WAN Data Acceleration Powers Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
PORTrockIT is deployed by companies such as IBM, Commvault, NetApp, and CVS Healthcare to mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss by using machine learning and artificial intelligence in ways that traditional WAN optimisation and SD-WAN solutions often fail to achieve. Reduction in network and data latency can lead to improved customer experiences. However, with the possibility of large congested data transfers to and from the cloud, latency and packet loss can have a considerable negative effect on data throughput. Without AI and machine intelligence solutions, the effects of latency and packet loss can inhibit data and back-up performance. CVS Healthcare has now expanded their back-up and recovery strategies, by using Bridgeworks’ products to achieve their ambitions. IBM Spectrum Protect PORTrockIT is integrated into the Nordic IT infrastructure company’s IBM Spectrum Protect offerings for high-speed disaster recovery. Yet it is not restricted to IBM users: it can be deployed by anyone that needs to mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss, helping to achieve results that can’t be attained through traditional methods, such as WAN optimisation due to the high cost of implementation and the move to compressed and encrypted data formats. The performance objectives were achieved with IBM Spectrum Protect for the BaaS using Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) as the methodology. The network latency within Nordic Region was 9 milliseconds with a WAN link of 10Gb/s with 2.5GBs used for the solution. Many BaaS and DRaaS providers are restricted by distance before the effects of latency force them to build more access points, closer to their customers. With WAN Data Acceleration product PORTrockIT, the “reach out” from a single data centre can be massively enlarged. This means a single BaaS or DRaaS data centre can cover a greater geographical area, reducing the needs for subsidiary access points and therefore lowering their costs whilst retaining LAN-like performance. Much was achieved when Bridgeworks a proof of concept (POC) for the Nordic IT infrastructure solutions company to show how PORTrockIT could improve back-up performance, increasing network performance by 20 times. To minimise risk, the original plan included onsite cache because back-ups and SLA demands were exposed to it until they arrived at the Nordic IT infrastructure company’s data centre. This successful test involved the original network performance standing at 7MB/s accelerating to 140MB/s. PORTrockIT uses machine learning to mitigate latency and to reduce packet loss by maximising the speed of data throughput. Another benefit of PORTrockIT: there is no need to build new data centres. Performance increases can be achieved by deploying it without replacing an organisation’s existing infrastructure. Cost-savings are therefore gained. To prove the point that PORTrockIT is a true global infrastructure product, Bridgeworks worked alongside the Nordic IT company to secure a BaaS client transfer from the east coast of America to their Nordic data centre. The capacity utilisation of the WAN link between the two sites increased dramatically from less than 5% to 98% of the maximum throughput.

INFINITY supports a Midlands-based firm of accountants to invest in upgrading its IT infrastructure to combat cyber threats and protect client data.
Howards Chartered Certified Accountants, which employs almost 40 staff at its office in Stafford, has installed a site-wide connected mobility solution with enterprise-class security. INFINITY carried out the installation, which included an on-site private cloud solution with multi-factor authentication (MFA), layer 7 security firewall and industry-leading end point detection and response, all monitored by a 24/7 and 365 days a year off-site service centre. Howards’ Managing Director, Matt Bailey said: “The UK is now the most targeted nation for cyberattacks and as a professional services firm handling payroll, pension and taxation and dealing with mergers and acquisitions as well as litigation matters, we hold a lot of sensitive data. We have always made client confidentiality our priority, but with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force in May last year, data privacy was taken to an entirely new level. We have embraced this change and are using it to fuel strategic advancement in our business.” Howards Accountants needed to modernise their workspace, and increase working mobility allowing their accountants to operate from anywhere in the world. The principal challenge as a financial house was that they are heavily governed by GDPR and regulatory bodies. INFINITY overcame this challenge by creating a private cloud solution enabling Howards to standardise the devices within their office, resulting in; hot-desking and the adoption of a BYOD policy for mobile workers, all without compromising security. As well as modernisation of their workspace, there was a substantial requirement to progress the skills of the user. Howards Accountants are a well-established and successful firm with a wealth of knowledge and experience enabling them to look after their clients. The Director’s philosophy has always been that IT is an enabler for their staff and the era of digital transformation must be showcased by their business and staff. As a result, there was also a significant investment in the training of their users. INFINITY designed a state-of-the-art server room, deploying the latest IBM servers and storage to run a sophisticated, fully branded, secure RDS environment; migrating to Microsoft Office365, alongside Microsoft Azure MFA. Business continuity is paramount for all fee-earning businesses, INFINITY addressed this by synchronising Howards data to the Infinity Datacentre. Having an offsite copy of their data, provides them with a level of essential security; nonetheless, being able to run their virtual machines from the offsite copy in full Disaster Recovery mode provides them guaranteed uptime and mobility. The desired level of mobility was not possible with their legacy network until we replaced it with Cisco Meraki, for additional speed and security. Cisco Meraki were the industry first line cloud-managed access and aggregation switches, that combined the benefits of cloud-based centralised management with a powerful reliable access platform. This enabled Infinity to configure and monitor hundreds of switch ports for Howards instantly over the web, providing a fantastic customer experience in the event of support issues. As well as replacing the network, INFINITY proposed that Howards standardise their end user devices utilising HP thin clients in the office space. Thin clients are protected from the use of unauthorised software, and greatly assist with the prevention of viruses. In addition, the adoption of thin client technology ensured that data cannot be copied to a disk or saved to any other location other than the server, which is a fundamental requirement for compliance within this hotly scrutinised finance sector. Ultimately, INFINITY are required to provide a fantastic service to our client and this technology ensured that centralised processing made it easier to both manage and monitor their system and provide a far quicker return to service if an issue was discovered. Progressing the user’s skills was greatly assisted with standardisation of devices and as an additional benefit, Howards introduced large touch-screen 85” devices in meeting rooms for collaboration. Furthermore, the solution enabled Howards to overcome a substantial industry hurdle by implementing encryption and information control exploiting AzureRMS. This ensured that Howards data is encrypted at the application level and includes a policy that defines the authorised use for that document. When a protected document is used by a legitimate user or it is processed by an authorised service, the data in the document is decrypted and the rights that are defined in the policy are enforced. This solution massively reduced costs for Howards and enabled them to maximise their return on investment, without having to heavily invest further. This was in stark contrast to other Accountancy firms who overspent with Major payroll vendors, but gave Howards the additional benefit that their solution covers all of their documentation and not just payroll. INFINITY manage all deployments with the utmost diligence and making such a vast change to a fee earning business needed to go smoothly. Whatever the requirement may be, from software and servers to networks or client machines, making changes to any IT estate can be a complicated process - particularly like this case with Howards. INFINITY were able to guide Howards when deciding what services were right for them and provide them with a solution to shape the future of their business. Taking the time to understand their business whilst providing them with a fully-outsourced managed service and understanding how they operate in order to provide the business with insightful advice, that they could use to ensure that all of their needs are met right now whilst provisioning for the future. Following the Microsoft enablement process a Microsoft Teams group was created for all project heads, followed by a project kick of meeting. After the project kick off meeting it was decided for maximum adoption and for the success of the project to be truly realised all members of staff were informed of the changes. Involving the staff in the process had a profound effect. A proof of concept was completed with particular attention paid to Howards core applications, accessibility and global printing to ensure any hurdles were overcome before adoption. Howards aren’t the most technically astute, in the past having had multiple machines and no continuity created various support challenges. That said, communication to staff was paramount so that they understood the changes and how they were going to delivered. All users benefitted from a 1:1 migration and training, with users being able to work anywhere in a recognisable workspace. INFINITY engineers were onsite throughout the migration, to ensure any issues or training needs were met immediately, with no downtime experienced from any user. The success of the implementation was that no unforeseen obstacles had to be overcome as a result of the POC. Post-deployment, Infinity harvested the user’s satisfaction through Microsoft Forms to feed back to the business the users experience, adoption levels and overall satisfaction. Accountants need mobility with the mere nature of their job, but Howards Accountants were becoming increasingly restricted by being in the office to perform routine tasks. This proved ineffective and costly. Users are now truly mobile, working anywhere from any device as if they were in the office. INFINITY were able to provide business continuity as part of the solution with an immediate return to service; if one machine was faulty, users could logon to another device and carry on where they left off. INFINITY were able to position the dramatic overhaul as part of a fully wrapped managed service at an operational monthly cost, providing a lower cost of ownership and allowing everything to be implemented simultaneously - as the true benefits wouldn’t have been reached until the last item was completed. A benefit that hadn’t been factored was how well the users would receive the technology, with user satisfaction at an all-time high. Downtime is a thing of the past, and users have gone from loathing IT to embracing it. All users have welcomed the improvements and have since become a sounding board for additional future developments. An additional benefit to the business was Power BI, traditionally the firm has provided their clients with reports for Accounts. The adoption of Office365 has given them the ability to automate reporting, pulling the information into dashboards for easy viewing, saving them both time and money. Staff can now demonstrate client performance face to face in a graphical manner, which has seen remarkable feedback from their clients. Summary of key outcomes: • Multi-layer security defence • Layer 7 protection • Machine learning based anti-virus • Around the clock security and performance monitoring (NOC) • Private cloud consolidated workspace • Compliance with GDPR and other regulations • Increased productivity and efficiency • Significant increase in user engagement • Near continuous data protection and automated failover (DRaaS) • Cost and time savings - client reporting automated in Power BI (Office365) • Increased fee earning ability for the client by circa 12 hours per day • Digital transformation - 85” touch screens allowing for more collaborative and interactive meetings Matt Bailey of Howard's feedback: “All our staff now use the same technology with the latest updates on a system that is faster, smarter and accessible from anywhere. We are saving around 12 fee earning hours a day in operational efficiencies and reduced downtime. And, importantly, we can give clients the information they need quicker, safer and more accurately than ever before.”

New edge data centre at The Wellcome Sanger Institute supports Genomic Research for the betterment of mankind
The Wellcome Sanger Institute is one of the world’s leading research facilities focused on genomic discovery. The DNA sequencing machines at the core of its research efforts generate vast quantities of data, the analysis of which drives research efforts into improving human health in several challenging areas, including cancer, malaria and other pathogens. The volume of data and the speed at which it is generated requires an onsite data centre with massive processing capacity, as a cloud option could not deliver the necessary latency. Wellcome Sanger has also just made operational a fourth data hall within its existing facility, with 400 racks consuming 4MW of power, it is now the largest genomic research data centre in Europe. The new hall is designed to be highly scalable—as the data demands of genomic research are only likely to increase rapidly—and efficient, as Wellcome Sanger is committed to reducing its PUE rating to 1.4. This effort is being realised by technology from Schneider Electric, including power distribution, UPS and its EcoStruxure IT management software. At the core of Sanger’s technical infrastructure are its DNA sequencing machines; a fleet of highly complex and advanced scientific instruments, which generate vast quantities of data that must then be analysed within their on-premise data centre. The nature of genomic research, a cutting-edge and evolving area of science, means that the demand for data-processing capacity is only likely to increase over time – genomic data is soon set to become the biggest source of data on the planet. The rapid pace of development of genomic research, and its exploitation by medical science, will continue to drive growth at the data centre. By way of example, sequencing the first human genome took 13 years; the same task can now be achieved in less than an hour. The amount of genomic data generated in the last 18 months is equal to the amount that was generated in the first 18 years of research. Every year, the sequencers generate data more quickly as the technology improves. IT has to keep up with that demand. The human body is made up of trillions of cells and as the Sanger sequences them, they will also be gathering more genomic data via a greater number of machines. Advances in today’s technology mean the Institute is gathering data more quickly than ever before. This requires more power availability, greater storage, faster connectivity and higher levels of local compute. Edge data centres provide computing resource close to the point at which data is generated or used. In the case of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the data generated by its DNA sequencers is of such a scale and generated at such a fast rate that the subsequent computational analysis must be performed as close to the site as possible. This requirement for local processing to be physically close-by the sequencing equipment where data is being generated is an archetypal example of an ‘edge computing’ deployment. Proximity to the sequencing equipment is a primary consideration for the data centre. The bandwidth and latency requirement for the high volume, and velocity, of genomic data makes cloud services unsuitable. As such, no other edge data centre is as important to discoveries about human life as the one at Sanger. Additionally, the DNA sequencing equipment on which the scientific effort depends are protected by individual APC by Schneider Electric Smart-UPS™ uninterruptible power supply systems. Downtime within this distributed IT environment would require the chemicals used in the research process to be replaced at significant cost, in addition to lost time and data. Ongoing monitoring of UPS battery health is therefore essential to ensure runtime is available and makes a major contribution towards the Wellcome Sanger Institute avoiding outages in both the data sequencing and research efforts. As well as the requirement to provide high-performance low-latency computational support to the sequencing machines at the heart of Wellcome Sanger’s efforts, the deployment and operation of the edge data centre has to be as efficient as possible, given the Institute’s desire to maximise its financial resources on medical research rather than computing infrastructure. Simply put, any money saved on IT and physical infrastructure, either in terms of capital expenditure or operating costs, means greater funding is available for key scientific research. Key to achieving efficient operation is the deployment of EcoStruxure IT, a cloud-based Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) system from Schneider Electric. This software provides vendor-neutral oversight from behind a ‘single pane of glass’ of all key infrastructure assets in the data centre including racks, power distribution units (PDUs), uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and cooling equipment. Wellcome Sanger had not deployed a single unified DCIM platform, and instead used several independent management systems, which monitored parts of the infrastructure but were unable to provide a single overall view of all assets. The EcoStruxure IT software is a cloud-based system that is highly scalable and quick to deploy. It enabled data centre management to discover and connect thousands of devices on its network in less than 30 minutes. The platform where data from assets is stored, pooled and analysed, is highly cyber secure and GDPR compliant, allowing users to view all their assets at any time. Status updates can be delivered to any device, including smart phones or tablets, allowing key service personnel to be alerted to any issues immediately wherever they may be. As an open-standards vendor-neutral technology, EcoStruxure IT’s ability to find so many network-enabled devices, regardless of manufacturer, greatly simplifies inventory management and makes the inevitable tasks of upgrading and scaling more efficient and predictable. For the first time, data centre operations management can monitor both IT equipment and the power train from the same system. Now that those two important elements are combined, much greater visibility over the entire operation is possible. EcoStruxure IT also includes a Data Analytics module to enable smarter real-time decision-making and ensure that any unexpected issues in the data centre are identified and quickly resolved. In time, the management software will also monitor the operations of the DNA sequencers themselves through the same single management console. This feature, and the fact that the sequencers are also supported by Schneider Electric Smart-UPS uninterruptible power supplies, helps to safeguard against downtime, which can be an expensive business given the valuable chemicals on with the operation of the sequencers depend and which must be discarded if the equipment is inoperative for any significant time. The key objective of the new data hall is to provide computational support to the vital genome sequencing work performed by the Wellcome Sanger Institute and to do so in a reliable and efficient manner that maximises the investment the Institute must make in its IT support equipment. Not only do the UPS systems minimise the risk of downtime, with its attendant high costs, but the EcoStruxure IT DCIM software ensures the reliable operation of vital infrastructure, the timely warning of any outages or service issues, the efficient management of all inventory on the Institute’s network and the cost-effective management of operations. One of the most significant costs associated with operating any data centre is the power required for the cooling function. Continuous reliable operation depends on the equipment being kept at a safe operating temperature; cost-effective use of power requires the cooling operation to be as efficient as possible. This in turn demands constant monitoring of temperature to prevent hotspots developing and the continuous adjustment of cooling equipment, including chillers and fans, to ensure that they are operating only as needed. The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio of any data centre, defined as the ratio of total power consumption to the power required by the core IT equipment alone, is a popular metric for overall electrical efficiency. The expectation is for the Wellcome Sanger Institute to save between 5 and 10% of its energy costs in the first two years in the data centre itself. This will be achieved by raising the room temperature in the data halls from 19 to 21C. This in turn reduces the cooling effort needed from equipment such as chillers and can only be achieved by continuous monitoring of temperature throughout racks with adjustments to fan speeds as and when they are necessary. Wellcome Sanger Institute has set itself ambitious targets of lowering its PUE from its current level, fluctuating between 1.6 and 1.8 to operating in the range of 1.4. This will produce more cost savings providing a further return on the investment in the new data hall and its monitoring software. Reduced costs on IT equipment frees up investment for genomic research, a key and ongoing objective for the Wellcome Sanger Institute. No other edge data centre is as important to discoveries about human life. Scalability, proximity to the data sources, and efficient management both to enable rapid allocation of resources to meet increasing demands and to controls costs are all essential elements in supporting Wellcome Sanger’s ground-breaking scientific research.

ServerFarm Succeeds with an Analytics-Based Efficiency Transformation for a London Data Centre
In March 2018, ServerFarm acquired a 120,000 square foot, 10.5MW data centre located in Feltham, London through sale and partial leaseback. (The press release about this news can be found at https://www.serverfarmllc.com/2018/03/london-data-centre-acquisition/, and the link to more information about the facility, called LON1, is https://www.serverfarmllc.com/london-data-center/.) A major global telco was the facility’s sole occupant, and its objectives were to remove the company from substantial capital requirements needed to maintain the data centres’ effective performance, as well as to “right size” its IT capacity to fit its business requirements. ServerFarm demonstrated its exceptional capabilities through acquiring the asset, executing a complex capital investment program (while the data centre remained “live” to the telco’s customer base) and instituting a new operations management model - covering facility, critical infrastructure and IT change management - that will significantly reduce TCO. ServerFarm also consolidated the telco’s footprint and installed a new customer base within the facility – all with zero performance interruptions or downtime. ServerFarm stepped in to create a multi-tenant data centre while facilitating a flexible, agile infrastructure environment for its customers. The company created a truly agile infrastructure environment to accommodate different densities and match customer workload needs - from low density, 1-4Kw per rack to HPC high density environments (up to 20Kw per rack). Through innovative containment, optimisation and deployment of high efficiency chillers and the InCommand cloud-based, real-time monitoring of data centre operations, ServerFarm halved the design PUE, enabling the incumbent managed service provider to offer data centre space with a design PUE of 1.2. ServerFarm’s InCommand is an integrated service platform that brings together people and processes into a portal-based solution for maximum data centre operational efficiency. InCommand offers: ● Infrastructure monitoring, reporting and analytics ● CMMS, change management, ticketing and work-order ● Remote Hands and NOC services Creating a Tier3+ environment in terms of uptime and efficiency was a challenge. ServerFarm accomplished this through cost-effective modernisation of existing electrical gear, new switches and UPS equipment to create N+1 electrical infrastructure with A+B feeds combined with new super efficient chillers and new CRAC units, ultimately developing an N+1 mechanical environment. This was completed while keeping the site live for existing commercial colo and telco enterprise customers. Within the first 5.5 months after acquisition, ServerFarm completed the handover and infrastructure refresh to release 3.6MW to a new customer. The telco and two customers went live with ServerFarm’s InCommand solution. Specifically, ServerFarm completed the following initiatives within the first five months of the LON1 transformation and saw the following results: 1. Undertaken significant capital investment (in excess of $9 million) in electrical and mechanical infrastructure ● Installed and commissioned new UPSs, revised the electrical topology, refurbished generators, installed new chillers and cooling plant, and power and energy management systems. (Full Systems IST took place in September, meaning that ServerFarm completed all of this in under 6 months, in a multi-MW data centre facility.) ● The telco adopted ServerFarm’s InCommand platform and ServerFarm helped the client with live IT systems migrations and consolidation into two data halls. ● All of this was done within a live environment and with precise coordination and approval from the telco. 2. Implemented the ServerFarm operations model and incorporated onsite personnel, to include: ● Management oversite by ServerFarm. Access to ServerFarm’s US-based global NOC. ● Operational team from a major real estate firm, which adopted InCommand, ensuring strong alignment with processes and people from both ServerFarm and the telco. ● The transition to the real estate firm took place in under 30 days with no operational issues. ● The real estate firm started integrating its platform with InCommand at the site as part of a wider adoption of InCommand across the firm’s installed base. 3. Secured and began installing a new 3.5-MW tenant in the telco’s former capacity ● The new tenant adopted InCommand and installed its first 50 racks. ● The new tenant contracted ServerFarm for asset, change and capacity management, including Remote Hands. Overall, LON1 clients have experienced significant OPEX savings, enhanced offerings in terms of flexibility of environment and the ability to easily add additional capacity in response to workload and customer demand. LON1 is ServerFarm’s first European property, adding another 120,000 square feet to the company’s existing data centre portfolio of more than 1 million square feet. The data centre provides ServerFarm customers with a strategically important entry into a vital data centre market. Close to Heathrow airport, the London data centre is strategically located with direct connections to Slough and London’s Docklands. It adds to ServerFarm’s growing global data centre portfolio, which also includes North American facilities in Moses Lake, WA; Santa Clara, CA; Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; Charlotte, NC; Oak Brook, IL; and Toronto, ON.

Talbots Law Cloud Project
EBC Group have made significant investments in their private cloud platform and data centres, and offer an impressive portfolio of cloud solutions, including private and hybrid solutions. EBC Group stands as a leading cloud provider, with an impressive history of delivering cloud-based solutions to clients, across multiple verticals. For West Midlands based solicitors, Talbots Law, who work across 6 locations, and house over 200 employees, the investment of over £1million to implement a new state-of-the-art hosted IT infrastructure, has digitally transformed the business into a dynamic cloud environment. Talbots Law had previously ran a on premise server room at its their headquarters which provided unreliable performance, especially for other sites. Dated hardware and software had started to degrade, whilst a remote desktop environment struggled to accommodate a growing workforce that demanded flexible usability. Running on Windows Server 2008 operating system, its impending end date meant the clock was ticking for Talbots Law to migrate to a newer more robust server system. Failure to address this would have seen detrimental vulnerabilities in their security, which for a law firm dealing with large amounts of confidential data could have devastating consequences. Talbots Law required a complete revision of their current IT infrastructure, and looked to EBC Group to provide a new cloud environment that would not only address current IT issues, but would also pave the way for on-going digital transformation. Leveraging EBC Group’s partnerships with industry leaders such as Dell, Microsoft and VMware, EBC Group developed a plan that would see the implementation of a fully scalable cloud solution, hosted at its primary data centre and full replicated to a secondary site, designed to meet Talbots on-going growth plans. The implementation of a hosted virtual desktop environment, that runs on the latest Dell EMC server and storage technologies, has provided an environment that is able to scale-up and out with a 10GB network and full solid storage ensuring speed and performance is at the forefront of the end users experience. The hardware is accompanied by VMware vSphere ensuring the environment is highly available and the load balanced across the Dell EMC cluster. Running in conjunction with vSphere is VMwares Horizen View product which manages and maintains Talbots Law’s upgraded Windows 10 virtual desktops deployed to end users. For complete disaster recovery capabilities, a second environment now resides in EBC Group’s secondary data centre, where all virtual machines are replicated. This environment, along with the production environment, is managed and monitored 24/7 with a DR strategy written between EBC Group and Talbots Law. Benefitting from complete secure remote working capabilities and a virtual desktop infrastructure, Talbots Law can now connect multiple-end-user devices from varying locations, with full access to systems whether they’re in a different office, remote working at a clients site or even in the courtroom. A complete re-fresh of end-user kit to Dell Wyse Thin Client Technology, allows for zero touch deployment when on-boarding new users, and provides a secure solution due to thin OS and central management of all devices, across their 7 sites. Centralising resources to a new cloud environment, ensures applications, sensitive data and memory are all stored in one secure location, whilst the elimination of endpoint machines has both decreased downtime and increased the overall productivity across the business. With the implementation of a scalable cloud solution, Talbots Law have already deployed 25 new users across the company, seamlessly with minimum disruption. Currently built for upward of 1000 users, Talbot Law’s cloud solution can be readily expanded at anytime, keeping inline with their strategy for rapid future growth. The introduction of cloud capabilities has also allowed EBC Group to implement a hosted telephony platform. Eliminating out-dated ISDN lines, the conversion into SIP trunks has made way for a new software based telephony system, Swyx. Easily integrating into existing workflows, Swyx has made the handling and transferring of calls between sites seamless, whilst its mobile app has dramatically boosted call handling enhancing user experience. In addition to average cost savings on calls of 55%, Swyx’s rich features have provided a host of industry benefits including; call recording and conference capabilities. Mary Mocklow, Managing Director at Talbots Law explained ‘Our ambition is to become the legal provider of choice for the Midlands and this investment – the largest we have ever made in IT – will make us more efficient and deliver even better levels of service to our growing client base,” “The private cloud offers more flexibility for our staff and the opportunity for them to work across any of our offices, not to mention when on-site with companies or during time in court.” She continued: “Staying ahead of the competition when it comes to technology is crucial to our growth plans that will hopefully see us increase fees from £11m to £12m this year.’’

Infinity Group implemented an innovative Wi-Fi network solution for Swingers London an award winning, corporate indoor golf course.
What was the driving force behind the project – what business or technology challenge needed to be addressed? Swingers Golf are a leading corporate entertainment venue in London. Their venues attract the corporate market and accommodate 500 people at once. Each site has over 20,000 sq/ft of floorspace and innovative Wi-Fi network that requires large amounts of data and strong, reliable Wi-Fi connection around the clock. Infinity Group were appointed to design, implement and manage the Wi-Fi and data network solution for their flagship venue Swingers West End. Due to the scale of this project and advanced technical needs, we deployed a dedicated project team to plan, manage and deliver the project from start to finish. Within the dedicated Swingers team was our CTO, PMs, IT Security Consultants, Specialist Cisco Meraki trained Network Consultants, IT Solution Architects, a technical Account Manager and our IT Support Manager. Our project team worked closely with the clients project lead over a 6 month rollout period. Taking a strategic approach right from the start and to gather the intricacies of their current IT Network, we kicked off the project with a site survey of their original venue. The survey provided us with a comprehensive understanding of the existing network and enabled us to analyse pitfalls and recommend improvements that could be incorporated to their new West End venue. Meeting objectives Their preliminary site’s network solution was designed by another provider and had frequent technical issues, inconsistent Wi-Fi signal and was hard to maintain remotely. Their initial brief to us was to implement several different wireless networks for each of their devices. Implementing this setup would take a lot of time to maintain and keep secure and would also not be cost effective. Exceeding objectives We took into account their brief and current and future needs and designed a wireless network solution to accommodate the PDQ machines, Swingers mobile app, CCTV, VOIP, AV equipment, access control and their EPOS system. Instead of multiple SSIDs which is slow are hard to manage we deployed the main 802.1x network which allow us to have a set of credentials for each relevant device to enable it to be assigned to the main network. For security reasons and guaranteed availability we installed a separate network for guest Wi-Fi to enable Swingers guests to join the Wi-Fi without the need to enter a password. Over and above Swingers’ original requirement, we were able to provide Swingers with an innovative multi-site hosted telephony solution and fully retained IT Support Services for technical issues at their London venues and Head Office. We also fully managed their IT hardware and software provision, managed the delivery and consolidation of their services, provided technical consultancy on their IT Security and Access Control System and CCTV solution • How did the solution address the challenges and were there any particularly innovative aspects that made it stand out? Due to the specific requirements and high volumes of data usage needed from the Wi-Fi network. Our projects team designed the network using Cisco Meraki components managed by Ekahau Pro. A specialist site survey tool that is the complete toolkit for designing optimising and troubleshooting Wi-Fi networks. We paid for our lead network engineer to be trained on how to use this specialist software to an advanced level to ensure the solution we implemented was fully robust and could be analysed in terms of any pitfalls and performance. Since this Swingers project we have used this software to manage several other clients Wi-Fi networks. • What major challenges were faced during the project and how were they overcome? Swingers were looking to roll out the network solution we designed to their future venues as part of their fast expansion plan. Clear communication between both us and the client was key for seamless project implementation especially seeing as there was so many third party suppliers involved with installing the internal fittings of the golf club. We had to overcome several factors out of our control whilst designing the network. These included not having a server room until the very last minute, which meant we had to adapt our delivery schedules so our team could work late into the night and over the weekends to install the network when the other trades were not present. To keep this schedule efficient we established a rolling list of priorities and our Project Manager made sure this was updated frequently to ensure the project was kept on track and remained in scope at all times. The six month project was exceptionally well managed and headed up by our Senior Technical Project Manager who spent many days on site closely managing every aspect of the project from design to installation, quality control and deployment. To ensure all of our dedicated project team were aligned with the installation and management plan, we made sure they were fully inducted on site in order for them to install the network, gain an in-depth understanding to the technical setup and continue to effectively manage and maintain the network remotely once live. Our IT Solution Architects and IT Security Consultant had regular meetings with the client to discuss the solution and troubleshoot throughout the installation phase. This kept the customer in the loop and enabled us to collaborate on regular occasions to ensure the ever changing needs were accounted for at all times. In order to achieve the highest output for the client, our certified Cisco Meraki Consultants underwent additional specialist training direct with the vendor at the start of the project to ensure their knowledge was kept at expert level. From our great work, we continue to provide IT Support and IT Consultancy services to Swingers on an ongoing basis and have done for the past 18 months. • What tangible benefits has the organisation seen as a result of the project’s implementation? We implemented a full Meraki network consisting of the following components 2x MX100 7x MS250-48LP (1 stack + 1 separate switch linked via fibre using MC-LAG for redundancy) 1x MS120-8LP to facilitate for additional ports added at the last minute for the EPOS system at one of the bars 16x MR52 (strategically positioned using predictive heat maps and re-surveyed to confirm positions using Ekahau Site Survey) measurable outcomes for the project The solution we implemented at the West End venue has surpassed all capabilities of the initial solution another provider installed in the preliminary venue. There has been very little downtime or technical issues since the solution went live. Excluding authentication failures, the wireless has a connection success rate of 99.2% (DHCP and DNS successful, per connection) and device success rate of 98.8%. This indicates a high performing wireless network. 600 Swingers devices access the Wi-Fi network per day/per site All while their Wi-Fi network is serving all CCTV and Wallboards, CCTV alone uses 830GB of traffic per day and 1 TB of traffic is used through the scoreboard and advertising wallboards per day. Corresponding to 400Mbps average background throughput. Throughout the day and in peak times such as the evenings, customer Wi-Fi traffic has no impact on back end system network performance (the main network that powers all Swingers devices including CCTV, EPOS, PDQ’s etc) because they access the separate Wi-Fi network we installed.

Miles Smith Insurance Group
The Miles Smith Insurance Group, which can trace its origins back to 1925, has a reputation for developing, underwriting and arranging general and specialist insurance products for niche markets and high risk industries, Miles Smith operates two businesses, a Chartered Insurance Broker offering specialist and niche products to businesses and a scheme and affinities Lloyd’s wholesale Broker. Owned by the Specialist Risk Group which incorporates additional Broking businesses The Underwriting Exchange and more recently Square Mile Broking. Having embarked on a ambitious Digital Transformation Programme following Private Equity acquisition Miles Smith adopted a Cloud First and Buy not Build strategy. With challenges of legacy on-premise applications and infrastructure hosted by multiple 3rd party providers they were constrained with various capacity and stability issues. The business brief was to build a modern, flexible, cloud-based business services platform, that would deliver genuine value to the current users and provide a foundation to rapidly integrate and transform the systems moving forward. Simplification and consolidation was the key drivers to enable the remaining pillars of their transformation including selecting one of the large cloud IaaS platform providers. Miles Smith head hunted Keith Bucknall to design and lead the Digital Transformation. Keith ran a rigorous RFP process before eventually selecting Navisite as his Cloud Transformation & managed service partner. Navisite were initially engaged to transform an aged VDI platform and after reviewing various options including hosted VDI and VMware based DaaS. Miles Smith selected a Citrix platform delivered on Microsoft Azure. Navisite's professional services team worked collaboratively, to assess current state, design future state and then migrate and transform platforms, before finally delivering ongoing managed services. This delivered a far more stable, performant desktop experience to the business users, but importantly also enabled ongoing support for core broking applications that needed extended support for Wk2008 and SQL2008; while these applications themselves underwent transformation. Miles Smith also migrated the ageing Exchange platform to Office 365; moving through a staged upgrade by first building a dedicated Exchange 2016 tenant on Azure to test user experience and back-end integrations to legacy systems. Outcomes: Service outages and incidents have reduced. Mobility has increased, and people can work remotely, GDPR controls were designed from the ground up leveraging Microsoft's capabilities, reducing exposure to fines or reputational damage. Full business continuity has been delivered, increasing availability and security Performance of brokerage and other business applications has improved, users are reporting greater satisfaction with the experience and faster processing of jobs - estimated savings are over 200 hours per annum, per employee. The IT team are now engaged in more strategic tasks, having moved away from fire-fighting and maintenance activities.

We Invest in Customer Experience
Turning Customer Experience into a Driver for Innovation Customer experience (CX) is the only consistent enabler for innovation, in a technology market that is continually changing. At Tata Communications, we have recognised that customer experience underpins Digital Transformation strategies, the deployment of new technologies and collaboration and innovation with customers. If an organisation doesn’t have a specific and dedicated vision for customer services, they will fail to support the next wave of innovation in global ICT. It’s not enough to just troubleshoot issues or provide a help desk, CX has to ensure the successful delivery of new services and innovation. CX has become one of the most core competitive advantages in global ICT and that’s why we have taken specific steps to be a leader in this area. Simplifying and Accelerating Digital Transformation Journeys The new reality for global businesses is Digital Transformation. They now need to increase the speed at which they deliver solutions and must also consider the complexities of deployment in a more complicated environment. Here at Tata Communications, we go beyond the basics of SLAs and helpdesks. We want to understand our customers’ businesses, stakeholders and unique needs. We built a service wrap, merging our service, sales and marketing teams, to create our Customer Success Group. We are the team that can meet customer needs in responding across multiple regions without borders. • Program Management and Service Delivery - give customers’ projects that best start and finish with our expertise and proven methodologies • Service Assurance - ensures customers’ enterprise stays one step ahead, with our comprehensive, always connected support services • Personalised Support - services drive customers’ operations forward with the best in class, personalised support services • Advanced Solutions Delivery – we give customers the chance to complete end-to-end lifecycle service for large critical projects, taking the pain out of business transformation • Service Management – customers receive outstanding support from a service management team that’s your voice in our organisation This new team helps to support our customers on their digital journey, enhancing their experiences and user productivity, as well as helping them manage business risk. By investing in these systems, we can reduce process and response times across our customer journeys to a few hours, rather than the industry standard of a few days. This demonstrates our expectational customer service. “I really appreciate the way you have supported and helped us to configure the network in such a short time after it got handed over to you. Moreover, thank you for giving us the confidence whenever I spoke to you. Every time I felt as if I were talking to my own team member/colleague. It really gave us the confidence and changed the perception we had about TCL, and for that credit goes to you and your team who worked extra time and went out of your way to help us. At every stage whenever we spoke, we had the confidence that we were interacting with right team who understood our issue. Once again, thanks to all the team members who were directly or indirectly associated with this assignment.” -- CIO, Logistic Company Delivering a Differentiated Service Offering To further support the changing needs of customers, we have developed a customisable approach to deliver service experience. Customers can decide what service levels they want, as well as the levels of interaction and collaboration with our teams. The differentiated services are designed to support the unique needs of customers and simplify customer relationships. • BESPOKE- Co-create with customers This service pack identifies the need for the highest level of customisation and customer experience with a focus on collaboration, business planning and co-creation. This service feature includes an onsite Customer Success Manager (CSM), bespoke reporting and governance, access to our customer advocacy program, innovation workshops, and first access to new technology. • CUSTOM – Transforming businesses through customer support The Custom service pack aims to transform our customers’ digital programmes and infrastructure by innovating together. These customers need round the clock support to ensure successful execution of their often-complex digital transformation projects. • PRIME- Accelerate your digital journey Helps our customers accelerate their business transformation by delivering increased personalisation, support, communication and insights. This segment benefits from our strong analytics, proactive advice and strong solution mapped interventions that are generated by our centralised support team. • DIGITAL – Access to a smooth integration Helps our customers integrate their digital transformation goals powered by our standard SLAs, omni-channel access, digital tools and workflows. Customers who are embarking on their digital transformation journey can hugely benefit from this service pack due to our experienced team, insights, network, process and analytics. “Thank you so much for your support in getting this upgrade completed during the need of the hour. Based on your support, we were able to meet our critical business requirement. We appreciate the kind of dedication showed and coordination done with all stake holders which helped us to achieve our stringent deadline. Thanks to you & your team for all the help & support on this upgrade. We look forward to getting similar kind of support for all our orders as always.” -- Lead Global Network Operations, Service and Consulting Company Investing in Customer Experience At Tata Communications, we recognised from the beginning that investing in CX would create a unique selling point (USP) within the industry. We have invested over $2.5 million in our transformation by developing an insight-based approach, with a focus on differentiating with ease of use, accessibility and superior customer experience. Our investment in CX and engagement allowed us to secure an 11-point increase in our Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 44 to 55, a strong 450+ customer reference base, and 70+ reviews on Gartner Peer Insights with an 85%+ rating of 4-5/5. Our customers have seen an immediate impact on the experience they receive when working with Tata Communications and we see this as a driver for our long-term growth. When our customers receive an optimised service experience, we can both grow together. It is a win-win. “We have seen a rocket improvement in Tata Communications’ operations services. We started the year with high expectations of the quality standards we expected to receive. Month after month and thanks to Tata Communications’ exhaustive work, we managed to jump from a non-compliance of most of the quality KPIs to a 100% compliance at the end of the year.” -- Lead Vendor management, Telecommunications Company Going Beyond Existing Offerings While most international telecoms operators have a customer service function, they are usually focused on a reactive approach that no longer matches customer needs. They have refined their approaches to ticketing and troubleshooting but have not fully integrated into the service offering like we have at Tata Communications. Customer experience at most telecoms companies remains a necessary cost rather than a differentiator. It is something that comes after a service has been purchased and not factored into the entire customer journey. This traditional approach no longer aligns with customers who need tailored support and new levels of reliability and trust, as they try to make transformation a success. We have made service experience part of our growth strategy and a key pillar of our entire service offering. We have positioned customer experience at the forefront of our support for customers’ Digital Transformation and see it as absolutely core to our future.

StorMagic Channel Partner Program
Introduced in 2019, the StorMagic Channel Program (SCP) is designed for partners who sell products into small data centers and edge computing environments. SvSAN enables hyperconverged, highly available, high performance compute and storage infrastructure on industry standard servers. StorMagic Channel Partners benefit from working with a company whose revenue model is 100 percent from channel, and with key corporate operations all housed at the Bristol, UK headquarters location, including development, engineering and support. Resellers of SvSAN can meet customer demands for high availability at a very low price point because the product is a proven alternative to expensive appliance-based hyperconverged products. Our VARs can build a hyperconverged solution using any server, any disk drive combination and any of the three leading hypervisors (vSphere, Hyper-V and KVM). This flexibility allows them to provide greater value to their end user customers by delivering a full solution with the highest margins possible. Our VARs can drive significant incremental revenue through generous margins with a solution perfect for unlocking the edge and SME markets. Further, StorMagic Channel Partners gain the following benefits: -Standard reseller 10% discount -Deal registration to protect opportunities at a 30% discount -Access to the StorMagic partner portal and resources -SvSAN NFR licenses to support internal training and customer demos -Access to the StorMagic MDF program -Lead distribution -Dedicated channel sales support -Technical and pre-sales support StorMagic’s Channel partner Program is simple to join, SvSAN is a simple product to learn and install, all from a UK-based company that is simple to work with.

Please answer these questions in the general description of your nomination: • What are your solution's key distinguishing features and/or USP? We offer 360 degree monitoring that covers Windows, Mac, Networking devices and Cloud monitors, all from an easy and intuitive UI providing a single-pane-of-glass. We have no-contracts, unlimited training and onboarding. We have tight and seamless integrations with most popular solutions in every category (Backup, Antivirus, PSA, Remote Control) that help MSPs use the products they love, directly from the ninja interface. • What tangible impact has your solution had on the market and your customers? We have provided our customers a newfound way of managing and monitoring their devices by giving them an extremely powerful yet intuitive way of doing things. This has also led to a movement where many of our competitors have revamped their platforms and are now focusing on not just the product features but also on the user experience. We also released our mobile app to manage and monitor your devices on the go. This makes MSPs daily tasks easier as ever before. • What are the major differentiators between your solution and those of your primary competitors? We have a very customer driven approach for deciding on the features to build, keeping the customer pain as the top priority. Also, our pre-sales and post-sales support are second to none. The goal for us is to give them a VIP white-glove experience throughout their journey with us. • Please supply any supportive quotes and/or case study materials to demonstrate the value of this solution to your customers/partners. https://www.g2.com/products/ninjarmm/reviews https://www.capterra.com/p/184229/NinjaRMM/#reviews

EfficiencyIT gives Genomic research facility greater visibility to enable cost savings for the benefit of mankind
EfficiencyIT (EiT) are a new value added reseller (VAR) and UK Elite Partner to Schneider Electric. They are experts in the field of data centre design and build and work with some of the world’s most well known businesses, including sports teams, leading charities and incredible research institutions like the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridge. The Wellcome Sanger Institute is one of the world’s leading research facilities focused on genomic discovery. The DNA sequencing machines at the core of its research efforts generate vast quantities of data, the analysis of which drives research efforts into improving human health in several challenging areas, including cancer, malaria and other pathogens. As such, no other edge data centre is as important to discoveries about human life as the one at Sanger. The volume of data and the speed at which it is generated requires ample processing power to be available onsite, and Wellcome Sanger has recently added a fourth data hall within its existing facility which, with 400 racks consuming 4MW of power, is now the largest genomic research data centre in Europe. With a need to be highly scalable, and to meet the stringent operating demands placed on it by Wellcome Sanger’s commitment to minimising the environmental impact of its activities, as well as the requirement to be as cost-effective to operate as possible, the data centre needs to be managed as effectively as possible. As part of its on-going demand for greater processing power, Sanger recently made operational a fourth data hall within its existing data centre facility. Comprising more than 400 racks and consuming 4MW of power, the Institute is now the largest genomic research data centre in Europe. As part of this upgrade, Sanger worked directly with EfficiencyIT (EiT), a value added reseller (VAR), specialist in data centre design and build, and UK Elite Partner to Schneider Electric. Having worked closely with the Institute for a number of years, whilst forming a long-term, strategic partnership with Schneider Electric, EiT were able to recommend the best course of action in terms of monitoring for this data-driven and distributed IT environment, ensuring that its scientific research would continue without interruption from downtime or from unexpected outages. EiT specified Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT™; a cloud-based Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software platform, which enables the user to manage all of the key infrastructure assets and improve the overall efficiency of the data centre. Installed by EiT’s software experts, the solution provides the Wellcome Sanger Institute with insight into the operation of all key infrastructure assets in the data centre, including APC by Schneider Electric NetShelter™ racks, APC rack-metered power distribution units (PDUs), Smart-UPS™ uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and cooling equipment. “Partnership is absolutely crucial for today’s data centre environments.” Nick Ewing, Managing Director, EiT, said: “By listening closely to the Wellcome Sanger Institutes’s challenges and understanding the paramount importance of their work, we were able to recommend the most cost-effective and innovative solution to support their business objectives. As such, they selected EcoStruxure, which gives them greater visibility into the IT and power infrastructure, whilst ensuring they can drive both operational and energy efficiency.” EcoStruxure IT™ is highly scalable and quick to deploy and install, allowing thousands of devices to be connected and discovered in less than 30 minutes. The software is completely vendor-neutral, allowing the user to manage all of the critical infrastructure assets on their network within a single solution, leveraging Data Analytics that enable smarter real-time decision making and ensure that any unexpected issues are identified and quickly resolved. The platform, where data from assets is stored, pooled and analysed, is highly cyber secure and GDPR compliant, allowing users to view all of their assets at any time, from anywhere and on any device. Additionally, security, software and patch updates are automatically issued via the Schneider Electric Cloud, which is hosted on Microsoft Azure to ensure customer information is kept safe and secure. Previously, the Sanger facility had not utilised a unified management platform for its hardware assets. Such systems as were in place had grown organically as the data centre grew. According to Simon Binley: “It was perhaps natural that the focus was on the IT equipment housed within the data centre and not necessarily on the power train. The EcoStruxure solution unifies those two important data centre elements, giving us greater visibility of the entire estate.” EcoStruxure IT replaces that disjointed system with a single management console that allows a much more comprehensive and integrated view of the operation of the entire facility. “Visibility of power utilisation and assets throughout the data centre is the first step to build a complete understanding of what the facility looks like,” says Binley. “From that we can make an informed decision on how to make it more efficient. Having the ability to see and manage more than 400 racks of critical IT equipment, and all the components contained within each, gives us a significant advantage and enables a massive improvement to the operation of the data centre.” Additionally, the DNA sequencing equipment on which the scientific effort depends are protected by individual APC by Schneider Electric Smart-UPS™ uninterruptible power supply systems that will, in future, be networked and brought under the control of EcoStruxure IT. Downtime within this distributed IT environment would require the chemicals used in the research process to be replaced at significant cost, in addition to lost time and data. Ongoing monitoring of UPS battery health is therefore essential to ensure runtime is available and makes a major contribution towards the Wellcome Sanger Institute avoiding outages in both the data sequencing and research efforts. EcoStruxure IT was chosen, says Binley, because it was considered best in class for the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s requirements after examining several competing products. It was well suited to the existing infrastructure in the data centre, most of which has been provided by Schneider Electric, but because of its standards-based open-platform architecture, it can simply and easily integrate with hardware from other vendors. As well as improving the operation of the data centre itself, EcoStruxure IT’s management capabilities can also be extended to other distributed assets throughout the Institute and the broader Wellcome Genome Campus, including is sequencers. Several other communications equipment rooms distributed throughout the Campus are also made visible within EcoStruxure IT’s single pane of glass. Another benefit of EcoStruxure IT is its cloud-based architecture, which enables the Institute to outsource some of its critical IT requirement to third-party colocation providers and still manage the infrastructure internally. The solution provides Wellcome with complete visibility of IT health, ensuring that both the data centre manager and any accompanying maintenance or service providers, such as EiT, are instantly notified via email and the EcoStruxure IT smartphone application should a power outage occur. In this way it allows all key stakeholders to have visibility, whilst enabling rapid collaboration to help quickly resolve critical IT issues. The payback for installing EcoStruxure IT will be seen through reduced operating costs, especially in terms of a reduction in energy consumption. “From a power and energy perspective, we expect to save between 5 and 10% over the first two years in the data centre itself,” says Binley. “We can do that by raising the room temperature in the data halls, currently set at 19C to 21C. For a 4MW facility, that represents a significant cost saving thanks to a reduced cooling effort required, and as the product matures, we would look to increase that even further.” The Institute has ambitious targets for improving the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating for the data centre from between 1.6 and 1.8 where it is now, to around 1.4, which will yield even further cost savings. “Any improvement in PUE and energy efficiency automatically reduces electrical spend and allows us to repurpose investment into other areas,” says Binley. “That means more equipment, more scientists and more benefit to humanity, which is the primary focus for the Wellcome Sanger Institute.”

CSL Router for: Most Innovative Managed Service Solution: Security
• What are your solution's key distinguishing features and/or USP? The CSL Router range offers instant connectivity for CCTV, HVAC, EAS, Access Control, Payment Terminals and much more. As well as single SIM options, the range now includes a new variant which is supplied with a dual SIM option for total resilience. Both send data via 4G, providing an instant, encrypted connection to the internet on sites where wired broadband is unavailable, impractical or slow. The dual SIM option is supplied with two network diverse WorldSIMs, one active and one on standby for total resilience. The standard option comes with a single network SIM for the most cost-effective bundle. The single network option can be configured to provide back-up 4G connectivity for an existing broadband service. • What tangible impact has your solution had on the market and your customers? CSL Router has been utilised in over 4,000 installations since its launch in 2018, as well as winning two prestigious industry awards – showing the positive impact Installers feel this is having to their offerings. The product offers Installers, ARCs and Distributors the opportunity to benefit from recurring monthly revenues. This adds value to the entire business chain, whilst also spreading costs to make them more manageable for all parties. Feedback from across the industry has also been extremely positive with projects covering Retail, Schools, Leisure Facilities and many more. Further positive impact on the industry is demonstrated by the established partnership with CCTV manufacturers and the growing partnership with distribution channels. Both groups are seeing the value in offering this product to their customers. • What are the major differentiators between your solution and those of your primary competitors? CSL Router provides true roaming on 4G. The 4G back-up option is used where you have an existing broadband connection. CSL Router is connected to the broadband but should that fail, the 4G connection will be automatically failed over 4G. Additionally, CSL Router allows Installers to make their communications cyber safe and GDPR compliant, whilst also avoiding conflict with IT teams as it does not interfere with existing infrastructure. The ongoing data packages with no over usage fees are unrivalled compared to any other solution on the market. CSL Router is supplied with the appropriate SIM for usage (2GB as standard with other bundles available upon request) and can also be adjusted should the conditions of your usage change. This flexibility enables Installers to have the high data allowance they desire and remain as cost effective as possible. • Please supply any supportive quotes and/or case study materials to demonstrate the value of this solution to your customers/partners. CIA Fire and Security – Access Control CIA approached CSL as they required a connectivity solution that could provide remote access to the Lawn Tennis Association’s (LTA) tennis courts. Having used the CSL for a number of years for their alarm signalling, CIA were confident that CSL Router would be able to offer trusted connectivity. The CSL Router was chosen to provide 4G connectivity for the electronic locking system at the tennis courts. Elements of the system were solar powered and CSL also provided a consultancy service to ensure the Router could operate with this power source. The Router provides a connection between the electronic lock and booking system. As a result, users can now book a time slot online where they receive an access code. When they arrive at their allocated court, the electronic lock is primed to receive the code. A lot of the tennis courts are in remote locations, the CSL Router provided connectivity where fixed line internet wasn’t available, ensuring that the courts would not be left out of action. The CSL Router is ideal where the challenges and cost implications of wired broadband are not an option. CIA now have over 80 CSL Routers in operation all supported by CSL’s fully managed service. Glendale Security Systems – CCTV Glendale Security Systems were looking for a solution that provided peace of mind to Eladon’s Shetland Ponies, especially during foaling time – where the animals often need emergency support. The stable housing the Shetland Ponies had no broadband and the owner lived on a separate site away from the location. Glendale Security Systems were provided with a CSL Router which offered wireless Connectivity with remote access. The site itself had no wired broadband available and to install a dedicated line would have been very expensive. The CSL Router provide secure Connectivity via a 4G SIM – offering a cheaper alternative whilst ensuring security was not compromised. Instant deployment of the solution was a critical requirement to monitor the stables. The pre-configured Router was provisioned, configured, tested and shipped by CSL to Glendale Security Systems. The installation was completed easily and quickly – with only a power supply required to set up the Router. This quick install avoided any further disruption to the animals – whilst also saving the Installer and the end-user valuable time. The Router was then remotely monitored around the clock and supplemented with full business hours Technical Support. Eladon’s Shetland Ponies were especially thankful for the CSL Router following the birth of a foal to one of the centre’s oldest mares. When the foal was born she decided to jump into the water bucket and couldn't get out. Had it not been for the CCTV system, and the remote access provided by the CSL Router, the staff would not have been alerted. Luckily the owners were able to get there within minutes to the relief of the panicking mother. Since having the CCTV system installed, the staff at the centre have spotted a few different incidents that needed their immediate attention.

WAN Data Acceleration Powers Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
PORTrockIT is deployed by companies such as IBM, Commvault, NetApp, and CVS Healthcare to mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss by using machine learning and artificial intelligence in ways that traditional WAN optimisation and SD-WAN solutions often fail to achieve. Reduction in network and data latency can lead to improved customer experiences. However, with the possibility of large congested data transfers to and from the cloud, latency and packet loss can have a considerable negative effect on data throughput. Without AI and machine intelligence solutions, the effects of latency and packet loss can inhibit data and back-up performance. CVS Healthcare has now expanded their back-up and recovery strategies, by using Bridgeworks’ products to achieve their ambitions.

SuperSSD: World’s First Ultra-High Capacity, High-Performance SSD Storage Appliance
Just a month after emerging from stealth mode in March (and launching two products), Lightbits Labs introduced its third offering: the SuperSSD hardware appliance, the industry’s first scalable, Ethernet-attached solid-state drive (SSD) solution. SuperSSD is geared toward industries and applications that are highly resource intensive, requiring high-volume storage, speed, capacity and reliability, such as artificial intelligence. Because SuperSSD is purpose-built for fast and massive parallel access to data, it addresses the needs of enterprises undergoing resource-intensive digital transformation. The Lightbits team created SuperSSD specifically as a solution that could challenge the traditional direct-attached storage (DAS) solutions on the market. With applications such as AI and machine learning, conventional DAS solutions eventually become ineffective, complex to manage, costly and even become a potential risk for being a single point of failure. That’s because traditional DAS solutions rely on locally stored data on DAS with SSDs. As data sets scale with data-intensive applications, Lightbits saw the need for scale, performance, and distributed access on a new type of storage system that would allow for fast and massive parallel access to data. What’s unique about SuperSSD is its simplicity. It’s a plug-and-play appliance, a simple 2U standard rack server, offering stellar performance, fault tolerance, and cost efficiencies. • Each unit is scalable from 64 TB to 1PB of usable capacity that can be shared across multiple compute nodes • SuperSSD supports up to 5 million 4K input/output operations per second (IOPs) and with a latency consistency of less than 200 us with end-to-end NVMe • It offers compression at 4x data reduction or greater at line rate, which increases usable storage capacity while enhancing SSD endurance and accelerating write-intensive applications • Uses standard TCP/IP network infrastructure for immediate share storage supporting many application and compute notes. For users, SuperSSD provides an opportunity to completely change their storage and data infrastructure – cost effectively – while gaining fast access to data they have stored anywhere.

DataCore Announces a Unified Vision for the Storage Industry; Introduces Analytics Service, and New Capabilities in Software-Defined Storage
DataCore ONE accelerates the software-defined future—unifying primary, secondary and cloud storage under a single management plane with predictive insights to optimise performance and costs DataCore Software has introduced DataCore™ ONE, its vision for storage infrastructure, designed to accelerate the adoption of software-defined storage (SDS) in enterprise data centres, the cloud and edge computing; centralizing command and control of different classes of storage spanning primary, secondary and archive. The company also announced the availability of a number of components that help make this vision a reality, including subscription-based licensing, a new cloud-based analytics service, and a number of enhancements to its already powerful software-defined storage technology. Central to the DataCore ONE vision is the new DataCore Insight Services - a predictive analytics engine that proactively monitors and assesses storage and provides actionable insights from a 360-degree view of infrastructure-wide storage. The SaaS control plane draws on telemetry and the collective learnings from thousands of customers around the globe for early problem detection, best practice recommendations and capacity planning. The combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence detects current or foreseeable anomalies in the data storage infrastructure, while the built-in recommendation engine directs designated individuals to the most appropriate corrective actions. The prescribed steps are highly automated and may be executed remotely from the same web user interface, or performed on-premises behind the firewall, as site-specific security policies dictate. The resulting value is expressed as reduced downtime, faster response, higher efficiencies and substantial cost savings. Additionally, containerized applications, virtual machines and bare metal hosts can all benefit from virtual storage pools that automatically place hot, moderate and cold data in the most appropriate class of storage. “We’ve heard from many IT leaders around the world about the challenges they face with multiple storage silos and the desire to fully realize the promise of software-defined storage by unifying them under a single intelligent layer. With DataCore ONE, we are delivering on this vision,” said Gerardo A. Dada, CMO of DataCore. “Building on the company’s vast inventory of intellectual property and patents, we are presenting this unified architecture to solidify DataCore as a complete and incredibly flexible software-defined storage platform that will help diverse IT environments achieve the maximum value from storage investments, simplify management, and be ready for the technologies and challenges of the future.” Intuitive workflows for provisioning, safeguarding, and monitoring Featuring an extensive UI redesign, DataCore’s latest software release includes new automation capabilities to help free ITops from procedurally-intensive manual tasks. Now, they can command and control the comprehensive set of data services from a bird’s-eye view through intuitive workflows for provisioning, safeguarding, and monitoring the entire storage infrastructure. A complete REST API library encourages programmability and further integration with third-party products. New encryption-at-rest technology brings advanced security measures across pools of diverse storage arrays, using military-grade XTS-AES 256-bit encryption algorithms that can be applied across different storage systems. It contrasts with other error-prone approaches that require multiple device-specific runbooks. There are many other enhancements in the latest software release including improved VVOLs management, streamlined deployment, and increased resiliency for metro-cluster environments. “The reality for most organisations today is that they are running multiple technologies on diverse equipment from different suppliers, and they need a new level of dynamic flexibility in order to turn their environments into cost-efficient, reliable, high-performance systems,” said Johnathan Kendrick, director of business development, Universal Systems, Inc. “With innovations like DataCore Insight Services, DataCore is giving the power back to the end user in how they deploy, manage and secure their storage systems. This not only provides a level of predictability and confidence in how they modernise their IT environments, it also extends the value of existing investments and provides them with an operational model that can easily adapt to the technological innovation, changing business needs and challenges of the future.” “IT leaders are now counting on software-defined storage to resolve many upcoming challenges… I&O leaders are drawn to software-defined storage for the flexibility of deployment choices (data centre, edge, public cloud), as well as the ability to deploy it on industry-standard hardware,” writes Julia Palmer, research vice president at Gartner. “By decoupling the software from the industry-standard hardware, I&O leaders can maintain hardware for a longer period without being forced to upgrade and migrate, while avoiding hardware vendor lock-in and forklift upgrades. The flexible pay-as-you-go purchasing model of software-defined storage can also help realize cost-efficiencies.”

Eco-cloud services
Please find the attached PDF document for full details. The innovation Following 50% company growth in 2018, PeaSoup has invested greatly in our infrastructure. Our datacentres have seen a complete IT overhaul based on market-leading Fujitsu hardware. This enabled the already performant servers to provide a super modern HCI environment. What differentiates PeaSoup from other hyper-converged cloud providers? In addition to the existing datacentres, to enhance the PeaSoup cloud offering the new cloud services are designed and deployed from/using liquid (immersed) cooling. This method of deployment provides an extra cloud resilience as the liquid cooling improves thermal (heat) exchange removing fluctuations or hot spots and allowing the hardware to operate in a more efficient state. Immersive technology condenses IT hardware, removes the risk of hardware failure from dust contamination minimalising at the same time the risk of overheating and electromagnetic interferences. Liquid cooling offers additional environmental benefits, require much less power to run but also creates a transferable heat source that can be used to heat and power a datacentre and surrounding buildings. Apart from the environmental benefits, there are many advantages to our cloud infrastructure. Our hyper-converged SSD infrastructure supports applications and complex workloads demanding better performance and availability. The submerged IT infrastructure helps to achieve this and high delivery of service-level agreements (SLAs) in comparison to standard cloud deployments. As the complexity of workloads constantly increases and mission-critical applications are being added the ability of the cloud infrastructure to adapt to workload needs and self-healing infrastructure will become more essential. More and more businesses will choose HCI driven datacentres to support applications where artificial intelligence and autonomous decisions are part of the product offerings. A cloud infrastructure powered by liquid cooling technology offers the performance and resilience necessary to support a high volume of raw and real-time data, integration, analysis and algorithm-driven resolutions.

ExaGrid’s Innovative Architectural Approach to Deduplication for Backup
ExaGrid is the only solution in the industry that solved the challenges and changed the economics of backup. ExaGrid realized that managing data growth can cause strain on backup storage and set out to develop the best backup target possible. Through its intelligent hyperconverged storage for backup, ExaGrid helps IT organizations solve three of the most pressing issues they face today: how to protect and manage growing data, how to recover data as quickly as possible, and how to do so at a lower cost. ExaGrid is best known for having architected an industry-leading approach to backup storage with unique Landing Zone technology, Adaptive Deduplication approach, and cost-effective scale-out architecture. ExaGrid also offers flexibility by supporting a wide variety of backup applications and utilities in a single environment. In data backup, organizations retain weekly, monthly and yearly backups in order to account for regulatory audits, legal discovery and other business reasons. It is not uncommon for organizations to retain 20 to 50 copies of their backup data at different historic points in time. As a result, the backup storage can be 20 to 50 times greater than the initial primary storage copy. The cost of storage for backup becomes prohibitive and difficult to manage. The value that ExaGrid provides stems from its adaptive approach to deduplication, which offers a 20:1 data deduplication ratio. The traditional “in-line” approach to backup storage only stores deduplicated data. Therefore, both backups and restores are slow as data is deduplicated and rehydrated. As data grows, no additional compute resources are added – so the backup window grows until backups must be abandoned as they are cutting into production hours. Only an expensive, disruptive, forklift upgrade can solve it. Instead, ExaGrid writes data straight to disk, while deduplication happens in parallel. The most recent backup is kept in undeduplicated form in its Landing Zone for the fastest restores and instant VM recovery, since no re-hydration is necessary. Long-term retention data is stored deduplicated in the repository, which is a separate section of the appliance. The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s computing software makes the system highly scalable. Appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system with capacities of up to a 2PB full backup plus retention and an ingest rate of up to 432TB per hour, which is the highest in the industry. Once virtualized, they appear as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic reducing IT staff maintenance and time. ExaGrid’s unique scale-out storage architecture provides all compute, network and storage resources for a fixed-length backup window as data grows. Additionally, this approach eliminates expensive and disruptive forklift upgrades and planned product obsolescence, which reduces the total cost of ownership. ExaGrid supports all typologies including private cloud, offsite data center, third-party data center, third-party cloud, public cloud, and can operate in a pure hybrid environment. Lastly, ExaGrid supports a wide variety of backup applications, utilities, and database dumps. ExaGrid allows multiple approaches within the same environment. An organization can use one backup application for its physical servers, a different backup application or utility for its virtual environment, and also perform direct Microsoft SQL or Oracle RMAN database dumps – all to the same ExaGrid system. This approach allows customers to use the backup application and utilities of their choosing, use best-of-breed backup applications and utilities, and choose the right backup application and utility for each specific use case. If the customer chooses to change their backup application in the future, the ExaGrid system will still work, protecting the initial investment.

Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT uses AI and ML to deliver significant advantages to end-users and service providers
Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT, EcoStruxure IT Expert and EcoStruxure IT for Partners are the Industry’s first and only vendor-neutral, Cloud-based Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) architectures. As part of Schneider Electric's EcoStruxure architecture, EcoStruxure IT operates on all IoT-enabled physical infrastructure assets like secure power and cooling solutions. It takes advantage of the growing presence of Internet of Things (IoT) technology in data centre products, gathering status information and updates from all manner of connected products including racks, UPS systems and cooling equipment. Using Big Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and intelligent benchmarking techniques, it can analyse aggregated data from a wide variety of sources to provide analytical insight into the operation of a data centre. Armed with these tools, data centre operators can become more proactive in their approach to management. Instead of reacting to problems as they occur, they can plan for adequate replacement of compute resources either in a single data centre or across a portfolio of distributed edge sites. Pre-emptive maintenance of equipment approaching capacity limits or nearing end of life can be scheduled to incur minimum disruption or downtime and furthermore means that costs can become more manageable. EcoStruxure IT Expert is completely vendor neutral and can be used to monitor equipment from a wide variety of suppliers. As a cloud-based solution it is readily scalable, and alerts and other vital maintenance information can be dispatched from a central console to remote service personnel, using a variety of mobile devices including smart phones. EcoStruxure™ IT for Partners is an open, cloud-based, multi-tenant platform developed for MSP’s and IT solution providers focused on data centre and distributed IT sites. This secure platform is enabled by EcoStruxure's predictive analytics and will host applications and tools for solution providers to build new, recurring service offerings and business models. They provide global visibility from anywhere, at any time on any connected device including tablets or smart devices and deliver data-driven insights into critical IT assets, which helps customers mitigate risk and reduce downtime. Additionally the software allows partners and end-user alike to drive profitability by delivering managed services for data centre power and cooling solutions, allowing users to increase customer intimacy, revenue streams and new business opportunities by providing visibility and insights into their customers' remote and distributed infrastructure. "EcoStruxure IT Expert provides the foundation to give partners visibility into multiple customer sites and develop additional potential revenue streams," said Kim Polvsen, Vice President & General Manager of Digital Services & Data Centre Software, Schneider Electric. "In the near future, we will deliver additional functionality and applications within EcoStruxure IT for Partners, offering our partners additional capabilities to remotely access customer sites and increase efficiency and control, reducing the need for onsite visits." EcoStruxure IT Expert key benefits include: • Vendor-neutral and multi-tenant monitoring platform enabling partners to grow their services offer to include power and cooling. • For customers not under contract, partners can resell this simple to deploy Software as a Service offer for additional recurring revenue. • Global visibility into their customers' infrastructure – in the cloud or at the edge – with data-driven recommendations to improve performance and efficiency and reduce costs. • Global view of inventory, alarms, and recommendations to resolve; also with analytics and benchmarking. What are the major differentiators between your product/solution and those of your primary competitors? 1) EcoStruxure IT, and EcoStruxure IT Expert are the Industry’s first vendor-neutral, Cloud-Based Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) architectures. 2) The cloud-based software uses the power of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics to gather data from any IoT-enabled data centre infrastructure solution, no matter the brand or Vendor. 3) This becomes even more important when managing distributed edge environments, something that cannot be delivered when utilising traditional on-premise Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software. 4) To date, it is the only solution of its kind available in the industry and shows why Schneider Electric’s focus on Innovation within the data centre and critical infrastructure industries continues to position them as the market leader.

Please answer these questions in the general description of your nomination: • What are your solution's key distinguishing features and/or USP? We offer 360 degree monitoring that covers Windows, Mac, Networking devices and Cloud monitors, all from an easy and intuitive UI providing a single-pane-of-glass. We have no-contracts, unlimited training and onboarding. We have tight and seamless integrations with most popular solutions in every category (Backup, Antivirus, PSA, Remote Control) that help MSPs use the products they love, directly from the ninja interface. • What tangible impact has your solution had on the market and your customers? We have provided our customers a newfound way of managing and monitoring their devices by giving them an extremely powerful yet intuitive way of doing things. This has also led to a movement where many of our competitors have revamped their platforms and are now focusing on not just the product features but also on the user experience. We also released our mobile app to manage and monitor your devices on the go. This makes MSPs daily tasks easier as ever before. • What are the major differentiators between your solution and those of your primary competitors? We have a very customer driven approach for deciding on the features to build, keeping the customer pain as the top priority. Also, our pre-sales and post-sales support are second to none. The goal for us is to give them a VIP white-glove experience throughout their journey with us. • Please supply any supportive quotes and/or case study materials to demonstrate the value of this solution to your customers/partners. https://www.g2.com/products/ninjarmm/reviews https://www.capterra.com/p/184229/NinjaRMM/#reviews

Six Degrees Cloud Platform Innovation of the Year Entry
Six Degrees is a cloud-led managed service provider. We work collaboratively with our clients, helping them to introduce transformative technologies that drive innovation and address their business challenges. Our passionate teams combine technical expertise and deep sector-specific knowledge to innovate, craft and manage the right solutions to power their businesses. The breadth and strength of Six Degrees’ technology is its foundation. Solutions range from data and application performance management through to colocation and unified communications, all with private, public or hybrid cloud at its core. Six Degrees works collaboratively and builds long-term partnerships through exceptional services that match its clients’ needs. Over the past 12 months we have worked closely with our clients to ensure that our solutions meet their security, regulatory, operational and investor requirements. In order to meet contemporary security challenges, we recently completed the acquisition of award winning security consultancy CNS Group. The acquisition of CNS Group has enabled us to stand out from the crowd by delivering managed services, security services and consultancy in a seamless, integrated manner that removes resource and management burden from our clients. At Six Degrees we continually invest in our product portfolio to meet clients’ operational and regulatory requirements. GDPR, MiFID II and constantly developing cyber-threats are all putting pressure on organisations in 2019. Our product innovations have allowed our clients to meet these challenges head-on, whilst alleviating the time and resource burden so our clients can focus on their core deliverables. The notion that ‘cloud’ means putting data into some massive US mega centre is becoming outdated. At Six Degrees we are continually developing our cloud technology approach: we’ve always been cloud-agnostic, but we’re doing even more to offer our clients exactly what they need from varied public, private, multi- or hybrid cloud environments and becoming more application-led to support the operational, regulatory and sovereignty requirements of our clients. Over the past 12 months, Six Degrees has strengthened its partner relationships with hyperscale cloud vendors Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS). We bridge skills gaps by supporting organisations through design, migration, adoption and support of cloud services, whether it’s our proprietary Enterprise Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS or a multi-cloud environment. This varied cloud approach has been enthusiastically adopted by our clients, who are looking to reap the benefits of multi-cloud without exposing themselves to unnecessary risk.

CTERA Introduces Industry’s First Hyperconverged Cloud Gateway
The CTERA Edge X Series, built in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), integrates HPE SimpliVity, an enterprise-grade hyperconverged platform, with CTERA’s global file system to provide all-in-one edge storage and compute solution with triple redundancy and multi-site collaboration. CTERA Edge X Series highlights include: • ROBO Consolidation: unified compute and data management at the edge, bringing applications closer to users and data sources • Built-in File Services: SMB/NFS support for workshares, applications, VDIs and home folders, with simple migration paths from legacy NAS systems • Edge Computing: managed VMware hypervisor for running multiple tier-1 applications • Global File System: cross-site file sharing and data protection, with seamless multi-cloud tiering, supporting all major public and private clouds • Elastic Scaling: frequently accessed data is stored on high-performance local flash drives, while infrequently accessed data is automatically migrated to ‘cheap and deep’ cloud storage • Triple Redundancy: all data is persisted synchronously across a pair of highly available local nodes and asynchronously replicated to off-site private cloud storage • Data Efficiency: local hardware assisted deduplication optimises local storage usage while and cloud deduplication slashes WAN traffic and cloud storage costs • Superior Performance: all-flash system with up to 23 TB of local storage (raw, before deduplication), 192GB memory and 10Gbps Ethernet • Ultimate Security: FIPS-certified cryptography with full control over key management and data residency • Enterprise Service: Global 24×7 support with onsite service and four-hour response time “We see a major market shift toward convergence of infrastructure at the enterprise edge on the one hand, and on the other hand the continuous migration of workloads and data to the cloud,” said Oded Nagel, CTERA Chief Strategy Officer. “The CTERA Edge X Series enables distributed organisations to consolidate all aspects of ROBO IT while gaining powerful and flexible multi-cloud services under unified management.” “Organisations choose HPE SimpliVity to speed application performance and improve efficiency and resiliency at the edge of the network,” said Phillip Cutrone, vice president and general manager, Worldwide OEM Business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “With HPE SimpliVity features integrated with the CTERA X Series, customers can re-imagine file service delivery by gaining modernisation for storing, accessing, and collaborating with unstructured data.” “One of the most significant business challenges for a modern enterprise is evolving the traditional models for storing, protecting and delivering secure access to unstructured data,” said Steven Hill, senior storage analyst for 451 Research. “With a growing number of workloads poised to take advantage of edge computing, enterprise-class data management needs to move to the edge as well. A unified model like CTERA’s offers an intelligent approach to unstructured data management from edge to core.”

Cloud Security Guardian
According to Gartner, by 2020, 80 percent of cloud breaches will be due to customer misconfiguration, mismanaged credentials, or insider theft, and not cloud provider vulnerabilities. On top of this, the cloud is viewed as the ‘wild wild west’ for many organisations, with little visibility into its security. To combat this, Barracuda created Cloud Security Guardian (CSG) to help organisations stay secure when building applications in, and moving workloads to the public cloud, complete with continuous compliance and automated remediation of security controls for end-to-end visibility of organisations’ security in public cloud deployments. Breaking the mould Although the appeal of public cloud is its ability to grow, the speed at which this happens often discourages organisations. CSG puts an end to this, providing visualisation of all cloud assets, and their inter-relationships from network, application and access perspectives, to give users insights to put them back in control of their cloud environment. Installing in a matter of minutes - and scanning the entire cloud infrastructure in the process - CSG uses pre-defined or custom profiles so organisations can quickly remediate and effortlessly maintain compliance with security frameworks like GDPR, PCI, CIS, NIST, or HIPPA. From there, it looks for unsecured vulnerabilities in cloud resources and, with one click remediation, automatically deploys and configures Barracuda's Cloud Generation WAF or Cloud Generation Firewall to remediate the vulnerability. Pre-loaded with CIS certified security policies built on CIS Benchmarks, CSG grants users an interactive umbrella map of their organisation’s cloud ecosystems, simplified drill-downs and relationship identifiers, as well as automated remediation. Unlike other solutions CSG bridges the needs of CISOs and cloud developers, allowing organisations to rapidly develop and deploy new cloud products and workloads while remaining confident their infrastructure is secure. It differs from other security compliance solutions by: Unique to us, CSG integrates with Azure’s native firewalls, meaning you can manage firewall policies from a single pane of glass. It can also search AWS S3 buckets for latent threats. Automatically deploying, configuring, and operationalizing CloudGen Firewalls and CloudGen WAFs when it assesses a security need, meaning any organisation deploying CSG will see an immediately enhanced security framework. Integrating with both AWS and Microsoft Azure - many others don’t. Unique to CSG, Azure Firewall integration covers the security story from end-to-end, unlike many solutions in the market today which solely offer compliance or data plane protection. CSG goes over and above typical visibility and reporting, offering orchestration, multi-cloud and remediation, as well as Barracuda’s companion Cloud Storage Shield, for tackling latent threats in cloud stores. A customer-first solution CSG gives users the freedom they need to use cloud services, while giving security officers the controls and automation to take action and stay compliant, all without restricting users. The result is a powerful, simple-to-use tool that empowers any sized enterprise to build or move environments across multi-cloud platforms safely, whilst staying compliant. This means IT managers can maintain control of their deployments without the need for a deep technical understanding of cloud architectures, whilst giving developers the freedom to realise the true benefits of a public cloud, all in a cost effective manner. What organisations are saying Shalomi Levin, Chief Technology Officer at Perception Point: "During our SOC-2 certification, CSG has been key to identifying any security non-conformance and limiting the additional investment we would have had to make to review all these policies manually. CSG simplifies the whole process." Doug Vincent-Townend, Solutions Specialist, SoftwareOne: “We’re really looking forward to seeing what we can do with CSG. Cloud governance is often something that’s overlooked so we feel it’s going to do well.”

Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs
What is the product? Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs is a monthly subscription program enabling Managed Service Providers, IT resellers and IT consultants to provide backup and recovery services for Office 365 mailboxes and (as from September 2019) files stored within OneDrive and SharePoint. MSPs can take backups and manage and monitor them through Altaro’s multi-tenant, cloud-based console. Backups are automatically saved to Altaro’s Azure infrastructure. There are no contracts or upfront costs: MSPs simply pay per user, per month. One monthly fee covers backup, storage, management console access, and 24/7 instant, human support (call response of less than 30 seconds). MSPs can set their own price and earn recurring monthly revenue. Core innovations enjoyed by MSPs and IT Consultants who use Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs: • Central multi-tenant management: Manage and monitor all your customers’ Office 365 mailbox, OneDrive and SharePoint backups through Altaro’s ground-breaking, multi-tenant cloud-based management console. • Pay per user, per month: Pay a single fee per user per month, covering back up, storage, use of our management console, and 24/7 support. Per customer, you can choose whether to only back up mailboxes or whether to also back up files stored in OneDrive and SharePoint. • Flexibility: Add or remove users as needed. You only pay for those backed up per month. • No contracts: or upfront costs No annual commitment. There’s just a minimum monthly starter pack subscription covering up to 30 mailboxes across all your customers. Scale to tens of thousands of users. • Storage is included; no local storage infrastructure or software required: You don’t have to think about setting up your own servers to save backups to or worry about SLAs – backups are saved to Altaro’s Microsoft Azure infrastructure as part of the package. • No extras fees: You get access to all product features across all your customers, our storage on Microsoft Azure infrastructure for backups, 24/7 support, and our multi-tenant console for centralised management of all your Altaro Office 365 Backup customer accounts. • Lightning-fast, 24/7 support: 22-second average support call pickup, live chat, speak directly with an expert, no tier 1 agents or gatekeepers. MORE INFORMATION: How Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs helps MSPs serve their customers Microsoft does not provide data protection services a part of its Office 365 subscription package. Therefore, data backup is a must. When trouble occurs resulting in loss or damage to Office 365 mailboxes, OneDrive or SharePoint data, MSPs need to have the peace of mind that they can assist their customers with reliable backup and recovery services. Altaro Office 365 Backup is the robust backup and recovery solution that enables MSPs to do so. Product functionality provides MSPs with these benefits: • Office 365 mailbox backups: Back up your customers' Office 365 mailboxes automatically throughout the day, including all emails, attachments, calendars and contacts within a user’s mailbox • OneDrive and SharePoint Document Library backups (as from September 2019) – You can also choose to back up files stored within your customers' OneDrive accounts and SharePoint. You have the flexibility to choose what you what to back up per customer, and pay per user. • Minimal recovery point objective – Backups take place automatically several times per day, ensuring a low recovery point objective (RPO) in case of data loss or damage. • Easily restore deleted, lost or damaged mail items - Benefit from various restore options for entire mailboxes as well as granular restore of selected mail items, such as restoring back to the same mailbox. • Fast and simple OneDrive and SharePoint item recovery – Use the solution’s granular restore wizard for OneDrive and SharePoint files. You can either restore the files to a downloadable ZIP Archive or back to a OneDrive Account or SharePoint Document Library. • Browsable backups – Search and browse through your customers' backups through various filters, with searchability throughout different backup versions, and avoid separate time-consuming searches. • Archiving or migrating mailboxes – All emails within an Office 365 mailbox can be restored to a downloadable PST file. The PST file can then be opened in Outlook to view and restore individual emails and attachments. This is ideal for archiving or migrating a user’s mailbox. • Worry-free, secure storage - Your customers' Office 365 mailbox and/or OneDrive and SharePoint backups are automatically saved to Altaro's secure cloud backup location hosted on Microsoft Azure. This way, you don't have to think about setting up your own servers to save backups to, or worry about SLAs. • Customer self-service – You can grant account access to one or more of your customers so that they can monitor, browse and restore their own backup data on the Altaro Cloud Management Console. • User access rights – Provide access to selected user accounts within your team, giving them control over backup browsing and restore capabilities for one or more customers. • Easy billing: Enjoy a convenient, ordered view of the total users backed up for each of your customers, making it simple and fast for you to know what you need to bill per customer. Using this solution, MSPs can also enjoy: • Recurring revenue: They can charge their customers a recurring monthly fee at the price point you decide on! • Unbeatable value: Competitive MSP pricing; MSps are then free to establish their own pricing model. Volume discounts apply.

ServerFarm Succeeds with an Analytics-Based Efficiency Transformation for a London Data Centre
In March 2018, ServerFarm acquired a 120,000 square foot, 10.5MW data centre located in Feltham, London through sale and partial leaseback. (The press release about this news can be found at https://www.serverfarmllc.com/2018/03/london-data-centre-acquisition/, and the link to more information about the facility, called LON1, is https://www.serverfarmllc.com/london-data-center/.) A major global telco was the facility’s sole occupant, and its objectives were to remove the company from substantial capital requirements needed to maintain the data centres’ effective performance, as well as to “right size” its IT capacity to fit its business requirements. ServerFarm demonstrated its exceptional capabilities through acquiring the asset, executing a complex capital investment program (while the data centre remained “live” to the telco’s customer base) and instituting a new operations management model - covering facility, critical infrastructure and IT change management - that will significantly reduce TCO. ServerFarm also consolidated the telco’s footprint and installed a new customer base within the facility – all with zero performance interruptions or downtime. ServerFarm stepped in to create a multi-tenant data centre while facilitating a flexible, agile infrastructure environment for its customers. The company created a truly agile infrastructure environment to accommodate different densities and match customer workload needs - from low density, 1-4Kw per rack to HPC high density environments (up to 20Kw per rack). Through innovative containment, optimisation and deployment of high efficiency chillers and the InCommand cloud-based, real-time monitoring of data centre operations, ServerFarm halved the design PUE, enabling the incumbent managed service provider to offer data centre space with a design PUE of 1.2. ServerFarm’s InCommand is an integrated service platform that brings together people and processes into a portal-based solution for maximum data centre operational efficiency. InCommand offers: ● Infrastructure monitoring, reporting and analytics ● CMMS, change management, ticketing and work-order ● Remote Hands and NOC services Creating a Tier3+ environment in terms of uptime and efficiency was a challenge. ServerFarm accomplished this through cost-effective modernisation of existing electrical gear, new switches and UPS equipment to create N+1 electrical infrastructure with A+B feeds combined with new super efficient chillers and new CRAC units, ultimately developing an N+1 mechanical environment. This was completed while keeping the site live for existing commercial colo and telco enterprise customers. Within the first 5.5 months after acquisition, ServerFarm completed the handover and infrastructure refresh to release 3.6MW to a new customer. The telco and two customers went live with ServerFarm’s InCommand solution. Specifically, ServerFarm completed the following initiatives within the first five months of the LON1 transformation and saw the following results: 1. Undertaken significant capital investment (in excess of $9 million) in electrical and mechanical infrastructure ● Installed and commissioned new UPSs, revised the electrical topology, refurbished generators, installed new chillers and cooling plant, and power and energy management systems. (Full Systems IST took place in September, meaning that ServerFarm completed all of this in under 6 months, in a multi-MW data centre facility.) ● The telco adopted ServerFarm’s InCommand platform and ServerFarm helped the client with live IT systems migrations and consolidation into two data halls. ● All of this was done within a live environment and with precise coordination and approval from the telco. 2. Implemented the ServerFarm operations model and incorporated onsite personnel, to include: ● Management oversite by ServerFarm. Access to ServerFarm’s US-based global NOC. ● Operational team from a major real estate firm, which adopted InCommand, ensuring strong alignment with processes and people from both ServerFarm and the telco. ● The transition to the real estate firm took place in under 30 days with no operational issues. ● The real estate firm started integrating its platform with InCommand at the site as part of a wider adoption of InCommand across the firm’s installed base. 3. Secured and began installing a new 3.5-MW tenant in the telco’s former capacity ● The new tenant adopted InCommand and installed its first 50 racks. ● The new tenant contracted ServerFarm for asset, change and capacity management, including Remote Hands. Overall, LON1 clients have experienced significant OPEX savings, enhanced offerings in terms of flexibility of environment and the ability to easily add additional capacity in response to workload and customer demand. LON1 is ServerFarm’s first European property, adding another 120,000 square feet to the company’s existing data centre portfolio of more than 1 million square feet. The data centre provides ServerFarm customers with a strategically important entry into a vital data centre market. Close to Heathrow airport, the London data centre is strategically located with direct connections to Slough and London’s Docklands. It adds to ServerFarm’s growing global data centre portfolio, which also includes North American facilities in Moses Lake, WA; Santa Clara, CA; Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; Charlotte, NC; Oak Brook, IL; and Toronto, ON.

Lightbits Labs: Enabling Hyperscale Storage Experience for Next-Generation Applications
Lightbits Labs was founded in 2016 by a group of well-connected and seasoned storage industry veterans and entrepreneurs with the purpose of remaking modern cloud infrastructure on a global scale. The company set a mission of reinventing the way storage and networking are conducted in hyperscale data centers and began building solutions to meet that goal. While they were quietly reinventing storage solutions, the team was also flexing its NVM Express (nonvolatile memory express) prowess. Lightbits executives worked closely with NVM Express and its member companies and played a leadership role in the initial development of the specification standards. Later, they were instrumental in the ratification of traditional TCP/IP as an approved transport layer for NVMe – which is now known as NVMe/TCP. When the specification was announced late in 2018, Lightbits announced its hyperscale storage platform would be the industry’s first to take full advantage of the newly minted transport standard. Before emerging from stealth mode, Lightbits began building a reputation as the storage industry’s pioneer in NVMe/TCP. Its team knew that by layering solutions over existing software-based TCP transport implementations as well as future hardware accelerated implementations, NVMe/TCP would allow large-scale data centers to use their existing, ubiquitous TCP/IP infrastructure to realize NVMe’s performance benefits. In March 2019, Lightbits received $50 million in funding and introduced two groundbreaking products: LightOS and LightField. The LightOS software and LightField storage acceleration card provide a high-performance, end-to-end disaggregation solution that can scale storage independently from compute without requiring any changes to data center clients or network infrastructure. They were the industry’s first software-defined NVMe/TCP solution in production and the only to provide a Global Flash Translation Layer (GFTL) running over high-performance standard networks. In short, they allow private clouds and software-as-a-service providers to capitalize on the application performance of using local NVMe SSDs with the simplicity and efficiency of hyperscale solutions. These initial products were very well received, and the company launched into nearly a dozen proof of concept tests with some of the world’s leading cloud companies and financial institutions. A month later, in April 2019, Lightbits launched its third product, the SuperSSD storage appliance, a plug-and-play, ultra-high capacity and high-performance SSD storage appliance. SuperSSD is scalable from 64TB to 1PB usable capacity that can be shared across multiple compute nodes. It supports up to 5 million 4K input/output operations per second (IOPs) with high fault tolerance with no service interruptions. As trailblazers of a new storage paradigm, Lightbits’ solutions are successfully being used in industry-leading cloud data centers around the globe. With strategic investors including Dell Technologies Capital and Micron, and with investments from industry luminary Chairman and Founder Avigdor Willenz, Lightbits Labs is separating storage from compute to enable a hyperscale experience and improve performance and lowering total cost of ownership.

Hyve: expansion, growth and improved services
Introduction to Hyve Hyve Managed Hosting is a fully managed UK based cloud hosting provider with a passion for technology. Utilising a small business ethos, Hyve focuses on providing the highest possible levels of support and management services alongside unrivalled service performance and reliability. Because of this Hyve delivers attentive, 24/7 support and is constantly using its passion for technology to provide innovative cloud solutions for its wide range of customers. Founded in 2001 by entrepreneurs Jon Lucas and Jake Madders, Hyve is based in Brighton, UK and has been delivering an extensive range of professional cloud services for nearly twenty years. Hyve is completely independent and self-funded, and the directors have consistently reinvested profits back into the company, enabling the impressive growth that Hyve has seen over recent years. Hyve has 380 customers, an increase of over 90 in the past year, and works with recognisable brands such as Carluccio’s, Queen Victoria Hospital and Safestore. It isn’t just in the UK that Hyve is attracting business. Its partnership with Equinix, one of the world’s pre-eminent data centre businesses, means its hosting, colocation and managed services are available across 35 data centres. This means customers benefit from tier 3+ facilities around the globe that offer connectivity, reliability, security and performance. A year of expansion, growth and improved services In the past year, Hyve has expanded its presence to cover Columbia, Miami, New York, Japan and two key locations in Switzerland - Geneva and Zurich. Its strategic partnership with Equinix means that by the end of 2019, it will be able to offer a further 12 data centre locations. As part of their global expansion, Equinix will also develop 23 of their existing sites, providing carrier-neutral data centre spaces across 5 continents. 2019 also saw Hyve launch an upgraded version of its dedicated Secure File Transfer service, enabling businesses to send and receive fully encrypted confidential information over the internet. The upgrade includes a brand-new web interface to allow users to access files via phone or browser behind a corporate firewall. Unlike the shared SaaS-based services offered by many other providers, Hyve provides SFTP connectivity via a fully managed Windows cloud server dedicated to each client. The service now offers an enhanced web interface with a higher upload limit and is compatible with mobile devices. All data is stored within the UK in Hyve’s ultra-secure data centres and each server is configured with a managed firewall and 7-day backups. Cloud specialists The cloud market is extremely competitive and with the likes of global brands such as Amazon, Google and Rackspace offering a range of services, Hyve has found its own place in the market for success. Hyve was the first UK cloud hosting provider to break conventions and set up a fully managed, multi-tenant VMware cloud within the UK, as well as having a 100GB network. The company virtualised and consolidated all of its clients onto a virtualised platform before cloud hosting was initially offered by other providers, and this now enables Hyve to deliver high performance, reliability and scalability that outperforms the competition. Cloud offerings Hyve has a wide range of cloud service offerings, enabling customers with any requirements to find a suitable solution with the company. These offerings include the four main types of cloud: managed, private, public, and hybrid. Managed cloud Hyve’s fully managed, multi-tenant VMware cloud builds upon its performance and scaling capabilities by adding security, networking and platform/server management layers. It also offers a range of management services across the whole infrastructure stack, supporting businesses of all sizes. Customers are allocated a personal Account Manager and a team of technical engineers to work on their account, who ensure that the solutions Hyve offers are effectively implemented and managed successfully. This mitigates customers getting stuck with automated call centres, and ensures a personal level of engagement at all times. Private cloud Hyve’s private cloud runs on hardware fully dedicated to each individual organisation, and the absence of shared resources ensures that customers have the highest level of security for their data. Customers also receive full control of every aspect of their servers, allowing for total jurisdiction over what and where data is stored; however, Hyve always has round-the-clock support available for any customer who needs assistance, for added peace of mind. Public cloud Businesses can reduce the risks of adopting a public cloud service provider, such as AWS, Azure or Google, by working with Hyve to create a realistic deployment plan and to add the vital layer of continuous management that reassures customers that their data is in safe hands. Like with the private cloud offering, customers using Hyve’s public cloud services receive the same essential support whenever and however required. Unlike other public cloud offerings, Hyve’s customers have to go through an extensive vetting, checking and due diligence process before they can access the network, giving businesses complete reassurance. Hybrid cloud Hyve’s hybrid cloud offering is a flexible cloud hosting solution that can utilise a combination of on-premise, private cloud and managed cloud services that all work in tandem. Using only the fastest and most robust hardware available, this approach provides businesses with the security and control of a private cloud, and the flexibility and cost savings presented by the public cloud. The advantages of this are that, not only is every aspect of the customer’s platform faster, but Hyve is also able to offer industry-leading SLAs. Also, any legacy applications or localised data on-premises becomes part of the overall platform, allowing for optimum efficiency. Going further than the competition Unlike many other hosts, Hyve doesn’t pack shared servers with thousands of domains. Instead, Hyve ensures that each server has plenty of resources available for the number of domains hosted – fewer domains per server. All of Hyve’s cloud services are built on HPE BladeSystems and HPE 3PAR tiered storage arrays, and running on VMware allows Hyve to offer high availability on all virtual machines with a 99.999% SLA. All solutions are fully managed by Hyve and can be setup to run across multiple data centres for disaster recovery.

Pure Storage - Digital Transformation Company of the Year
Pure Storage believes that data is strategic to customers’ digital transformation journeys. Data requires innovation and investment, especially as new application architectures are driving unprecedented levels of performance, parallelism, and multi-cloud data workflows. Customers are selecting Pure because it enables them to simultaneously modernize their existing applications and accelerate their adoption of hybrid cloud, containers, DevOps, AI, and real-time analytics at scale. Data drives digital transformation. The businesses that can make the best use of this data are best placed to survive, compete and succeed. However, managing this data can be a huge challenge; a challenge so all-encompassing that it detracts from the very innovation it’s meant to support. Since entering the market ten years ago, Pure Storage has been on a mission to help organisations overcome these challenges, and ultimately to build a better world with data. Leading the charge in emerging technologies such as hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning and NVMe, Pure is at the forefront of digital transformation strategies for customers such as Mercedes AMG-Petronas Sport, Man AHL, Waitrose, Paige and many more. Industry-First Solutions that Create an “Unfair Advantage” Having pioneered industry-first solutions for the last decade, the past 12 months have been no exception, with the development of solutions specifically designed to deliver a modern data experience. Pure is focused on items that are important to CIOs, and strategic decision makers today - building a hybrid cloud, transitioning to fast, consolidated data architectures, and deriving business value from AI and analytics. As the first and only company to offer customers integrated hybrid cloud and on-prem solutions, consumable As-a-Service, Pure is delivering a modern data experience. In the past year alone, Pure has enabled customers to better leverage true hybrid cloud environments, extended its file capabilities and unveiled NVIDIA-powered solutions for a full spectrum of AI initiatives. To explore some of these in greater detail: Giving Organisation Choice and Eliminating Compromise Real-time access to data is needed to drive any digital transformation initiative. This real-time access requires applications to move freely between on-premises and the cloud. A lack of purpose-designed, strategic integrations between on-premises storage and the cloud has been a primary inhibitor of application mobility. In short, organisations have had to make compromises on their infrastructure. The age of compromise is coming to an end, with the introduction of a truly unified cloud strategy – Pure’s Cloud Data Services. The suite of cloud offerings run on Amazon Web Services (AWS), giving businesses the freedom to create an environment that best suits the needs and drivers of the organisation; a solution truly based on choice. As of September 2019, CloudSnap by Pure Storage is a multi-cloud solution, delivering cloud backup on AWS and now, Microsoft Azure, maximizing the cloud’s potential for backup storage with intelligent and efficient data transfer to and from the cloud; rapid recovery on-premises to help customers meet demanding service level agreements (SLAs) and compliance policies with easy and cost-effective array and volume-level recovery. Pure has unified the cloud with a common set of data services, enabling consistent storage capabilities, APIs, and resiliency so that applications can be built once and run everywhere. These services include Cloud Block Store for AWS. Generally available as of September 2019, this solution offers industrial-strength block storage that runs on AWS. Designed to enable mission-critical applications to run seamlessly in the cloud, Cloud Block Store enables hybrid mobility and adds new storage services to web scale applications. With the combination of Pure's Cloud Block Store on AWS and traditional FlashArray on-premises, customers can embrace the power of hybrid cloud architectures for their data. A Single Pane of Glass This kind of hybrid architecture requires consistent visibility and management of data wherever it is stored, which is where Pure1 comes in. Pure1 is a truly AI-driven cloud-based infrastructure management and support platform, which manages, automates, orchestrates and optimizes data infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. Organisations can now spend less time managing their IT infrastructure and more time innovating. By making capacity and performance forecasting a reality, Pure1 eliminates guesswork. It means the IT team can predict capacity and performance needs over time; even model workload consolidation and hardware upgrades. The centralized dashboard gives businesses a holistic view of their data, no matter where it’s stored. The platform provides an overview of all snapshots using Snapshot Catalog, and Purity CloudSnap maximizes the cloud’s potential for backup storage with intelligent and efficient data transfer to and from the cloud. Pure1 serves as that single pane of glass across the infrastructure granting the ability to simplify, automate and optimize every step of the infrastructure across the stack. An Industry-First in an AI-Driven World Artificial Intelligence is a game-changer, with the potential to revolutionize how organisations can manage and work with their data. However, the road to implementing AI solutions is not without its complexities. Enter AIRI; the industry’s first integrated AI-ready infrastructure for deploying deep learning at scale. Completely scalable, it eliminates the challenges of building an AI infrastructure, neatly and compactly delivering all the necessary components in a small form-factor: AIRI is so powerful that it delivers the performance of 50 racks of compute and storage capability in under 50 inches of space. This year Pure introduced the first hyperscale configuration for AIRI. This delivers even more powerful supercomputing capabilities for enterprises pioneering real-world AI initiatives, courtesy of Pure and AI supercomputing leaders NVIDIA and Mellanox. Customer Testimonials Pure Storage customer Causeway Capital’s mission is to provide clients with superior, risk-adjusted returns while maintaining a culture of responsibility and accountability. Data is the lifeblood of modern organizations, and Pure’s seamless integrations with multiple clouds allow Causeway Capital to innovate with data, unconstrained. “Hybrid applications give us the advantage of best-in-class capabilities delivered by the cloud,” said Pete Petersen, CTO & CISO, Causeway Capital. “Today's landscape is competitive. We can’t afford to limit our innovation to on-premises or the cloud. Now, our application developers can develop to a single storage API, leverage a storage platform that provides rich resiliency services and count on Pure for guidance and reliability." Pure customer Paige is revolutionising clinical diagnosis and treatment in oncology, with AI. Whilst pathology is the cornerstone of most cancer diagnoses, most pathologic diagnoses rely on manual, subjective processes developed more than a century ago. This is where Pure Storage comes in. “With access to one of the world’s largest tumour pathology archives, we needed the most advanced deep learning infrastructure available to quickly turn massive amounts of data into clinically-validated AI applications,” said Dr. Thomas Fuchs, Founder and Chief Science Officer, Paige. “The powerful combination of DGX-1 and FlashBlade accelerates our mission to catalyse the medical industry with AI.” Royal Bank of Canada is one of Canada's largest banks, and one of North America's leading diversified financial services companies. Royal Bank of Canada provides personal and commercial banking, wealth management, insurance, investor services, and capital markets products and services on a global basis. "We are excited to see what Pure1's manageability of cloud platforms like Cloud Block Store and CloudSnap new multi-cloud capability will offer," said Antonio Puccio Director of SAN storage, Royal Bank of Canada. "With cloud-based platforms like Pure1, it is easier for organizations to manage their storage infrastructures across hybrid cloud environments without having to invest in multiple vendors and tools."