< PreviousOn-demand digital channel services for partners’ growth Nuvias Group has announced Nuvias Digital - a suite of channel support and sales tools, accessible through a single login, designed to facilitate channel partners' digital enablement by enhancing customer experience and paving the road to customer success. Nuvias provides a toolset that not only makes working with Nuvias and its vendor partners easier but gives partners the facilities to develop and market their business, building and supporting their growth. Nuvias Digital offers partners a choice of tools designed to answer the needs of diverse businesses, to help them ride the next wave of channel growth. This modular approach to the toolset provides a foundation for future development as well as choice for partners, addressing the needs of a range of diverse partner businesses. Nuvias Subscription Services will enable partners and their customers to access subscription-based technology solutions via the Nuvias Digital toolset. Nuvias Subscription Services will also offer vendors solutions, for example, Checkpoint, in combination with Nuvias’ own partner focused managed services. New vendor and Nuvias Subscription Services and solutions will be added to Nuvias Digital on an ongoing basis. Nuvias Digital will help partners take advantage of the growth opportunities for the IT channel in 2021 and beyond, linked to the accelerated pace of Digital Transformation, imperative for all businesses in view of the remote working practices that have become prevalent during the pandemic. As a digital sales enablement engine, coupled with Nuvias’ expert knowledge of technology and of the industry, it will support channel partners in riding the next wave of channel growth. Karl Roe, VP - Digital Transformation and Customer Success at the Nuvias Group, commented, “We are excited to open up access to the toolkit and with it, to on-demand services that answer real partner requirements. Nuvias Digital is built on the transparency, visibility, technical know-how and business expertise the channel needs for digital enablement. Nuvias Digital automates the processes so that we can devote more time to personal, strategic conversations with our partners and customers. Choice is an essential quality of Nuvias Digital, as a fixed model, where one-size-fits-all does not answer real- world requirements.” n Creval deploys Pluribus for multi-site data centre network Pluribus Networks has announced that Credito Valtellinese, an Italian banking institution, has completed deployment of a new multi-site data centre network fabric using Dell EMC Powerswitch S5200- ON series switches running the Pluribus Netvisor ONE operating system and Adaptive Cloud Fabric software. The fabric spans and enables two new active-active data centres which provide near-zero downtime for banking applications, ensuring a high-quality experience for Creval’s customers. The fabric was also extended to Creval’s two legacy data centres to support seamless migration of workloads to the new data centres with no service disruption to customers, eventually enabling Creval to decommission the legacy data centres after all workloads were migrated. With expanding business operations that include more than 3,400 employees in 11 regions through a distribution network made up of 355 branches, Creval needed to modernise its data centre network to meet IT workloads and evolving customer expectations. Its legacy network consisted of two data centres, with applications announced over a private MPLS WAN. With its data centre architecture based on older switches, Creval faced multiple issues related to disaster mitigation and recovery, siloed services between single data centres and outdated storage systems and firewalls among the switches. The goal of the project was to provide Creval with a scalable, agile and resilient architecture. An automated network fabric was critical to achieving these goals and, after investigating multiple networking solutions, Creval ultimately selected Pluribus Netvisor ONE running on high-performance open networking Dell 5200 series switches. Creval built two new modern data centres within 50kms of each other and interconnected them with two 10G low latency DWDM links. Pluribus’ Adaptive Cloud Fabric solution, powered by Netvisor ONE, enabled Creval to deploy an SDN-automated, overlay network fabric across the geographically separated data centres for operational simplicity, agility, ease of service migration and integrated analytics for visibility. Bruno Franchetti, Chief Architect at Creval, said, “Creval was committed to moving ahead with a solution that supported disaggregated networking and a vendor that had local support and could meet our stringent testing and service migration requirements. Among the key benefits of this network refresh with Pluribus, is a drastic streamlining of our disaster recovery procedures which have reduced Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) to minutes.” Iacopo Salacrist, Head of Technology Division at Creval, said, “Creval’s application services can be distributed across both of our new data centres for resilience and there is complete flexibility in performing granular workload migration without impacting service performance. The IT team now has the choice to control when to move an entire service or all services from one site to the other by reconfiguring a pair of firewall interfaces and with a minimal impact to the service availability.” n Quantum acquires surveillance portfolio and assets From Pivot3 Quantum has announced an agreement to acquire the video surveillance portfolio and assets of Pivot3. The acquisition brings a diverse portfolio of video surveillance appliances, network video recorders (NVRs) and management applications along with a scale-out hyper-converged software platform, which, going forward, will all be offered under the Quantum VS-Series product portfolio. Together with Quantum’s current line of NVR servers, the StorNext File System and ActiveScale object storage, the Pivot3 additions round out a comprehensive surveillance and security portfolio, spanning small to multi-petabyte deployments. Jamie Lerner, Chairman and CEO, said, “Surveillance cameras are the biggest data generator on the planet, and Pivot3 has established themselves as one of the leaders in this space by pioneering the use of hyper-converged software for surveillance recording. This acquisition represents another key step in Quantum’s transformation, solidifying the company as a serious player in the multi-billion-dollar video surveillance market, expanding our global customer base, sales channels and technical expertise specific to this industry.” Lerner added, “We are excited to welcome Pivot3’s surveillance customers and partners to Quantum. We are committed to making sure that they receive excellent service and support throughout this transition and we have an innovative and compelling roadmap planned that builds on the proven Pivot3 product line with Quantum’s intellectual property and expertise in video.” Curt Wittich, Vice President of Sales, Strategic Markets, at Quantum, said, “We believe it’s critical to manage the video surveillance data lifecycle from initial capture through expiration and adding Pivot3 to the Quantum portfolio expands our ability to address security projects of every size and scope. These solutions range from entry-level VMS servers all the way to cloud or tape storage for multi-year, multi-petabyte retention. Quantum’s portfolio covers the entire lifecycle for optimal video placement, accessibility and cost-effectiveness.” n NEWS IN BRIEF www.networkseuropemagazine.com 20Lacework expands in EMEA Lacework has announced a global business expansion into the EMEA region. Building on its innovation lead since launching in 2015, Lacework’s rapid growth is a testament to the company’s revolutionary approach of tackling security as a data problem through the Lacework Polygraph. Customers are increasingly relying on Lacework to access a unique view into all entities across applications, users, networks, containers and processes in a data centre to quickly secure the code, the container and the cloud in a way that empowers developers to build at lightning speed. This EMEA expansion comes on the heels of eight straight quarters of sequential revenue growth, Lacework’s best quarter to date in Q1 of this year and $525 million in funding from Sutter Hill Ventures and other top tier investors in January. The company is making significant investments into building out its EMEA operations, including a European HQ in Dublin, regional offices in the UK, France and Germany, and an AWS data centre in Frankfurt, alongside strategic sales, marketing and customer success hires in the region, most recently the appointment of Ryan Sheldrake as EMEA Field CTO. The company has also expanded its Executive team, including the additions of Mike Staiger as CFO and David Hatfield as CEO, following his successful tenure as the President of Pure Storage where he led the company through eight years of hyper-growth from inception to more than $1.5 billion in revenue. Ryan Sheldrake, Lacework EMEA Field CTO commented, “Lacework is a special company in a very exciting stage of growth and product development, and we are delighted to now expand our reach and operations into EMEA. Digital businesses should not have to choose between innovation, speed and security. With Lacework, organisations no longer need to make these tradeoffs. Our team has worked incredibly hard to develop a truly sophisticated platform with consumer-level ease of use that automates cloud security at scale, and it’s now time to kickstart a secure cloud revolution.” n Netskope launches the SASE Accreditation Netskope has announced the SASE Accreditation, an accreditation course intended to address design requirements for Secure Access Services Edge (SASE). SASE unifies networking and security services in a cloud-delivered architecture and organisations now have a comprehensive option available to train on and deliver SASE requirements, without ambiguity or confusion. Developed in collaboration with industry expert, Dr Edward Amoroso, CEO of TAG Cyber and former Chief Security Officer of AT&T, the SASE Accreditation is designed for network infrastructure and cybersecurity practitioners. Netskope, the sole sponsor of the course, worked with Amoroso to create a vendor-agnostic curriculum, offering the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in several cloud security and networking disciplines. Attendees will learn how SASE helps networking and security professionals gain greater visibility and real-time, actionable information about cloud services, activity, traffic and data while also simplifying their security stack. Jason Clark, Chief Strategy Officer at Netskope, said, “SASE is a new term but it’s not a new concept. From day one of Netskope, the idea of security and networking merging was the foundation for how we built our products and services. As SASE continues to grow, the demand for skilled and educated practitioners will grow along with it and until today, those options for education and training were very limited. Netskope is thrilled to be sponsoring the SASE Accreditation. Leveraging Dr. Amoroso’s deep experience in the security and networking industries and his passion for education, made this partnership an easy choice for us.” Ed Amoroso, Founder and CEO of Tag Cyber, said, “SASE is changing the way companies are thinking about securing their users and data in the era of cloud. Working with Netskope, we developed the SASE Accreditation to give practitioners an in-depth, hands-on introduction to SASE and how to design for it. This course is built to prepare students and practitioners for the future of cloud security and how all enterprise networks will be designed and secured in the future.” As part of a continued initiative to mentor and educate students on cybersecurity and industry career opportunities, Netskope has partnered with the Security Advisor Alliance (SAA) to support the SASE Accreditation. For each SASE Accreditation course session, a select number of seats will be granted to train SAA students on SASE architecture, at no cost to them. The SAA is a non-profit organisation, founded and run by industry-leading cybersecurity executives, dedicated to helping each other solve the biggest unmet challenges in cybersecurity, most importantly, the talent gap. Gary Latham, Executive Director at Security Advisor Alliance, said, “Netskope has been an active and committed partner to the Security Advisor Alliance since day one and is dedicated to helping us with our mission. We are both passionate about educating the future workforce on cyber industry security, which is becoming a huge portion of the potential job market. Allowing students to get a head start on education and training around SASE will not only give them a glimpse at how exciting and interesting cybersecurity is but also a solid foundation for a career in the industry.” n Softing expands IIoT gateway for Industry 4.0 integration The smartLink HW-DP allows access to process data from PROFIBUS devices and HART devices connected to PROFIBUS remote I/Os, as well as secure export to any system inside or outside its own network. Users in the process industry who want to adapt their communication architecture to modern IIoT use cases can integrate smartLink into existing plants in a simple and cost- effective manner. Until now, access to data relevant for optimisation processes was possible via HART IP for HART devices and FDT for PROFIBUS DP. The new version V 1.10 additionally provides an OPC UA interface. This means that any HART IP and OPC UA clients, such as Emerson's AMS Device Manager or the Android app DevComDroid, can now be used to configure, monitor and evaluate field devices via these open communication standards. With the new smartLink DTM, FDT/DTM parameters can now also be set for HART devices. n NEWS IN BRIEF www.networkseuropemagazine.com 21Liquid cooling sustainability Energy efficiency and data centre waste heat recovery Businesses are expanding the traditional definition of shareholder ROI to not only incorporate sustainability goals but to use sustainability as a means to improve their bottom line. For example, this year in Europe, 88% of companies are planning to increase investments into digital processes and sustainability practices compared to 58% in 2020. In the data centre industry specifically, a recent Schneider Electric survey with the 451 Group interviewed more than 800 global data centre operators and found that 97% of providers’ customers are asking for contractual sustainability commitments. Sustainability is no longer “nice to have”, but a “must-have” business requirement. The worldwide data centre industry has managed to hold steady at 1% of global energy demand in spite of internet traffic increasing 12-fold since 2010. Much of this has come from the shift to cloud and hyperscale environments, but more will need to be done as data centre demand continues to grow. The challenge now becomes where to find additional sustainability gains. Liquid cooling offers data centre operators the opportunity to reduce infrastructure energy use, improve PUE, capture and reuse waste heat, and meet sector targets to be net-zero carbon by 2030. A recent Cundall report assessed the performance and energy efficiency of liquid cooling approaches and found that with liquid cooling, carbon emissions could be reduced by around 11% per kW of ITE power, per year. This is against best-in-class air cooling in hyperscale, it follows that the vast majority of the world would see 2x, 3x and in some cases even 4x savings above that level. For a typical 150MW hyperscale data centre consuming approximately $200 million worth of electricity per year, that is $22 million in savings. With environmental, social and governance (ESG) objectives at the forefront of many organisations' business goals for 2021, it’s clear we are in the midst of a transition to a low-carbon economy. While as a society we recognise the urgency of the climate crisis, both the ecology and the economy of the situation are beginning to take hold. David Craig CEO Iceotope liquid cooling www.networkseuropemagazine.com 22stainability gains ntre waste heat recovery liquid cooling www.networkseuropemagazine.com 23The first place most people look to is power and water efficiencies. Cooling power can be more than 35% of a data centre’s total energy consumption and in 2020, US data centres alone consumed an estimated 174 billion gallons of water. It makes sense to address those two key areas first. However, several other areas tend to get overlooked but are equally as important and impactful to overall sustainability. Let’s explore density, supply chain and heat recapture/reuse in more depth. Density Contrary to accepted data centre colocation best practices, the industry is likely to see a trend towards smaller data centre footprints moving forward. This is being driven by a few factors, all of which have an impact on sustainability. First are the costs of new construction. New building construction impacts the environment through land opportunity cost, natural resources used, materials for building, as well as waste production and disposal. There is a carbon footprint for every extra square foot of a building that wasn’t there before. In addition, certain countries and municipalities are facing growing pressure to refuse new data centre builds. Whether due to political or environmental concerns, the move to repurpose brownfield buildings begins to make more sense in a post-pandemic era. Repurposing office blocks no longer being used to the same capacity is a very smart alternative. Construction costs are reduced and the time to launch the data centre site is faster. Both have a strong economic benefit in addition to the environmental one. Finally, the move to edge computing is changing the way we process data. A quote from Gartner is that ‘the data centre is no longer the centre of the data’. We see that occurring with new and emerging workloads happening in any location. Compute is being processed closer to the user than ever before. This will continue the drive for smaller footprint solutions that maintain the same level of data centre density without sacrificing energy efficiency. Supply Chain Accountability for the supply chain is becoming an imperative sustainability metric. Last year Microsoft announced a net negative carbon strategy that included plans to see their suppliers reduce their scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, a first for the industry. For the entire industry, the ability to remove volume, materials and movement is only going to gain prominence. Immersion liquid cooling has a role to play in that process. With a sealed chassis, all the server components are cooled using precision delivery of dielectric coolant. Dielectric coolant is a byproduct of the carbon process. When well maintained, it does not break down easily, which enables it to be recycled for several life cycles and can outlive the ITE it is cooling. Liquid cooling also reduces the overall data centre space for a given IT load by eliminating the need for hot and cold aisles. The physical space of the server is scaled back, and as a result, so too is the number of components in a data centre operator’s supply chain. Thousands fewer chips, motherboards, power supplies - and all the individual electronic pieces that make up that equipment - can be eliminated when the server footprint is reduced. The push towards supply chain sustainability also coincides with the fact that high-performance computing, and its higher density CPUs and GPUs continue to strain traditional air cooling methods. A recent ASHRAE report highlights a 20% increase in the power requirements of servers from HPC workloads. Air-based data centre cooling systems are being pushed beyond the limits of their capabilities and effectiveness. As well as powering the HPC ITE, the increasing energy required to air-cool HPC IT environments is becoming unsustainable and costly for a data centre operator. Heat Recapture and Reuse Among the stories making headlines are towns and villages where homes are heated by data centre heat waste, and liquid cooling provides unique capabilities to make this happen. Typically, a data centre environment is cooled using chillers to blow air through hot and cold aisles, not the most effective solution for heat recapture. Immersion cooling technologies use liquid to cool the servers. They are able to do so at a higher temperature, around 50°C, and are a thousand times more effective at retaining Certain countries and municipalities are facing growing pressure to refuse new data centre builds. Whether due to political or environmental concerns, the move to repurpose brownfield buildings begins to make more sense in a post-pandemic era. liquid cooling www.networkseuropemagazine.com 24and transferring the heat. The heat then becomes an almost immediately useful byproduct by being at the right temperature, in the right format and easily transportable. Challenges remain in implementing heat reuse. Data centres tend to be located outside of towns and cities and not where homes are located. Storage technologies still need to be improved so that any surplus gains achieved during the summer, for example, can be effectively stored and used during the winter to heat homes. Finally, the process of converting heat waste to electricity still needs to be refined. However, heat recovery and reuse is a massive imperative given the net-zero initiatives being established throughout Europe and around the world. As part of the UK’s initiative, we will see the elimination of gas boilers to heat homes, increasing the urgency for alternative solutions. This also brings an economic opportunity to drive growth with sustainable energy. The local data centre can create data, jobs and revenue for a community. If it can also convert heat energy for use in homes, then there is an opportunity to create a sustainable circular economy that gets us to net- zero carbon even faster. Implementing and capitalising on the sustainability gains outlined here requires leadership and vision. The data centre industry was built upon an engineering mindset, which has been necessary and taken us far. To carry us forward, we need to be aware of the increasing impact of data. A moral argument can, and should, be made to use technology to stimulate economic growth while causing the least amount of harm to the planet. This shift to a low carbon economy requires new ideas and solutions to address the problems and leaves no excuse for non-sustainable technology. The time has come for us all to determine how to play our part in making this happen. n liquid cooling www.networkseuropemagazine.com 25fibre optics www.networkseuropemagazine.com 26Robert Merki CTO R&M Broadband networks require electrical energy. The data doesn’t come into your home under its own steam. Access networks account for 70-80% of the power consumption in this sector. This is often forgotten in everyday life. When broadband connections work smoothly, nobody really thinks about them anymore. But from the central office to the subscriber, electrical systems are working around the clock to deliver data to homes and transfer it back to the Internet. Each appliance indirectly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Two to three percent worldwide Telecommunications services today already consume two to three percent of the energy generated worldwide. Data traffic continues to increase, for example through video streaming or teleworking. Data transmission can account for up to 80% of the power consumption of video streaming. So, is broadband provision at odds with climate protection? Not in the case of fibre optic cabling. A report from the German broadband association BREKO from January 2021 states that based on energy consumption per bit rate, copper-based networks (VDSL2 vectoring, super vectoring) consume up to 17 times more electricity than full-fibre networks. Unbeatable energy efficiency. BREKO published this alongside EuropaCable and the FTTH Council Europe. The report is based, among other things, on a study conducted by TH Mittelhessen University of Applied Sciences, in May 2020. More powerful than copper Fibre optic networks require virtually no electricity to travel from the PoP to the subscriber. At the same time, they are able to transfer more data faster over longer distances to the most remote places. FTTH networks could even accommodate the data traffic from 5G antennas around them if they were configured for this purpose. Power consumption plays a role for broadband providers not only for climate protection reasons but also for cost reasons. The industry consultants at WIK Consult have calculated that switching off copper saves 60% of energy costs. BREKO also added that fibre optic networks are more reliable than copper-based alternatives with fewer service interruptions, fewer failures and lower maintenance costs. This, in turn, saves energy. It should also be noted that according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the overall energy intensity of the data networks is halved every two years. What remains is the power consumption of the subscriber devices, whether routers or TVs. Their energy efficiency increases 2.7-fold each year. n When it comes to protecting our atmosphere, fibre optics is a good choice. The CO2 emissions caused by modern broadband provision can be curbed with Fibre to the Home (FTTH). Fibre optics for the climate fibre optics www.networkseuropemagazine.com 27The promise of a fully deployed 5G network comes with high expectations, as it will play a critical role in enabling exciting applications and services for industries and consumers across the globe. Andreas Sila VP Market Management Data Center HUBER+SUHNER Autonomous driving, real-time gaming, augmented reality, Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things are just a few examples of applications that are driving the need for optimum performance and connectivity. To avoid the applications experiencing critical connectivity delays or interruptions, 5G must offer ultra-low latency and high bandwidth capacity to process data in real-time. To match the performance expectations of 5G applications, the network needs both centralised large-scale data centres and small de-centralised edge data centres (EDCs), which are located much closer to end-user devices. Gartner expects that more than 15 billion IoT devices will connect to the enterprise infrastructure by 2029. By avoiding lengthy data transmission routes between applications and 5G networks, the data can be processed at a faster rate using EDCs to provide connectivity that consistently offers low-latency and high bandwidth. While a couple of seconds delay during video streaming is not usually an issue, any delay is unacceptable for critical applications, such as stock exchange financial transactions. The challenges of being on the edge Being at the network’s edge is a high- pressured job, as high performance is expected with very limited space to play with and in a standalone location. The definition of an EDC is an enclosure or space that contains facilities for networking, computing, storage and access. Higher capacity, lower latency and reduced network costs can all be enabled by moving computing and data storage closer to the end-user. To enable fast, remote operations, an EDC that is built to perform to its maximum potential requires thoughtful planning and high-quality solutions. As small, containerised data centres that are deployed in a remote location, EDCs need to Edging closer to 5G with edge data centres edge data centres www.networkseuropemagazine.com 285G entres edge data centres www.networkseuropemagazine.com 29Next >