By Raymond Goh

As the volume of data continues to grow, businesses today are facing challenges in managing and storing the data efficiently and cost effectively. Businesses are using and saving more data than ever before. And, by all accounts, data will continue to proliferate at unprecedented rates, pushing the total amount of information in existence today to 1.2 zettabytes—1,000 exabytes, that is—according to a special February 2010 report by The Economist.

At the same time, however, businesses are facing reduced budgets. They are pressured to manage, control and reduce cost, in addition, IT departments are being asked to do more, often much more, with lesser budgets.  Regardless of how much data their likely overburdened IT staff must manage today and tomorrow, businesses must find ways to save money by keeping a tight rein on both capital and operational expenditures.

The good news? Cost-efficient information management technologies such as deduplication and archiving, which were previously options for enterprise organizations only, are now available for the mid-sized business. Better yet, these technologies have been integrated into backup and recovery solutions that businesses can now use not only to reduce storage costs but to improve data protection and minimise the overall complexity of their IT environments.

While there is no single approach that is right for every organisation, businesses need to take an informed approach, looking at corporate culture, risk tolerance, size and reach. Technology can assist in managing data, cost and reduce risks in a systemised and protected manner that is in compliance with the various rules and regulations.

Eliminating Redundant Data

One of the most effective technologies for addressing the challenges of both rapid data growth and reduced budgets is deduplication. After all, during the typical backup process, approximately 70 percent of data that is backed up is actually duplicate data that has not been accessed in more than 90 days, according to a recent Gartner report.

Redwood City, CA-based desktop virtualisation company NComputing was ranked No 1 in enterprise client device shipments in Asia Pacific in in a newly published IDC report, the company announced on 22 October, 2010.

IDC’s Q2 2010 Worldwide Enterprise Client Devices Tracker ranked NComputing as the first in terms of Asia Pacific shipments at 25.2% share and fastest quarter on quarter growth at 50.2% (when combining the thin client and terminal client categories).

“In less than three years, we have deployed over 350,000 virtual desktops in the Indian subcontinent and over 100,000 in ASEAN region.”  said Manish Sharma, NComputing’s Vice President for Asia Pacific.

“We are proud of this achievement. It doesn’t just represent our success.  It also represents the success of our customers who are leading the world and providing the blue-print for successful desktop virtualisation deployment,” he added.

NComputing chief executive officer Stephen Dukker said, “To date, many of the large global PC and chip manufacturers have been barriers to the mainstream adoption of desktop virtualisation because of their economic interest and legacy investment in the old ‘PC per desktop’  centric IT infrastructure by maintaining artificially high prices.”

“NComputing’s dramatic success demonstrates the truly disruptive economics of virtual desktops when naturally priced; reducing all client related costs by 50% or more compared to traditional PCs.

“We are putting the ‘old guard’ on notice that desktop virtualisation is ready to go mainstream and  NComputing has and will continue to lead in this space and deliver on our promise of transforming the economics of computing,” Dukker added.

However, what does NComputing's virtual desktop solution actually do?

Over the past year, Juniper Networks has been advocating a New Network vision that includes new technologies, partnerships, and even a venture fund to get tomorrow’s network innovations moving forward at a more rapid pace.

Here,  David Yen, Executive VP and General Manager of Juniper’s Fabric and Switching Technologies Business Group,shares his perspective on Juniper’s 3-2-1 architecture and what it means for the future of data centers.

Q: As the head of Juniper Networks’ Fabric & Switching Technologies Business, can you sum up what Juniper has laid out for customers and others?

A: One major theme we’ve been advocating since our ‘New Network’ launch back in October 2009 is the realization that technology has evolved so much in just about every facet of the IT industry – from the mega data centers to consumer. It's time for a new network to fulfill the promise of today's technology while fostering future innovation. And we believe the most important thing—the first step of this process —is to simplify the data center. Then you can control your cost. You can scale. And you have a much better foundation to automate the network.

Q: Let’s talk a bit about the data center. What has fundamentally changed there in the past few years?

A: For decades the perennial challenge for data center managers has been to strike a balance between the user experience and the economics. With a new network, you actually have a chance to enhance both measures. As everybody has seen in the last decade or so, there have been very significant changes in the data center, particularly on the application, user services and programming style sides. Over the last 10 years, instead of the popular client-server model, the work, the application, has evolved to the Web 2.0 style. You touch on a number of applications written by different people, possibly running on different servers.

With the service-oriented architecture time to market, people no longer develop their applications completely from scratch. Furthermore, more modern applications have fundamentally changed the workload in the data center. In the client-server era, typically people used very capable UNIX servers to run particular application services. And that particular service may be rendered by various processes within the server and dealing with one or maybe more databases also contained, controlled by the server. So the network traffic in the data center primarily ran “north and south,” between the server and the serving client.

Now look at the data center architecture, which today is primarily a multi-layer Ethernet switching tree structure, where at the bottom or “south” of the tree are the servers, while clients come from the top of the tree so traffic is north and south.

With the advent of Web 2.0, the service-oriented architecture, along with the increasingly capable x86 processors that commoditize the server hardware, and also the popular practice of designating a particular server to run a particular application, now, a typical application in the data center may interact with several servers and deal with one or more databases. Each of these databases is probably created by different people for different purposes and they just aggregate all these to provide the services. As the workgroup grows, this tree gets bigger and more complex.

Experian's new Marketing Services Centre, officially opened in Cyberjaya on 5 October, will develop its analytical and marketing services products for the world, according to Gavin Appel, Experian Marketing Services senior vice-president for Global Product Development and Delivery.

At the same time, Experian Marketing Services centre also received MSC Malaysia status from Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) chief executive officer, Datuk Badlisham Ghazali.

This opening comes about two years after Experian's Global Research & Development Centre opened in another building in Cyberjaya. The Marketing Services Centre is housed in the Ericsson building nearby but their operations are separate.

“Products offered by the Marketing Services Centre include Hitwise, CheetahMail and QAS services and will help  our clients target and acquire new customers and achieve better returns on investment,” said Andy Went, operations director, Experian Global Development Centre Malaysia.

By Koh Ee Laine

The surging cost of storage is a headache to many companies as they deal with issues in managing and storing data, and addressing question on what information should be retained, how the information should be available, and how long should it be kept?

The consequences of information management missteps are severe and far-reaching. It is now 1,500 times more expensive to review data than it is to store it, highlighting why proper deletion policies and efficient search capabilities are critical for enterprise organizations. Backup windows are soaring while recovery times have become prohibitive. In addition, with the massive amounts of information stored on difficult-to-access backup tapes, eDiscovery has become a lengthy, inefficient and costly exercise.

Symantec’s 2010 Information Management Health Check Survey, highlights that a majority of enterprises are not following their own advice when it comes to information management.  While a large majority of respondents believe in the value of a formal information retention plan, but only a small number actually have one.  The survey also found that too many enterprises save information indefinitely instead of implementing policies that allow them to confidently delete unimportant data or records, and therefore suffer from rampant storage growth, unsustainable backup windows, increased litigation risk and expensive and inefficient discovery processes. 
Infinite retention results in infinite waste

Enterprises see the value of a solid information management plan, but too many still follow the outdated practice of keeping everything forever. The sheer volume of data is growing exponentially, so trying to keep everything consumes large amounts of storage space and demands too much of IT's resources.  As a result, businesses spend far more time and money on the negative consequences of poor information management and discovery practices than they would by working to change them. 
Recommendations

Enterprises need to regain control of their information.  The costs of waiting for the perfect plan are far outweighed by the benefits of being proactive. The following are some recommendations from Symantec to address the issue:

Backup is not an archive, and it is not recommended to use backup for archiving and legal holds.  Enterprises should retain a few weeks of backup (30 - 60 days) and then delete or archive data in an automated way thereafter.

People normally don't pay much attention to advertisements in print media and generally avoid TV ads by changing channels, making a cup of coffee or taking a toilet break until the ad is over but there are some exceptions, according to local taxi advertising operator Futurelook.

In pilot trials of its iCab taxi advertising service in April, one of its clients which advertised its car rental, car service centre and handyman's services was so happy that it extended its campaign for a further four months.

“This client received between 30 and 40 enquires per month, with between 50% to 60% conversion rate compared to one or two calls per month when it advertised in the newspapers,” said Futurelook director, Valens Datuk Dr. Subra.

Another client, the Islamic International School in Subang Jaya received between five and six enquiries per day for the RM1,500 it spent per month on iCab advertising, compared to less than five calls in response to an ad costing RM8,000 per insertion in a newspaper.

Futurelook officially launched iCab in 100 taxis in early August and at the time, had four clients – namely MBF Card, Palm Gardens Resort, Pusat Zakat Selangor and Avis International Car Rental, though Futurelook also targets clients such as telephone companies, banks, hotels, insurance companies, food & beverage outlets, entertainment spots, government and others which typically address consumers.

iCab consists of iCab Digital, a digital media player with a 7 inch LCD display mounted in the back of the headrest of the taxi's front passenger seat or in front of the passenger sitting on the left side of its back seat. where studies found 95% of passengers normally sit.

The media player plays a video and slide advertisements with voice-enabled full multimedia which repeats every 10 minutes, 60% of which are advertisements interspersed with four minutes of movie trailers and important announcements on health issues such as the H1N1 virus, cancer and other matters.

Advertisement length starts from 15 seconds minimum, 30 seconds or longer and they pay from RM1,500 per month for a 15 second ad displayed across the whole fleet of participating taxis, RM3,000 for a 30 second ad and more for ads of longer duration.

Kuala Lumpur, 29 June, 2010: The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), the driver of the MSC Malaysia National ICT initiative continued to support the adoption and use of open source software (OSS) at the three-day MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference 2010 (MOSC) which opened at the Berjaya Times Square Hotel here today.

The event was jointly organised by MDeC, in collaboration with the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation Planning Unit (MAMPU) which is the force behind OSS adoption by government and the Open Source Developers Club Malaysia (OSDC.my).

MSC Malaysia encouraged Malaysian companies to adopt open source software as a means to raise productivity and efficiency while lowering costs and to improve their competitiveness in world markets.

The term “open source” refers to to software of which its initial form in human-intelligible script is made available along with its executable form which can be run by computers, along with permissive licensing conditions which allow users to freely use, copy, modify and distribute the software or its derivatives.

Most of the proprietary software used today only comes in its executable form, which is very hard for even the most competent programmers to fully understand and modify.

An analogy would be an open source cake, where its recipe is provided along with the baked cake, so that others can either make the same cake or with modifications and enhancements to suit their taste.

Also, OSS is usually available for download free of charge or at a nominal fee covering the cost of the CD, DVD or USB-drive on which it is provided.

KUALA LUMPUR, Sunday 27 June: Yasar FC, a joint venture between Malaysian company Dondurma AP Sdn Bhd and Yasar Dondurma of Turkey will introduce the Turkish company's desert cafe chain to Malaysia and the Asia Pacific region.

The agreement was signed at the Bosporus Restaurant, Pavilion shopping mall this afternoon, by MADO group chairman, Mehmet Kanbur and Shaifubahrim Mohd. Salleh and Ameta Kaur on behalf of Dondurma AP, before Her Excellency Serap Ataay, Ambassador of Turkey to Malaysia.

Yasar Dondurma owns the MADO branded cafe chain, Turkey's largest, as well as the MADO ice cream brand made from goats milk and saleb, an orchid extract found in the Marash region of Turkey, which give the ice cream its viscosity and provides an aroma which counters the smell of the goats milk. The ice cream is unique in that due to its viscosity, it's eaten from a plate with a knife and fork.

MADO has been making ice cream for five generations and it positions itself as being family-oriented, with family-oriented service, along with modern facilities such as WiFi, and it combines high European standards with the assurance of halal food.

Yasar FC will use Malaysia as a base for distribution of the MADO brand of ice creams, Turkish coffees, speciality cakes, its range of baklava (a rich, sweet pastry), breads, Turkish pastry's and small pizzas in Malaysia and across the region, and the company expects this to bring in US$100 million in various investments over five years. Dondurma AP owns 51% in Yasar FC, while Yasar Dondurma owns the rest.

Over the next few years, Asia is poised to see tremendous growth in the area of managed services, according to Value Advantage.

Managed services is the practice of outsourcing the implementation, support and maintenance of IT systems to an external provider, which allows organisations to focus on their core business activities. According to Frost & Sullivan, organisations in the Asia-Pacific region are expected to spend over US$10.25 billion on managed services by 2010, up from $6.47 billion in 2007.

Value Advantage is Asia’s first host of Canada-based Level Platforms Inc’s Managed Workplace, the industry-leading Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) platform designed exclusively for use by managed service providers (MSPs).

It's RMM products include management of IT systems' architecture, monitoring, managed cloud services, alerting, alerts Viewer, remote Control, out-of-band management, patch Management, scripting, bandwidth monitoring, asset management, asset tags. policy modules, reporting, customised user interface, trouble tickets, 3rd party integration, collaboration, on-premise or hosted solutions.

However, many managed service providers (MSPs), especially in Asia, work on an inefficient model of reacting to problems only after they start to affect the customer's day-to-day operations or what is called “firefighting.”

Furthermore, many small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) don't take advantage of the full value of their IT systems; rather, they have simply purchased the equipment for the sake of adopting technology in typical kiasu fashion as they say in Asia.

So how should MSP’s aim to counteract both these problems? How can remote monitoring and management (RMM) enable MSP’s to better serve their clients as well as increase productivity and efficiency for themselves?

Well, Value Advantage is confident that its RMM products will help MSPs to better serve SMEs in Asia.

However, based on the past experiences of other service providers, they found Asian SMEs to be resistant to embrace remote services.