failure in the power
distribution in its primary data centre, causing
twelve expensive hours of disruption. In this
case, the CEO was forced to apologise via
social media; the kind of experience that all
business leaders dread.
COPING WITH DEMAND
There are many different ways in which data
centre and service availability can be affected.
Around a quarter of outages are due to power
failures, but software and hardware problems,
human error, natural disasters and cyberattacks
also play a big part.
Another problem is overheating due to
inefficient cooling. A rapid increase in
temperature can cause immediate equipment
failure but inadequate cooling of equipment
over a prolonged period of time will also lead
to damage or failure. A lack of capacity is
equally damaging - a spike in traffic could be
enough to cause downtime if equipment
becomes overheated and overworked.
Operators face a constant battle of
balancing workloads against available
budgets. Many data centre owners choose to
over-provision resources and servers 'just in
case' a disaster situation occurs, however this
can be immensely costly. There are other
strategies available.
PREVENTION - BETTER THAN CURE
One of the methods to maintaining resiliency,
even in the face of an extreme weather event
or a catastrophic power failure, is through a
clear understanding of the data centre
environment. Operational management
solutions can provide real-time insight,
control and predictability so data centre
managers can solve environmental and
operational challenges with valuable insight,
rather than guesswork.
Data centre assets need to be monitored and
tracked to maintain performance and guard
against technical failure. Environmental
conditions need to be dynamically adjusted
with changes in demand. It is all about
understanding and managing your
environment to ensure reliability.
As data gets bigger and cloud computing
expands further, data centre dependency is
only set to increase, although the use of realtime
insight and other tools will ensure data
centres remain secure, resilient and reliable in
the face of businesses' unrelenting appetite
for more data.
More info: www.rfcode.com
^
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MAGAZINE

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INDUSTRY SPEAKERS,
40 CASE-STUDIES,
50 EXHIBITORS AND NETWORK
WITH THOUSANDS OF YOUR PEERS.
ALL FREE OF CHARGE. REGISTER AT:
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EVENT
E VENT: STORAGE A WARDS 2017
WHO DO YOU LOVE?
THIS YEAR'S STORAGE AWARDS ARE ALREADY ON THE HORIZON -
STORAGE MAGAZINE EDITOR DAVID TYLER REMINDS READERS WHY
IT'S SO IMPORTANT TO MAKE THEIR VOICES HEARD
It may be hard to believe, but March
31st is the closing date for nominations
for our fourteenth annual Storage
Awards, after which the 'serious business'
of online voting begins. Voting for the
finalists will run from April 6th to June 6th
- D-Day indeed! So don't miss out on your
chance to reward the product, company or
individual that you feel has made a
significant difference to the storage
industry over the last year.
The 2016 Awards broke all previous
records: in excess of 10,000 readers voted
and over 50,000 votes were cast. Head to
the website below to make your nomination
now - and remember, you don't have to
nominate in every category, only the ones
that interest you. It's a great way to
recognise and reward those businesses who
have made an impact in your sector.
The Awards night itself will take place on
the evening of June 15th in its regular
venue of London's spectacular Grand
Connaught Rooms. There will be plenty of
time for networking and socialising as well
as the 'serious business' of the competition
itself - and as ever, the party is certain to
overflow into next door's Sway nightclub
for the hardiest of our attendees.
There are still some sponsorship
opportunities available too, so if you're
interested in using the ceremony as a
way to promote your company's brand,
or just in booking a table for the event,
then details can be found again on the
Awards website.
More info: www.storage-awards.com
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EVENT
E VENT: STORAGE A WARDS 2017
AWARDS CATEGORIES IN FULL
"ONE TO WATCH" AWARD - PRODUCT
"ONE TO WATCH" AWARD - COMPANY
"VALUE FOR MONEY" AWARD
STORAGE MARKETING TEAM OF THE YEAR
SERVICE TO INDUSTRY AWARD
CHANNEL EXCELLENCE AWARD
SOLUTION OF THE YEAR
ARCHIVING & COMPLIANCE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
STORAGE INNOVATORS AWARD
AVAILABILITY PLATFORM OF THE YEAR
STORAGE MONITORING PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
CONNECTIVITY PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
OBJECT STORAGE VENDOR OF THE YEAR
HYPER CONVERGED PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
DISK/HYBRID BASED PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
FLASH/SSD PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
CLOUD ENABLER OF THE YEAR
HOSTING COMPANY OF THE YEAR
CLOUD PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
STORAGE VIRTUALISATION PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
SOFTWARE DEFINED STORAGE (SDS) COMPANY OF THE YEAR
CHANNEL PARTNER PROGRAM OF THE YEAR
EDITOR'S CHOICE
STORAGE RECRUITER OF THE YEAR
STORAGE SERVICE COMPANY OF THE YEAR
CORPORATE STORAGE RESELLER OF THE YEAR
SPECIALIST STORAGE RESELLER OF THE YEAR
STORAGE DISTRIBUTOR OF THE YEAR
STORAGE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR
STORAGE COMPANY OF THE YEAR
www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards Jan/Feb 2017
^
STORAGE
MAGAZINE
23

CASE STUDY: ASTRAZENECA STUDY
FOCUSED ON PROTECTION
PHARMACEUTICAL GIANT ASTRAZENECA IS LEVERAGING CLOUD COLLABORATION
TECHNOLOGIES WHILE KEEPING USERS AND DATA SECURE
As a global pharmaceutical company
whose footprint includes operations in
over 100 countries, AstraZeneca has
an immense amount of data to protect,
thousands of users to connect, and a highly
regulated environment to operate in.
To help tackle these challenges, AstraZeneca
Chief Information Officer, Dave Smoley,
developed an IT strategy that put
collaboration at the forefront, breaking the
traditional mould of conservative
pharmaceutical companies; allowing users,
patients and medical professionals to share
data and make the most of new science,
creating a lean, fast-paced and creative
environment.
THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX
In addition to collaborating with leading
universities and other pharmaceutical
companies, AstraZeneca has tens of
thousands of salespeople globally who need
immediate access to their data from anywhere
in the world. With the old ways of connecting
through VPNs proving to be cumbersome, the
team at AstraZeneca started looking to the
cloud for answers, specifically, how to drive
secure and effective collaboration through
widely used cloud-based tools like Box.
"People couldn't understand why they need to
VPN-in to access Box," says Jeff Haskill,
AstraZeneca's Chief Information Security
Officer. "With the help of Skyhigh, we've
removed that friction and offer a more
streamlined solution which is still secure and
compliant, but a night and day difference from
what our employees are used to." With
Skyhigh, AstraZeneca now enforces security
and compliance policies across cloud services
like Box without adding any friction in the form
of VPN or new agents on devices, making the
secure path the easy path for users.
With the consumerisation of IT on the rise, the
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Jan/Feb 2017
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MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: STUDY
ASTRAZENECA
use of shadow, or unsanctioned cloud
services, has grown within the
enterprise as any employee with a
credit card or email address can signup
for new cloud services without the
knowledge or approval of IT. As
employees start sharing data outside
the enterprise, they increase an organisation's
overall risk of data loss and exfiltration.
"What we needed was visibility," says Haskill.
"As we pushed more data into the cloud, we
really had to answer the tough questions - what
are we using the cloud for, what's our data
doing, where's it moving to, and who has
access to it?"
To gain the granular visibility and control
AstraZeneca was looking for, they decided to
leverage CASB (Cloud Access Security
Broker) technology and brought in Skyhigh
Networks. Haskill and his team deployed
Skyhigh for Shadow IT to help answer
questions about who had access to their data
and where it was going.
AstraZeneca uses Zscaler as their inline proxy
to monitor web traffic across users, devices and
locations and protect employees from
malicious or compromised sites.
Skyhigh seamlessly integrates with existing
technologies like Zscaler to process proxy logs
to provide the visibility into AstraZeneca's cloud
usage as well as the individual risk ratings of
each service. Using the integration,
AstraZeneca can also analyse a particular
cloud IP address to see if the site is malicious or
serving malicious content and block it if so.
With increased visibility, Haskill and his team
were able to leverage Skyhigh's Global
CloudTrust Registry which includes the risk
ratings of over 19,000 cloud services to allow
or block cloud services based on their
individual risk scores, and further drive
adoption to Box through just-in- time coaching
and user education.
"I've been in this field a long time and not
much surprises me," says Haskill. "We thought
we would have a lot of shadow IT, we found it
was true and now we can act upon it."
In addition to driving adoption and
consolidating services, AstraZeneca also uses
Skyhigh to further secure their Box usage. By
using Skyhigh, Haskill and his team are able to
drill down and see who has access to sensitive
data, who it has been shared with, and also
have the ability to extend their existing onpremises
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to the
cloud. As such, they can limit and control
access based on user role, device type
(managed and unmanaged) and user's
geographic location; all while notifying the
security operations centre if compromised
accounts or insider threats are detected.
"Skyhigh lets us use Box to its full
capability," says Haskill. "We can see how
our data is being used and if it is being
shared with third parties."
DATA DRIVEN SECURITY
In utilising Skyhigh as a central control point to
enforce policies across all cloud services,
Haskill and his team are armed with the
actionable information they need to continue
to lower risk across the organisation and gain
executive support.
"We have the proof, down to the smallest
kilobyte of data, which allows us to have
intelligent discussions with the executive
leadership teams and with the business,
because we have actionable data to share,"
says Haskill. As a result, Haskill knows that the
overall risk posture at AstraZeneca has
decreased by the way the business approaches
cloud usage: "When IT can bring the audit
committee and the executive members together
and they are confident and comfortable using
the cloud, it is huge. You know you've made an
impact on risk. It is no longer IT
security saying, 'we believe this, or
we think that'. We have the data we
need to answer their questions and
provide the metrics showing how
Skyhigh is mitigating and lowering
risk. It's the facts."
FORWARD LOOKING
As Haskill and his team continue to enable
their workforce's needs for global
collaboration, all new services are screened
and "wrapped in Skyhigh," allowing for the
required controls to be in place. "Skyhigh has
allowed us to leverage new cloud technologies
that wouldn't have been possible before," says
Haskill. "Our users never see Skyhigh even
though it is a key part of our whole IT security
strategy, allowing us to keep our users and
data safe so they can have the global access
they need on any device."
With a target of having a substantial
proportion of their apps in the cloud by 2018,
it is imperative for AstraZeneca to have
solutions that integrate into existing solutions,
as the old, traditional model is heavy on
paperwork and requires on-premises devices.
"Skyhigh integrated seamlessly with our
existing providers like Zscaler, and feeds into
our SIEM, so we get the information that is
important for us and we can continue to be
fast, lean and agile," says Haskill. Leveraging
the integration between Zscaler and Skyhigh,
AstraZeneca can secure and govern cloud
usage, by pushing governance policies based
on Skyhigh's cloud insights directly to Zscaler to
block high-risk services, and enforcing granular
DLP policies on cloud usage.
"Skyhigh has streamlined application
management from weeks to hours and that's
key to our overall strategy to be fast,"
concludes Haskill. "The reduction in man
hours allows us to focus on more important
things, like enable our users and deliver on
the key science that makes AstraZeneca a
great place to work."
More info: www.skyhighnetworks.com
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^
STORAGE
MAGAZINE
25

OPINION: DATA GROWTH DATA GROWTH
BIG DATA GETS BIGGER
JASON BEESON, COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR AT HAMMER, LOOKS AT HOW THE CHANGING VOLUMES -
AND TYPES - OF DATA WILL IMPACT THE STORAGE SECTOR
which comes as no surprise.
It means data centres will continue to increase
in both number and size. IBM, for example,
has announced it is to triple its UK-based cloud
data centre capacity. This is likely to be
intensified as the demand for storage comes
not just from the simple growth in raw data, but
from that data being increasingly structured,
i.e., sorted and segmented for analysis.
According to the Worldwide Semi-annual Big
Data and Analytics Spending Guide from IDC,
worldwide revenues for big data and business
analytics will grow from $130.1 billion in 2016
to more than $203 billion in 2020.
After the Iron Age and Industrial Age, we
are now well into the Information Age.
Global economies are shifting from
those based on activities inspired by the
Industrial Revolution to those built on
information and computerisation. Whereas
machines and muscle were the keystones of
success, now it's compute and connect. We
are, as a result, being deluged with data.
Which is good. Data - information - is the
bedrock on which modern business success is
based; the foundation of a knowledge-based
economy. The more data we have - the more
information - the better the decisions we take
and the better the projections we make.
It's little wonder we are experiencing a data
explosion. Some 90% of all the data that
exists today has been created in the past two
years. By 2020, about 1.7MB of new
information will be created every second for
every human on the planet. By then, our
accumulated digital universe of data will grow
from 4.4ZB today to around 44ZB, or 44
trillion GB; that's almost as many digital bits
as there are stars in the universe.
Let's put that into perspective. If all the words
ever spoken where digitised as 16kHz 16-bit
audio, it would require 42ZB of capacity to
store it all. That's the volume of data we are
talking about.
This data is created from a variety of sources;
sensors, social media, e-commerce, mobile
phones and so on, in fact, anything that is
connected to the internet. This is big data - and
it's only going to get even bigger.
What is truly amazing is that less than
0.5% of all this stored data is ever analysed
and used to its maximum effect. That's
where the opportunities lie, not just for the
businesses who own the data to better
understand customer behaviour and
preferences, but also for those who operate
in the data storage sector. This is a business
growth bonanza; according to IDC, this
rapid data generation is outpacing storage,
This need to store growing volumes of data is
being met in part by the drive manufacturers
who are pumping cash into R&D and creating
HDDs and SSDs with higher capacity. WD and
Seagate now offer a 10TB HDD and Seagate a
60TB SSD. The networks, too, are evolving with
Mellanox, Dell, Huawei and QLogic all
offering 100Gb/s Ethernet connectivity. In fact,
Mellanox has recently announced Connect X6
adapters which support 200GbE, although
they are still to become generally available.
Data centre designers are also focusing on
streamlining centres with lower carbon
footprints and greater energy efficiency. Many
are aiming for a PUE (power usage efficiency)
rating of less than 1.5.
Clearly the winners in this information
explosion will be those who facilitate the
capture and collation, dissection and
dissemination of data to the greatest effect.
Hammer, the award-winning distributor with
25 years' experience in providing storage,
server and networking solutions is well-placed
to work with, and advise, those for whom data
storage is mission critical.
More info: www.hammerplc.com
^
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Jan/Feb 2017
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MAGAZINE

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