The continuously growing numbers of users sharing a network, use of advanced applications (i.e. internet-based applications, video communication), faster desktop PCs, and faster network servers, all of which contribute to traffic congestion, are creating a dire need for networks to support gigabit transmission speeds. This insatiable need for faster and faster transmission speeds is forecast to continue gathering momentum as businesses adopt bleeding edge networking technologies, such as, data warehousing, cloud computing, server virtualization, all of which have immense resource demands i.e. higher storage needs, and bandwidth-hogging applications.

Against this backdrop, the network and data communications equipment market is opening up fast due to rising need for connectivity, new applications based on Internet Protocol (IP) and concerns of business firms for security of business data. The market segments of wireless LAN (Local Area Network) equipment continue to expand, as it provides higher mobility and in turn, a greater flexibility within an organization. In order to make use of faster Ethernet technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet, LAN hardware has begun to shift from hubs to switches, which provide faster inter-connections.

In the Router segment of the market, there is increased demand for the gigabit IP products arising out of the increased use of RAS (Remote Access Servers), VPN (Virtual Private Networks), switching and importance of security issues. However, competitive prices in lower-end product segment are expected to act as a hindrance. The increased need for Remote Access Connectivity, e-commerce, Intranets and Internet, is expected to generate additional demand for greater bandwidth and higher speed in the LAN market. In the communications segment, increasing demand for high-speed connection, greater bandwidth and uninterrupted connectivity increases the growth potential of this segment. Even though analogue modems still hold a major share in the developing countries, sales of ADSL routers and modems have improved substantially in recent years.

The depressed economic climate forced companies to reduce their budgetary outlays, and critically re-evaluate their network operations, and infrastructure during 2008 & 2009. This pruning down of investment outlays to hedge the financial weakness in the market as well as in the balance sheets eroded shipments of networking hardware and software products. Thanks to resurgence in economy and sustained growth in the corporate sector, network spending increased over the last few years and will continue to grow in the short to medium term period, which augurs well for networking equipment and products market.

About 52% of enterprises are planning to increase their network equipment spending in the short to medium term, which augurs well for future of this market. Realizing the benefits of having strong network connectivity, SMBs, which hitherto stayed away from making huge IT infrastructure investments too are gradually increasing their network spending. Healthcare, Financial services, and the government sector will be major target markets for network equipment vendors, as these segments will continue to remain major spenders. Network security, Wireless LAN, VoIP and WAN optimization will be some of the major investment areas in network market.

After witnessing a temporary deceleration in growth during 2009, the world market for Ethernet Switches is back on growth track, thanks to resurgence in deployments of data centers, including using 10-Gigabit Ethernet in modular, Top-of-Rack and blade switches. With data/traffic saddled networks are pouring in 10GbE is increasingly becoming insufficient, and advancements in Ethernet will continue to play an ever-bigger role in handling rising data traffic on the Internet. With the ink barely dry on the newest 40GbE and 100GbE technology standard, potential evolution of 400GbE and 1TerabitE, the next rate of Ethernet speed, is already creating a flutter.

Huge pent-up demand and the growing need among enterprises to upgrade existing networks in order to ease congestion have and will continue to drive demand for both wired and wireless Ethernet switching. Having realized that effective communications among employees and uninterrupted access to IT applications will play a major role in enhancing organization productivity and competitiveness, enterprises across the globe have been expanding their existing network coverage, including mobile access, there by driving demand for efficient network hardware. Europe continues to remain the largest regional market for ICT Networking Equipment and products; Asia-Pacific however is the fastest growing regional market. Switches and Routers represent the most prominent product segments in the global ICT Networking Equipment and Products market.

The research report titled “Networking Hardware and Software: A Global Outlook” announced by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., provides a collection of statistical anecdotes, market briefs, and concise summaries of research findings. The report offers a rudimentary overview of the industry, highlights latest trends and demand drivers, in addition to providing statistical insights. Regional markets briefly abstracted and covered include United States, Europe (Spain, United Kingdom, France, and Germany). Asia Pacific (China, Hong Kong, India, Korea, and Taiwan) Middle East (UAE) and Latin America (Brazil, Venezuela) The report offers a compilation of recent mergers, acquisitions, and strategic corporate developments. Also included is an indexed, easy-to-refer, fact-finder directory listing the addresses, and contact details of companies worldwide.

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Accenture will work with DILA to build a more flexible IT infrastructure to increase access, availability and performance of nationwide public services offered to French citizens. The information will be stored on the country’s first government cloud.

DILA, one of the branches of the prime minister’s central administration, oversees administrative information, legal distribution and public announcements. DILA’s decision to create the G-Cloud enables the government to standardize new services for citizens and administration officers.

“Now is the time to make the cloud real, to provide a real solution with working systems that will help DILA meet the growing needs of its citizens,” said Jerome Vercaemer, managing director of Accenture’s Health & Public Service group in France. “Cloud computing is not a theory. It is a reality that will help streamline operations and help pool government resources.”

The G-cloud will be fully operational by March 2012, he said.

“We are excited by the transition to the cloud. We want to take advantage of all the benefits in terms of cost control, agility and reactivity to better meet new needs,” said Jean-Francois Imokrane, chief information officer of DILA.

Accenture will be supported by three subcontractors, Cisco UCS, NetApp and VMware.

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WAN Virtualization (using Talari's adaptive private networking (APN) appliances) aggregates two or more network connections (e.g., DSL, cable, fiber and Ethernet over copper, etc.) into a single logical network, continuously monitoring the performance of every network path between six remote sites and the firm's head office in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England. Measurements of loss, latency and jitter are used to detect and respond, sub-second, to congestion, for real-time traffic engineering decisions on a packet-by-packet basis.

Since 2005, Whiting & Partners has relied on a Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network with a single DSL-based tail circuit connecting each site. But the MPLS network, with no tail circuit SLA, was consistently unreliable, with sites sometimes going down for a week at a time.

With Talari, the MPLS network is still in place, and a separate DSL connection has been added at each site. "This gives us complete carrier diversity and, with Talari, the resiliency that we were looking for," says Chris Haydon, IT manager with Whiting & Partners.

Most incoming traffic is routed over the MPLS network because of the available bandwidth. However, outgoing traffic is typically directed by Talari over the DSL circuits. Now when the MPLS connection goes down, all traffic is instantly diverted over the DSL circuits, thus ensuring no detectable interruption of business-critical applications.

In anticipation of VDI and eventually VoIP, Haydon has begun converting the MPLS circuits over to a new service from TalkTalk that will provide 10 Mbps Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) to all of Whiting & Partners' office sites. Talari's Mercury T730 and T200 appliances will provide resiliency in combination with these new circuits.

Once VDI and VoIP are deployed, Whiting & Partners will have the flexibility to open a new office much more easily with less cost, according to Haydon.

"Today we'd need a file server and fat client PCs," says Haydon. "In the future, all we'll need is a dumb terminal on the desktop, an IP phone, a Talari T200, and some connectivity."

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"Technologies like virtualization, cloud computing, social networking and energy efficiency present companies with major opportunities to develop their businesses -- even in difficult economic times," said Todd Johnson, vice president of data recovery operations, Kroll Ontrack. "However, despite all the enthusiasm for these developments, it is important to keep one eye firmly fixed on the associated risks. Just as with any other technology, data loss can never be completely prevented, and businesses should be prepared for these incidents before they occur."

In 2012, virtualization will continue to evolve and spark a variety of other trends, predicts IT analyst firm Gartner. Without a doubt, virtualization provides more flexibility and hardware independence; however, the risk of data loss remains. Even in the virtual world, information is still stored on a hard or tape drive. Hardware independence does not therefore eliminate the risk of hardware failure, operating errors or insufficient employee training. Rather, companies should make sure they adjust their information management strategies for newly adopted technologies and their associated risks as well as know that expertise and specialized tools can result in a successful data recovery from these complex infrastructures.

Companies will also continue to increase their use of cloud computing in 2012. According to a report recently published by Cisco Systems, cloud-related network traffic is increasing by 66 percent each year. In 2010, there were 130 exabytes of data flowing through cloud networks, and if Cisco's predictions are correct, by 2015, this will increase to 1.6 zettabytes. Although cloud computing offers optimized storage that is not connected to a specific infrastructure, this technology still relies on hardware components and is consequently not immune to data loss. Cloud service clients should therefore work with their provider to understand what safeguards are in place in the event of data loss. A sound and tested disaster recovery plan with an experienced data recovery provider denoted is imperative for any cloud service.

Social networking tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are increasingly being used by companies for marketing, recruiting and information sharing. While there is tremendous value in harnessing this collective information, organizations can't overlook how to protect it. Higher levels of human interaction equate to increases in storage volume and consequently the probability of data loss and data security vulnerabilities. Organizations therefore need to make decisions regarding if and where this social networking content is physically stored and how this information can be protected.

The growing bring-your-own-device trend also presents businesses with new challenges, as privately owned mobile phones, tablets and laptops may not be sufficiently secured. Without a concise back-up strategy for personal devices, valuable information may be lost if the personal device is damaged or stolen. Further, proprietary data could remain on the personal laptop or iPad(R) when the employee leaves the company. Companies need services that can retrieve data from damaged devices when necessary as well as professional solutions to securely delete data without damaging the device itself.

Flash storage drives and solid state disks (SSDs) in particular offer greater storage capacities and are falling in price. As flash and SSD technology become more widespread, the amount of critical company data stored on them will also grow. Users therefore need efficient ways of recovering data from flash media and SSDs. Standards have not yet been established, so manufacturers have developed their own versions of the technology. As new products hit the market quickly, data recovery engineers will have to stay up-to-speed with the necessary tools and technologies to successfully retrieve data from flash and SSDs. For flash and SSD users, this means that regular backups are even more important.

Finally, 2011 data breach stories and countless spot checks have shown time and again that confidential data has been and continues to be easily retrieved using relatively simple methods. As new technology is adopted in 2012 and older corporate and end user technology is discarded or donated to charitable institutions, organizations and consumers alike must develop strategies for securely deleting data before passing them on. This applies to all mobile devices, laptops, virtual infrastructure, USB sticks, archive volumes and memory cards that are discarded, donated or resold on the second-hand market.

"Kroll Ontrack data engineers specialize in these issues and regularly help organizations and home users with recovering lost or damaged data and advising them on data management strategies," said Johnson. "We continually invest in creating current proprietary tools and technologies to address the latest technology developments and use trends."

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“CiRBA’s Control Console is the brain for new school data centers, giving an unprecedented level of control over virtualized infrastructure,” said Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO, CiRBA. “The ability to know precisely where to place workloads and how to allocate resources enables organizations to run leaner data centers and achieve their financial objectives for virtualization and cloud computing. CiRBA has removed the guesswork from operations by providing answers according to an organization’s operational policies and workload requirements. For the first time, infrastructure managers know exactly what needs to be done to operate efficient, worry-free virtualized infrastructure.”

“CiRBA Version 7.0 enables infrastructure owners to quickly and easily understand what is going on in virtual and cloud infrastructure and what they need to do to improve the current and future state of operations,” said Rachel Chalmers, Research Director Infrastructure Management for 451 Research. “CiRBA just gets visualization in a way that other companies don’t.”

Having Just the Right Amount of Infrastructure
Most organizations today combat risk in virtualized infrastructure by over-provisioning. Excess capacity and overly-conservative allocations create a costly buffer zone that erodes the ROI of virtualization and clouds. CiRBA’s Control Console reveals whether or not VMs, hosts or clusters have “Too Little Infrastructure” (resources in the red band), “Too Much Infrastructure” (resources in the yellow band) or are “Just Right” (resources in the green band). This provides a simple means of understanding what is at risk, what is inefficient, and where action needs to be taken. Infrastructure managers use the Spectrum view and explicit actions provided by CiRBA to work toward a simple goal of moving all of the entities in an environment into the green. This powerful management paradigm radically changes the way infrastructure requirements are viewed and managed, highlighting waste and inefficiency and the steps required to address these issues in a way not previously possible.

Predictive Analytics
Users can also see an environment’s status and requirements over time by leveraging historical, current and predictive views through the Control Console. The predictive analytics incorporate “Bookings” to reserve capacity for new workloads and hosts coming online (or systems leaving the environment) so that a comprehensive, forward-looking view is provided. This helps to ensure enough capacity is budgeted and the guesswork of determining future requirements is eliminated. The Action System in the Control Console leverages these analytics to provide users with details and automation options for workload placement changes, resource allocation changes and capacity changes recommended to optimize an environment.

Comprehensive Policy-Based Control
Only CiRBA’s analytics model an organization’s business and operational policies so that requirements for SLAs, regulations, DR, HA, and other critical criteria are reflected, measured and complied with to ensure low risk, highly actionable answers. Policies effectively form a “contract” that ensures the safe operation and appropriate placement of workloads. With Version 7.0, CiRBA has delivered a powerful new Policy Manager so that organizations can easily apply, tune and control policies.

CiRBA Version 7.0 ships with six standard policies based on best practices that are easily configured and applied through the Policy Manager. These policies include Production Critical, Production IT, Production Cloud, Production Batch / HPC, Pre-Production, and Dev / Test. Settings available through these policies relate to guest density, guest performance, availability, placement volatility, operational windowing, resource reclamation, compliance and automation.

“With increased adoption of shared resources in today’s IT environments, organizations simply cannot address the complexity introduced by workload mobility, dynamic resource allocations, and the need for agile decision-making using existing monitoring and capacity management tools,” said Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO, CiRBA. “It is only by leveraging predictive analytics that understand all of the workload requirements, constraints, patterns and policies, and using this to guide and automate workload placement and resource allocation, that organizations will achieve their goals of reduced infrastructure costs and increased agility.”

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Service Desk 7.5 introduces its browser interface, LANDesk Web Desk, on a mobile platform. LANDesk Mobile Web Desk provides IT support staff and management with the capability to access service desk functions via a smart phone or tablet device, so that they can maintain the same level of availability and support end users have come to demand while away from their desks. LANDesk Mobile Web Desk ITSM process-handling capabilities are unlimited in that they allow staff to work with any process in any window. Mobile Web Desk is available across multiple platforms.

"We wanted to address the fact that service desk managers are increasingly mobile," said Steve Daly, CEO, LANDesk Software. "With the Mobile Web Desk functionality of 7.5, they can review service desk information or authorize requests regardless of location or the type of mobile device they may be using, ensuring that end users will receive the continuous, instantaneous support they are increasingly requiring in today's always-on workplace."

LANDesk Service Desk 7.5 also includes an enhanced version of LANDesk Management Information. This functionality provides a graphical trend view of key data metrics generated using service desk data, along with external data sources, so IT managers can track the progress of Key Performance Indicators and service performance over time to ensure alignment with business goals. This information can then be pushed out in chart form across the business to all Service Desk web interfaces, including mobile, so that senior management can gain a rounded view of performance on their smartphones or tablet devices and in turn, make more informed business decisions.

In addition to the new mobile functionality provided by Mobile Web Desk and the enhancements in Management Information, LANDesk Service Desk 7.5 also takes advantage of a popular self-service capability, the shopping cart. Recent studies indicate that as younger generations enter the workforce, they prefer to troubleshoot IT needs themselves, while older generations would rather call a service desk staff member on the phone. As baby boomers retire and the workforce becomes increasingly younger, this is a preference IT managers will need to address. With the new shopping cart functionality built into the LANDesk Service Catalogue, employees are given web-based, self-service capabilities provided through a consumer-style shopping cart feature that allows them to add a request (or multiple requests) to their shopping carts and checkout. With the Service Catalogue shopping cart, employees can now enter multiple requests at a time, review their requests before submitting and cancel requests. In addition, even when multiple services are requested through the cart selection, they can still follow their own unique fulfillment processes. This feature allows short-staffed and under-funded service desks to reduce call volumes and provides end users with the consumer style "self service" function they are increasingly demanding.

With Service Desk 7.5, LANDesk is furthering its position as a leader in service desk best practices. LANDesk is also announcing that it is one of just four service management vendors to have recently achieved PinkVERIFY v3.1 status from Pink Elephant for all 15 ITIL v3 processes. Developed by the UK government and used by thousands of organizations around the world, ITIL has become the de facto standard for IT best practices and assists organizations in providing the necessary framework for IT service management.

Additional Features of LANDesk Service Desk 7.5 Include:

• New Installation Administration: Enables SaaS hosts and private cloud administrators to spin up and configure multiple instances of Service Desk through a single control panel
• Enhanced Default Design: Default out-of-the box design now provides an even faster time-to-live route based on customer best practices
• Extended Concurrent License Monitoring: Users can now track and manage the use of their concurrent licenses alongside their named license models for maximum accessibility
• New Localization: Already available in English, French, German, Russian and Portuguese, Service Desk 7.5 extends reach to end users in Japan with Japanese language functionality

LANDesk Service Desk 7.5 is available today.

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Nadine Routhier, vice president of Telecom and Technology, NCR commented, “IT requirements are changing dramatically making the underlying network ever more critical. With the breadth and depth of our expertise in delivering Cisco Unified Computing Systems, NCR is able to help meet significant market demand for cloud computing services from telecom carriers and enterprises across the fast growth MEA region.”

The Cisco Unified Computing System unites network, computational, storage access and virtualization resources in a single energy-efficient system that can reduce the costs and complexity of information technology (IT) infrastructure. It combines a “wire once” unified fabric with an industry-standard computing platform to optimize virtualization, reduce the data center’s total overall cost and provide dynamic resource provisioning for businesses that are becoming increasingly collaborative, mobile and distributed.

Organizations today are migrating their enterprise application processing to the cloud without having to concern themselves any longer with idle CPUs or unused drive space. By opting to use a cloud service provider, they can access services on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, making this a highly scalable and cost-effective IT strategy.

“Taking advantage of an architectural shift in the data center, Cisco’s new computing model can help customers transform the data center into a dynamic IT environment with the power to increase productivity, improve efficiency and drive virtualization to an entirely new level,” said John Growdon, director, Worldwide Channels Go-to-Market Group at Cisco. “As a Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Authorized Technology Provider, NCR is a member of an elite ecosystem of industry leaders working with Cisco to stimulate technology innovation, augment service delivery and accelerate the market adoption of unified computing.”

To qualify as a Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Authorized Technology Provider, NCR had to meet a number of requirements. These included achieving the Cisco Data Center Networking Infrastructure Specialization and the Cisco Data Center Storage Networking Specialization, as well as demonstrating mature competencies in server, storage and virtualization technologies.

Cisco’s Authorized Technology Provider Program is part of a comprehensive go-to-market strategy for emerging and advanced technologies. The program helps Cisco to define the knowledge, skills and services that channel partners need to sell, deploy and support these technologies.

Cisco predicts IP traffic in the MEA will reach 2 exabytes per month by 2015, at a CAGR of 52 percent. Business IP traffic in the Middle East and Africa will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 30 percent, faster than the global average of 24 percent.

NCR has been a Cisco service partner and integrator for over two decades. It is also among a select handful of Third Party Maintenance (TPM) partners that have a presence in all five Cisco theatres, focusing on Cisco’s advanced networking, Unified Computing System (UCS) and Telepresence™ solutions.

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Before AWS launched in early 2006, businesses would take on the massive capital investment of building their own infrastructure or contracting with a vendor for a fixed amount of datacenter capacity that they might or might not use. This choice meant either paying for wasted capacity or having to worry that the amount of capacity they forecasted was insufficient to keep pace with their growth. Many businesses spent time and money managing their own datacenter or a co-location facility, which meant time not spent on growing their actual business or differentiating their offering for customers. Over the past five years, AWS has changed the way that businesses think about technology infrastructure--incur no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, turn capital expense into variable operating expense, scale seamlessly by adding or shedding resources as quickly as you wish, free up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running your own infrastructure--all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security.

“Many South American customers have been using AWS in existing AWS Regions across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. With the launch of the new South America (Sao Paulo) Region, these customers can now run their applications in Brazil, which significantly reduces latency to end-users in South America and allows those needing their data to reside in South America to easily do so,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “South America is full of innovative companies and with the move into this region we are excited to help even more businesses innovate faster, accelerate their pace of technology delivery, and save money by either migrating their existing systems to the cloud, or starting fresh with AWS-powered environments.”

Orama is a financial institution with a mission of providing better access to investments for all Brazilians. “Today, Orama uses AWS for the majority of our customer relationship systems. In order to achieve our customer satisfaction goals, we need to react with agility, speed and reliability of service,” said Guilnherme Horn, CEO, Orama. “The opening of the South America (Sao Paulo) Region will enable greater flexibility in developing new services as well as help us comply with the needs of the regulations of the financial markets.”

Gol Airlines is one of the largest airlines in Brazil and is using AWS to help provide onboard Wi-Fi service for customers and for automatic communication between airplanes and the onboard content system. “Datacenters are not Gol Airlines core business, so by using AWS, we can focus on innovation, our customers and our business. AWS provides us with easy to use, low cost servers that are highly available, scalable and flexible to help us provide technology infrastructure that is still very new to the airline industry,” said Giselma Silva, Innovation and Products Business Unit at Gol Airlines.

Peixe Urbano is the leading online discount coupon site in Brazil. “AWS allowed us to launch a site with zero capital expenditure that has grown to a top-50 site without having to change our infrastructure or architecture,” said Alexander Tabor, CEO of Piexe Urbano.

R7 is a portal owned by Rede Record and one of the most accessed in Brazil. According to Edson Brandi, Director of Technology R7, “We use AWS in the daily operation of our portal to deliver 100% of static content through our portal structure. Amazon CloudFront [AWS’s Content Distribution Network] provides us with excellent performance in delivering this data to users anywhere in the world, while also making it easy to integrate to other Amazon cloud services that we use, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The infrastructure from AWS is allocated dynamically throughout the day, increasing or decreasing according to our audience. By making use of AWS, we always have the right infrastructure to serve our customers. The launch of the local infrastructure will bring us additional opportunities to increase the speed to Brazilian users in a cost-effective way.”

Dedalus Prime, an AWS solution provider and reseller, is looking forward to providing its services on AWS for their customers. “We believe that the resource elasticity offered by AWS provides the most efficient infrastructure to customers. This, combined with the pay-as-you-go model, will dramatically change the way we think about enterprise IT infrastructure,” said Mauricio Fernandes, CEO, Dedalus Prime.

In addition to a broad base of South American customers, AWS has a vibrant partner ecosystem in Brazil that are building and selling innovative solutions and services on AWS’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure. These partners include: Avanxo, Accenture, CI&T, Concrete Solutions, Deloitte, Dedalus Prime, Dextra, Infor, Genexus, Globant, MPL, Lumis, Oracle, Summa, and Uptodate Consuting. These Independent Software Vendors and Systems Integrators have made or will soon be making their software services available on AWS in the new South America (Sao Paulo) Region, making it even easier for South American companies to take full advantage of enterprise class software on AWS cloud.

Developers and businesses can access AWS services from the new South America (Sao Paulo) Region beginning today, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudFormation.

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"Symantec is committed to providing our partners with early access to our solutions and ensuring they work closely with us to successfully bring them to market," said Randy Cochran, vice president of channel sales for the Americas, Symantec. "We're excited about the upcoming release of Backup Exec 2012 and encourage our partners to test it out and give us their valuable feedback. With Backup Exec 2012, we're confident that our partners can be the backup heroes for their customers."

READ THE REPORT:
"V-Ray Gives Symantec a Competitive Edge Today and Into the Future"

The mainstream use of virtualization, Data explosion and a 24/7 business model have created a significant backup challenge for IT organizations. With the release of Backup Exec 2012 beta, Symantec will help eliminate backup complexity through a single solution that unifies virtual and physical, deduplication, and replication while offering a choice among on-premise software, appliance, or cloud delivery models that best fits an organization's needs. No other single vendor provides this level of choice for customers and partners.

"The fragmentation of backup into different solutions for virtual, physical and deduplication has created one of the greatest risks to effective data protection for businesses of any size. A new approach is needed to ensure recoverability, reduce complexity and save management costs," said Amit Walia, vice president of Backup Exec product family. "Symantec is taking the lead to go beyond vendors that can only solve one piece of the data protection puzzle. This is why Symantec is most frequently compared to by other industry vendors that make grand claims to solve the problem, but deliver only part of the promise."

Backup Exec 2012 Partner Beta release will deliver the following benefits:

• Unite Virtual and Physical:
  Powered by Symantec V-Ray technology, Backup Exec 2012 beta enables visibility across both virtual and physical environments for fast and efficient backup and recovery while eliminating the need for specialized point products. Backup Exec 2012 beta will also provide true single file recovery, deduplication and backup management for VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers in a single product enabling significant storage and management savings.
• Eliminate Backup Complexity with a New Administration Console:
  A newly redesigned administration console will provide users with fast, concise management and monitoring capabilities. The new user interface will also automatically configure the most common and successful policies and settings, drawn both from Symantec's many years of experience and from the Backup Exec community, to allow for quick configuration of systems and protection of data and applications with minimal effort.
• Integrated Disaster Recovery:
  With bare-metal disaster recovery and Backup Exec's "no hardware DR" built in, organizations will be able to easily recover a failed system to a physical server, or to a Hyper-V or VMware guest. Backup Exec's powerful recovery capabilities enable granular restore of entire virtual machines, single files, Active Directory objects, Exchange Emails, or SharePoint Documents from any single-pass physical, VMware or Hyper-V backup.
• Capacity Licensing:
  New capacity licensing model for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), mid-sized and lower enterprise organizations will provide easier purchasing and maintenance by capacity as an alternative to existing a la carte pricing.
• Small Business Edition:
  In three simple and quick steps, Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition beta will install and configure backups so small businesses with limited IT experience can protect their data with ease. The beta version of Backup Exec Small Business Edition will bundle Symantec's data and system recovery technology into one affordable solution with a single license that's designed specifically for a growing business.

Partner Beta Registration and Availability
Symantec encourages its global partner ecosystem consisting of more than 60,000 members to download and evaluate Backup Exec 2012 beta version to experience the product first-hand and see how they can help their customers unite physical and virtual. The beta program is now open for all Symantec channel partners and the new versions will be generally available to the public for purchase the first half of calendar 2012 through Symantec's worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors and systems integrators or directly.

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"The digital industry will be an important addition to our town," Mayor Karl Petersen told AFP.

With a population of 74,000, Luleaa has long been home to Sweden's thriving steel industry, with one of the world's leading producers, SSAB, based there. It is also a key hub for the mining and pulp and paper sectors.

In October, Facebook announced it had chosen the Swedish town for its first European data centre, and third globally, in large part because of its "suitable climate for environmental cooling (and) clean power resources."

The icy region, located on the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska, was especially attractive due to its climate, "since cooling (computer) servers is a major issue for data centres," Facebook said.

The company is expected to pump between three and five billion kronor (326-543 million euros, $440-734 million) into the data centre, creating 300 new construction jobs for the next few years and then 50 to 60 permanent jobs, Petersen said.

"This is the biggest single investment in Luleaa since the steel plant was built in 1940," he added.

He hopes the data centre will put Luleaa on the map, attracting other businesses to the region dubbed the "Node Pole."

"Talks are already underway" with a few companies, he said.

"Facebook is one of the world's biggest brand names ... Awareness about the town of Luleaa will increase and that means a lot.

"We have a very modern steel industry, we're a very industrial town and we have the Luleaa University of Technology. So we have a lot of competence and research here," Petersen said.

In Sweden's sparsely-populated far north, "we're a big town with a lot to offer and a varied labour market ... Our local economy is doing well, we have a strong birth rate and new people moving here all the time," Petersen said.

One of the main reasons Facebook selected Luleaa was that the data centre could run primarily on renewable hydropower.

The Lule river that runs through the town supplies Sweden with nine percent of its electricity and has proved a stable energy source for the town's industries for decades.

The data centre will consist of three server buildings each covering an area of around 28,000 square metres (300,000 square feet).

The first building is already under construction and is expected to open for business in mid-2013.

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