Data Center – MEC Networks Corporation

MEC Networks Partners with Hitachi Vantara to Transform Data Infrastructure Solutions in the Philippines

Kait Donieto — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 06:47:06 +0000

We are thrilled to announce our new partnership with Hitachi Vantara, the data foundation for innovation. This partnership marks a significant milestone in our journey to enhance and expand our offerings in the local market, particularly in the areas of data analytics, management, AI, and storage. As we know, data is crucial and can be complex, especially for enterprises managing vast amounts of it. With Hitachi Vantara by our side, we now have the strong support and deep expertise needed to help a wide range of industries succeed. This partnership is a great step toward making data infrastructure easier and more effective for our clients.

Who is Hitachi Vantara?

Hitachi Vantara is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., and is renowned worldwide for its cutting-edge technology and innovative solutions that help organizations across various industries leverage their data to gain valuable insights, improve operations, and drive growth. With decades of experience, they have become a trusted partner for businesses seeking to harness the power of data through its comprehensive portfolio. The company’s commitment to delivering top-tier solutions that address the evolving needs of modern enterprises makes it an ideal partner for MEC Networks.

A Synergy of Strengths

MEC Networks has been a premier ICT distributor in the Philippine market for over 25 years, with a well-established reputation for our expertise in data center infrastructure, particularly in cabling, networking, and wireless solutions. As the demand for advanced data analytics, management, AI, and storage solutions continues to grow, this partnership enables us to expand our product portfolio, providing our customers with a more comprehensive, end-to-end solution that addresses their most pressing needs.

With the addition of Hitachi Vantara’s products and solutions to our portfolio, we are now better equipped to support our customers in building robust, scalable, and secure data infrastructure. Their state-of-the-art storage solutions and data infrastructure are designed to meet the demands of modern enterprises, offering unparalleled performance, reliability, and efficiency.

Mr. Carlo Subido, VP for Business Development at MEC Networks

Mr. Joe Ong, VP and GM for ASEAN at Hitachi Vantara

In his speech during the contract signing, Mr. Carlo Subido, Vice President of Business Development at MEC Networks, highlighted the importance of this partnership in filling a critical gap in our offerings. “We are strong in networking, cabling, and even UPS and electrical systems. However, what was missing in our portfolio was compute and storage solutions. By signing up with Hitachi Vantara, we are now able to fill this gap,” he said. This partnership not only enhances our capabilities but also solidifies our position as a one-stop solution provider for data management and storage needs in the Philippines.

Delivering Value to Our Customers

At MEC Networks, our commitment to our customers has always been at the core of everything we do. We understand that every business is unique, with its own set of challenges and goals. That’s why we don’t just offer products; we provide integrated solutions that are tailored to meet the specific needs of our customers. Through our new partnership with Hitachi Vantara, we are taking this commitment to the next level, delivering even greater value by offering a wider range of solutions that are designed to work seamlessly together.

This new partnership marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for us. By combining our strengths with those of Hitachi Vantara, we are confident that we can deliver unparalleled value to our customers, helping them meet their current challenges and seize new opportunities for growth and innovation.

Welcome to the MEC family, Hitachi Vantara! Here’s to a prosperous partnership for the data-driven businesses and individuals we’ll serve.

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A Recap of the H3C IT Talk at MEC Networks

Kait Donieto — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 07:28:57 +0000

Last week, on August 8, MEC Networks teamed up with H3C for an exciting event at our headquarters—the H3C IT Talk. This one-day gathering was all about exploring the latest tech innovations and sharing smart strategies on how to market these new solutions. It was a great opportunity for us to connect with our partners, explore cutting-edge technologies, and build even stronger relationships with H3C. The event was a fantastic way to learn, grow, and prepare for the future together.

What Went Down in the H3C IT Talk

• Enhanced sales strategies with H3C solutions.

• Explored the benefits of H3C’s HCI through a remote demo.

• Experienced real-world applications with live demonstrations of networks and servers.

Product Highlights

The H3C IT Talk event kicked off with an opening statement that highlighted key H3C products: the Uniserver servers, the CAS virtualization platform, and the UIS hyper-converged system led by Ms. Danna Lapore, Mr. Crishar Tabuada, and Mr. Micole Laduvice.

H3C Uniservers

These servers are designed for intelligent management, enabling them to adapt to various situations with powerful computational capabilities. They are suitable for stand-alone, cluster, or data center scenarios.

CAS (Cloud Automation System)

This virtualization and cloud computing management software is tailored for data centers, offering telecom-grade performance in delivering computing, storage, network, and security virtualization resources.

UIS (Unified Infrastructure System)

The UIS serves as an infrastructure that seamlessly integrates with other H3C products such as CAS, ONEStor, and Sec. It streamlines data center and IT operations, enhances management efficiency, and reduces TCO through the UIS Manager software. The UIS, which leverages HCI servers, is easy to set up right out of the box.

After that, two sales strategies were discussed in the morning session, with presentations by Mr. Rolando Mijares and Mr. Jose Rafael Dimaano. The topics, “V-Vendor Out CAS In” and “HCI Sales Guide,” underscored the importance of a deep understanding of both H3C’s products and its competitors to maximize sales.

In the afternoon, Mr. Mijares led the demonstration segment, which was divided into three parts:

H3C Servers Demonstration

Attendees observed the operating power of H3C servers firsthand.

CAS and HDM Demonstration

The second demo showcased the CAS platform alongside the HDM (Hardware Device Management) system embedded in H3C’s servers. The HDM provides monitoring, management, and security control throughout the hardware lifecycle.

UIS Infrastructure Remote Usage

The final demonstration highlighted the remote usage of the UIS infrastructure.

H3C IT Talk concluded with an engaging Q&A session, followed by closing remarks.

What’s next? Stay tuned for more updates and upcoming events as we continue our exciting journey with H3C!

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CommScope Explains What IoT, 5G, and Smart Cities All Have In Common

MEC Digital — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 07:10:32 +0000

CommScope’s Morne Erasmus explains what IoT, 5G and smart cities all have in common.

Read any tech news story today and chances are high that you’ll see something concerning IoT, 5G or smart cities. These are all hot topics, but did you know all of them have CommScope in common?

To make things “smart” and improve overall efficiency, we connect IoT devices through a network to the cloud (and each other).

Thus, anything “smart” requires connectivity, both wired and wireless, at least in most cases. The 5G networks of the future can bring refined connectivity to these edge IoT devices with higher speeds, more machine-to-machine connections, and extremely low latencies – enabling a brand new generation of applications and use cases that we haven’t yet thought of.

Once we connect all the eyes and ears (IoT sensors) of the world to the data center brain, we can begin generating intelligent information to drive new analytics and services. As well, more processing power is shifting to the edge, with the deployment of MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) moving closer to the particular endpoints and users to enable lower-latency applications.

All of these IoT edge devices and MECs need a home near to the users, that is why we are seeing city streetlights morphing into smart poles.

Streetlights are uniquely spaced throughout the city; they provide power and altitude and are prepared for remodeling with LED replacements. Today, cities are eyeing 2 kinds of smart poles for replacing legacy streetlights:

IoT streetlight pole – A streetlight pole can support public Wi-Fi deployments, environmental sensors, gunfire detection and LED lighting control upgrades. Adding IoT edge devices transforms humble streetlight poles into smart IoT poles.
Telco pole – These are the typical small cell poles deployed by carriers or neutral hosts to support cellular connectivity in dense areas. These poles are designed for connectivity and will play a crucial role in 5G mmWave deployments. By adding IoT devices, simple telco poles become smart telco poles. With telco poles, the connectivity backbone delivering a path between the edge and also the cloud is already established, thereby enabling quicker deployments. Thanks to the larger type factor of small cell equipment, physical constraints should be an early and primary guideline for aesthetic concealment in cities.

It should be noted that smart poles are a part of a smart ecosystem and no single company can go at this alone. We are constantly asked if CommScope has any plans to create IoT sensors, software, apps or services for smart poles and our answer is “no, we need an ecosystem.” put simply, these interconnected products and services require multiple players to work harmonical to offer complex services.

This is why the industry must support an open ecosystem that enables customers to decide on their own edge devices, software, and cloud providers. This is notably important because of the long lifecycle (decades) of public projects compared to typical enterprise (years) engagements. Additionally, regulatory guidelines should also be considered.

At CommScope, we offer the physical layer for smart poles and do that exceptionally well. This starts with the fiber and copper solutions connecting all the racks inside a data center. From there, we offer outside fiber solutions to connect these data centers to the central offices (head ends) for the carriers and to the business/home or macro/metro cell tower. At these endpoints, we usually see the conversion from wireline to licensed or unlicensed spectrum wireless.

These wireless networks also are experiencing constant changes where licensed (4G/5G) and unlicensed (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LoRa, etc.) are commencing to converge. For instance, smart buildings are expected to produce reliable cellular coverage within the building along with ubiquitous Wi-Fi and support for IoT wireless networks. Add the upcoming CBRS private networking play and we shortly realize we are building multiple networks under one roof – all delivering ones and zeros to endpoints. How can all these networks converge in the future?

By providing the connectivity piece in this advanced puzzle, CommScope adds tremendous value to the client. we will still build out our ecosystem so we can provide complete solutions with our partners. So, the next time you read something regarding IoT, 5G or smart city projects, know that we at CommScope are providing the wired and wireless connectivity to make the world even smarter with our #smartcityconnectivity

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Where is the Philippine ICT Heading in 2020?

MEC Digital — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 03:22:14 +0000

Where is the Philippine ICT Heading in 2020?

Philippines is becoming one of the emerging tech regions in Asia as strong public investments are expected to support the country’s economic growth. More than ever, the Philippine Government recognizes the need for strengthening efforts to widen the reach of ICT in the Philippines. In line with this, P5.2 billion is allocated for the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) for 2020 to support its efforts in rolling out interconnectivity and data security programs.

Of the overall budget, P1.1 billion will be used to install free WiFi in public places. Some P280 million will be used to fund free Wi-Fi facilities in state universities and colleges while P196 million will be for the National Broadband Plan.

Furthermore, it is also envisioned that around P295 million is needed on creating the National Government Data Center (NGDC) which will serve as the physical infrastructure that will interconnect government agencies through centralized data centers, servers, and storage facilities.

The Market Potential of ICT in the Philippines

According to the 2015 Frost & Sullivan report, there is going to be a shift in total spending in the ASEAN IOT Market. Singapore, the undisputed leader with 44.25% of total IoT spending, will drop by close to the 50%

Singapore 2015

44.25%

Singapore 2020

50%

while the Philippines share will increase by 12%. This only means one thing, the Philippine IoT spending is forecasted to grow from US $55.1M in 2014 to a staggering US $766.8M in 2020. We are about to see the emergence of Philippine’s ICT Market.

Philippines 2015

12.56%

Philippines 2020

24.65%

Considering that the Philippines is a country with a young population that is in the process of building its ICT market, it is poised at creating a government, as well as companies, that are actively looking for partners in the ICT space.

Key Areas in ICT Development:

Back in 2014, Manufacturing and Logistics has the biggest share of spending in ICT. However, the sectors of banking, healthcare and smart city hold a lot of promise for future investments of ICT.

Banking

In a study done by the World Bank, it is said that 69% of Filipinos did not have bank accounts in 2014. This factor, combined with the rise of online shopping, presents a gigantic opportunity for e-wallet operators in the ICT space, as they could easily claim roughly two-thirds of the Philippine population as potential customers.

Healthcare

Meanwhile, in the latest Philippine Statistics Authority report, health-related expenditures pose an 8.3% increase in total spending in 2018 compared to the previous year contributing 4.6% to the country’s GDP. In effect, the Philippine government has been also actively looking at ICT services for healthcare solutions in an effort to provide a sufficient level of health care, especially to rural areas and spread-out island communities.

Smart Cities and Infrastructure

Smart Cities are an important component in growing digital economies, as it incorporates sustainable growth and deep technological integration into the country as well as giving substantial economic boost. The Philippines have planned for multiple smart city projects that will be launched over the next decade such as the New Manila Bay City of Pearl and New Clark City being the core developments. The New Clark City alone is predicted to contribute an additional USD$31 billion to the country’s GDP.

Factors Driving ICT Spending Increases in 2020

Upgrading Infrastructure

We are all aware that the world of technology is fuelled by continuous advancements. Upgrading ICT infrastructures, which remains to be the main driver of ICT spending increase, is an imperative for businesses because keeping legacy ICT infrastructures can expose your business to risks like system downtimes, decreased productivity, security issues, and increased cost.

Growing Security Concerns

The threat of cyberattacks remains as one of the biggest challenges that the Philippines is facing nowadays. The growing number of aggressive and malicious hackers targeting businesses is not to be shrugged off. A study by Frost & Sullivan states that a large-sized organization in the Philippines can possibly incur an economic loss of $7.5 million, more than 200 times higher than the average economic loss for a midsized organization ($35,000). Organizations should invest in a robust unified threat management system that protects their most valuable assets, data and information.

Employee Growth

The abundance of human and talent resources in the Philippines presents an under-tapped national asset that is ripe for mobilization. Building a thriving ICT ecosystem requires a mechanism to complement this opportunity with a conducive policy and business environment that can optimize productivity and increase competitiveness. For instance, ICT innovations, such as higher broadband speeds first introduced through the BPO sector’s rigorous global requirements, are slowly becoming mainstream requirement in other industries like banking, education, the government, and even at home.

Ready to Get Started?

Ready to
Get Started?

In the end, we at MEC look forward to how the private and government sectors will strengthen the partnership and move past industry boundaries to build on the momentum of digital growth that will promote balanced regulation, empowered innovative endeavors, and boosted competitiveness for inclusive growth of all Filipinos.

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Quantum: The “Chill Factor” in a Secured Backup and Archive Solution

MEC Digital — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 08:55:41 +0000

The topic of data growth and security continues to be a challenge for several organizations. The question to “air-gap” or not to “air-gap” is systematically being posed across all industries as they think about a solid backup and archive strategy. Once it involves how and where to invest, air-gapping becomes the last item on the checklist, and understandably so. Data keeps growing and whereas budgets might increase slightly, IT resources are forecasted to remain flat, according to IDC. With such a big amount of avant-garde technologies out there, it appears tape is shrinking in its usage. However, tape’s distinctive ability (despite its advanced age) to morph into a sustainably green, secure, and extremely cost-efficient alternative to different backup and archive solutions permits it to remain relevant – even over cloud alternatives. I’d say a rebound may be on the horizon…

So what’s the chill factor?

As in weather, the wind chill will verify how cold it feels on your skin once the wind is factored in. Likewise, organizations nowadays should perceive their data to see how hot or cold it’s to leverage the acceptable storage solution that’s efficient yet price effective. Much of the data in additional expensive primary storage is cold. Cold data is just sometimes used data. IDC estimates that about 400th of the 7.5 ZB of data are commercially connected and of that, about 60 minutes are cold data or data with expected retrieval of larger than thirty days. This data may be a good candidate for tape storage in your data center or within the cloud. And hey, cold storage doesn’t need a great deal of power and cooling.

Security

Tape continues to be the de facto to secure your cold storage/long-term data. Fact is, the physical air-gap between tapes and the network merely doesn’t allow malware/ransomware or hackers to break through to reach offline data. The goal of these evil agents is to destabilize and destroy the ability to self-recover and then demand a ransom. We’ve heard several stories and firms withdrawing from business because of the vulnerability of keeping all data online. Whereas any online data is destroyed by an eventual hacker, the data stored firmly on tape is untouched with its integrity intact.

Considering each cost and damage created by these attacks, and the astronomical hit on your resources and valuable time that would be spent on managing important data, there are quite enough reasons to make the best protection of your crucial data on tape. Sure, you’ll keep cold data on hot disk, however, the simplest approach is to tier it off to the foremost cost-efficient alternative – tape. That’s why we extremely suggest the 3-2-1-1 approach to protection. At the end of the day, what matters is “are you able to recover?”. If your data is chilled, there’s no reason to tremble.

Economics

Determining the worth of your data can assist you to perceive the ultimate storage solution needed. Never underestimate the worth of your historical data. We live in a world where our “always online” approach to life opens the door to a barrage of threats. The great news is, economics is on your facet. Tape remains the cheapest price for storage on the market nowadays, and the predictable future. At less than $50/TB, as long as data is preserved on tape, it’ll provide you with a very cheap total cost of ownership (TCO).

Taking these factors into consideration can bring a tiering approach to your backup and archive strategy and enable the right protection approach for the kind of data in need of saving, cooling, and securing.

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Panduit: De-stressing The Data Center Infrastructure

MEC Digital — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 09:52:49 +0000

The IT industry does a wonderful job in advance positioning the next nice innovation. We’ve been simply a step away from the internet of things (IoT) for over 20-years, AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been around for as long as we can remember, and solid-state memory is about to take over from disk drives and tape, speeding access, saving space, energy and resources. Maturity of a technology is mapped using a ‘hype cycle’ idea model, in easy terms… as time moves forward the ‘hype’ becomes reality and ‘quantum leaps’ are ever nearer.

Preparing for tomorrow’s future is crucial for business survival

In data center network communications, multiple technologies are evolving to deliver growth of emerging, data-intensive applications from e-health and media and content delivery, to sensor connected devices and automotive vehicles.

With volumes of data set to grow exponentially, the tactic of gathering, storing, processing, and transmitting across the data center is seriously hindered without an infrastructure that meets latency and bandwidth performance requirements currently, and for the predictable future.

Indeed, once technologies like AI and Machine Learning (ML) become common, individual information sets can run to 100s of terabytes. Meanwhile, M2M data is predicted to outstrip enterprise and personal knowledge within the next 5years. This increase in data traffic is already making bottlenecks among traditional data centers, with each gateway and connection reducing the general performance potential of the system.

With an understanding of the opportunities on the market and also the technologies influencing change we can set up better and prepare our structures to work at the foremost acceptable levels. We can learn from the hyper-scale designers who are planning systems with equipment manufacturers to optimize necessities for use, to draw these aggressive applications into the cloud.

Each of those technological advances reflects the rise of a worldwide digital economy that is making a demand for larger network speed and performance from the internet backbone right into the core of the data center.

Key challenges for the infrastructure network are the ever-growing demand for quicker speed – 10GE, 25GE, 40GE, 50GE and 100GE nowadays, with 200GE – 400GE with expected rollout as early as 2019. In conjunction with new network architectures designed to maximize performance, the physical infrastructure should be designed to enable fast and seamless deployment of the latest switching technologies.

Data bottlenecks can still be a growing issue if infrastructure and data center businesses target short-term fixes. Network infrastructure is as important as data center power and cooling, without appropriate investment it may considerably reduce each life cycle and ROI.

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ChargeUPS: Why Businesses Need A UPS

MEC Networks Corporation — Thu, 16 May 2019 01:45:50 +0000

Power outages caused by utility failure, accidents, and natural disasters such as storms, flooding, or earthquakes are inevitable. There’s very little you can do to prevent any of these from happening, but you can avoid the consequences to your business by using an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS).

What is an Uninterruptible Power Supply?

An uninterruptible power supply is a basic bit of equipment that secures both your machines, your information, and your whole operation. It gives a backup power source if there should be an occurrence of major power disappointments brought about by electrical flow issues, for example, blackouts, brownouts, and power spikes.

Smaller UPS units can ensure singular computers while bigger models can power numerous devices or a whole office. Independent companies can pick individual UPS units, which ought to be sufficient to back up basic computers and different devices that are critical to business congruity.

Advantages of Having UPS

Power outages can harm or totally crush electronic devices, particularly computers and IT infrastructures machines like servers, switches, and surveillance equipment. The surprising shutdown can make incredible harm to your equipment and influence you to lose unsaved information. In today’s digitally transformed work, every company requires a continuously operating and connecting office that never runs out of power. A UPS guarantees you the power to keep you going.

Here are different ways that a UPS benefits your frameworks:

Uninterrupted power flow during power surges

When you have UPS, the voltage that goes from the primary electrical lines to your devices is reliably stabilized. This shields your devices and major machines from power surges, which happen when the voltage in other hardware all of a sudden ascents.

Refined and filtered power supply

It normalizes power levels, so your devices are secured against plunges and spikes, brought about by lightning or an anomalous power supply that generally originates from reestablished power after a blackout.

Instant power during brownouts

An uninterruptible power supply ensures your activities’ continuity. In the case of transient intrusions, it gives you sufficient opportunity to change to a bigger, progressively stable power supply, for example, a generator.

Be that as it may, in contrast to a generator, it gives moment power to your hardware at the definite minute the power goes out.

Does Your Business Need a UPS?

In case you’re acquiring new devices and infrastructure for your company, a UPS is a very important part to include on. Businesses that require constant power to function such as hospitals, banks, academic institutions, manufacturing companies, and any business for which storing and processing data are critical tasks can benefit from uninterrupted power.

This is why we at MEC are now adding new technology expertise under our growing portfolio of solutions to help you keep going through your digital transformation. Learn more about our new Power Solutions Line now and get uninterruptible growth with uninterruptible power!

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