Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F

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1 Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F W H I T E P A P E R I B M P o w e r S y s t e m s a n d T h e i r S u p p o r t f o r B u s i n e s s R e s i l i e n c e i n C h a l l e n g i n g I T E n v i r o n m e n t s Sponsored by: IBM Jean S. Bozman April 2012 Randy Perry E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y The global business environment is becoming increasingly competitive, and IT organizations must deliver highly consistent, secure, and available services to support business functions on a global basis. They require what IDC refers to as business resilience, the ability to deliver high levels of availability while protecting the business against outages or other business continuity issues. Downtime can be highly disruptive and expensive to an organization, with cost drivers including lost revenue, reduced employee productivity, reputational damage, and the cost of resources required to address and avoid outages. Most organizations in IDC surveys indicate that even one hour of downtime can have a severe business impact and that businesses are investing in highly available servers and systems to protect business continuity. There are many approaches to providing availability, including duplicating datacenters; investing in reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features for server hardware; and using availability and clustering software. However, most IT organizations surveyed by IDC indicate they prefer to have availability provided at the hardware level. This approach protects business resilience following initial server installation, regardless of the deployment details. IBM Power Systems, based on IBM POWER7 processor technology, provide high performance and reliability in a server system that supports multiple operating environments and can be deployed in multiple form factors, ranging from blades to high-end supercomputers. They incorporate RAS features at the chipset, server, and software levels and are designed to provide high levels of availability, utilization, and resilience. Power Systems also include features to automate virtualization management and reduce power consumption, which is designed to reduce operational costs for the IT organization and the business it supports. Based on customer studies, IDC has found that IBM Power Systems offer an attractive option for many organizations looking to deploy highly available server infrastructures. IDC has spoken with customers that have moved workloads from x86 platforms to IBM Power Systems, based on IBM POWER processors, to take advantage of that platform's efficient management, security, and high levels of uptime. In surveys of 17 IT organizations that have consolidated workloads on IBM Power Systems and run them over a period of three years or more, IDC found that downtime for the migrated workloads was reduced by as much as 84% compared with the previous deployments.

2 S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W Mission-critical computing has become crucial to the enterprise, particularly given the 24 x 365 operations of today's global organization. IT organizations must deliver consistent, highly available, and secure business services to end users and end customers, wherever they may be located around the world. Given the continuing news about natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes and of widespread power outages and network outages, the task of planning for IT disruptions and how to orchestrate and manage a disaster recovery cannot be avoided. IDC uses the term business resilience to describe the ability of the IT organization to deliver consistent services to business units while guaranteeing high availability and protecting business processes against outages or other business continuity issues. It is critical for IT organizations to evaluate and consider all of the systems in their infrastructure to ensure that the underlying technology supports high levels of business resilience. It is equally critical for business managers to work with IT organizations toward efficient use of budgetary resources to accomplish the goals of business resilience. A variety of technologies and best practices are involved in this process. First, IT managers must leverage technology features such as component redundancy, memory protection, multipath I/O, and data replication and clustering to ensure that data requests have alternate resources for processing and multiple ways to access outside resources such as storage and networks. Then, they must make sure they have dual power grid feeds for the datacenter, backup power, and multiple connections to the outside world via multiple high-speed networking connections. This white paper examines some of the requirements for delivering resilience and availability in server systems and describes the IBM Power Systems approach to providing business resilience. T h e H i g h C o s t o f D o w n t i m e Downtime can be unplanned (due to network outages, power outages, or natural disasters) or planned (system downtime for maintenance). Either way, organizations consider downtime to be extremely costly in terms of both time and money and are working diligently to avoid it. In IDC's recent Mission-Critical Workloads Study, organizations reported that even one hour of downtime can have a far-reaching impact. As Figure 1 shows, 48.5% of respondents said that one hour of outage would have a "severe business impact" and another 7.1% rated it a "business disaster." When the two categories are combined, more than 55% of respondents recognize that even one hour of downtime would be excessive. 2 # IDC

3 F I G U R E 1 B u s i n e s s I m p a c t o f a O n e - H o u r O u t a g e f o r M i s s i o n - C r i t i c a l A p p l i c a t i o n s Business disaster (7.1%) No business impact (2.0%) Small business impact (13.1%) Severe business impact (48.5%) Moderate business impact (29.3%) Source: IDC's Mission-Critical Workloads Study, 2011 It is clear from Figure 1 that the majority of respondents consider one hour of downtime to be unacceptable and would work to avoid having that much downtime. The longer the outage continues, the wider the "ripple effect" from the initial outage will be and the wider its impact will be on the entire business organization. Figure 2 shows the IDC Business Value consulting team's estimates of the cost of downtime by industry and plots three key data points against that cost: Revenue loss per hour of downtime (vertical axis) Employee productivity loss per hour of downtime (horizontal axis) Average number of annual downtime hours (size of circle) According to the IDC Business Value data, the financial services industry experiences the greatest impact per hour of downtime with nearly $10 million revenue loss per hour and $3,640 in lost productivity per hour; however, reflective of the amount of attention financial services firms place on their infrastructure, they have the lowest amount of downtime at 3.6 hours per year. At the other end of the spectrum, within commercial industries, is healthcare, with relatively low $157,000 revenue loss per hour and $1,250 productivity loss per hour and the highest amount of downtime at 21.7 hours per year. The public sector suffers the least productivity loss per hour and no revenue loss (by definition), and its 9.4 annual downtime hours are about on par with the annual downtime hours of the retail and manufacturing industries IDC #

4 F I G U R E 2 A v e r a g e A n n u a l R e v e n u e L o s s, P r o d u c t i v i t y L o s s, a n d D o w n t i m e H o u r s b y I n d u s t r y 100,000 10,000 Financial Services ,000 Revenue Loss Per Downtime Hour Log Scale ($K) 100 Healthcare 21.7 Retail 7.75 Manufacturing Public Sector Productivity Loss Per Downtime Hour ($K) Note: The size of the circle representing the industry denotes the average annual downtime hours for that industry. Source: IDC's Business Value Research, Productivity Loss / Hour Revenue Loss / Hour Downtime Hours Financial $3,640 $9,997, Retail $2,580 $397, Healthcare $1,250 $157, Manufacturing $3,060 $59, Public Sector $850 $ Downtime Cost Drivers Downtime can be divided into two categories: planned and unplanned. Planned downtime is usually associated with systems maintenance, which was a common requirement for previous generations of servers. However, the nature of today's global business environment which runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year makes it difficult for organizations to justify even small windows of planned downtime. Unplanned downtime can potentially affect any number of business-critical functions and can occur at any time of day. For this reason, unplanned downtime can have a number of economically costly ramifications for the business, including the following: 4 # IDC

5 Revenue loss. Unplanned downtime is felt most directly and immediately when it occurs in revenue-producing, customer-facing systems. As businesses of all varieties automate their business functions, revenue loss from downtime is not limited merely to industries such as financial services and ecommerce; rather, it can be felt in enterprises in nearly any industry. For mission-critical workloads in many large enterprises, the real cost of downtime can often be measured in millions of dollars per hour. Reduced user productivity. Users across an organization, from employees to contractors and partners, rely on IT-delivered services and applications for their business productivity. Downtime can greatly reduce their productivity, and for many knowledge workers, downtime in just the right (or wrong) systems can cause their workday to grind to a halt. Customer disruption and reputational damage. Even when downtime occurs in systems that are not directly revenue producing (for example, if it happens in customer service or support systems), customers can still suffer from the disruption and the damage that can occur to the organization's reputation. Sufficiently provoked, dissatisfied customers can take their business elsewhere, and poor word of mouth can cause future sales to suffer. Resources required to isolate and repair issues. The cost of downtime also extends to the personnel and resources required to find, troubleshoot, and fix the issue. Postmortem analysis must also be completed, siphoning off dozens of hours of productive IT staff time that could be spent on more strategic projects. Overprovisioning of resources to compensate. Many organizations guard against unplanned downtime by overprovisioning server, network, and storage resources; building redundancy into their systems; and keeping pools of hotswappable hardware on hand. This is expensive, not only in terms of the additional equipment that must be purchased and maintained but also in terms of the additional staff hours required to set up and maintain that equipment and the extra network and storage resources that must be kept online. R e s i l i e n c e D e s i r e d a t t h e H a r d w a r e L e v e l Many organizations choose to build redundancy into the computing environment, but many approaches can be taken to achieve this goal. One way is to build duplicate datacenters with the ability to provide failover between the two. This can be seen as a form of insurance against natural disasters or outages that might disable one datacenter but not others. Another, less costly, approach is to make sure that each server node is resilient as a standalone computing component. This is particularly important for servers that are running large databases or important enterprise applications that are being accessed by hundreds or thousands of end users. Any downtime for these types of servers would have far-reaching effects across the organization. IDC's Mission-Critical Workloads Study determined that the majority of respondents (59.1%) prefer to have highavailability solutions for their server systems at the hardware level rather than at the software or middleware layer. Embedding RAS features in the hardware platform 2012 IDC #

6 means that less IT staff time will be devoted to one-off customization of software scripts to manage a failover or restart of a critical application on alternate server resources. A third approach is to install availability and clustering software, which ensures that applications continue to run even if they have to be shifted to other servers or to other sites. Usually, this type of software can work with both physical servers and virtual servers, giving the choice of a restart for physical machines or virtual machines (VMs). However, there generally is a short period of failover time for the restart, and the alternate server needs to access the production data, most likely via a switchable, or replicated, copy of that data. D o w n t i m e C o s t E s t i m a t i o n M e t h o d o l o g y The IDC Business Value consulting team's model for calculating the business impacts of downtime and comparing how downtime affects companies across different vertical markets informs this cost of downtime assessment. Customer survey data, gathered and analyzed by the IDC Business Value team, provides the measurements for calculating the way downtime affects a variety of business functions, including IT productivity, end-user productivity, maintenance cost, and revenue. This information has been collected over a period of more than five years from over 3,000 companies in 43 countries and more than 25 industries. I B M P O W E R S Y S T E M S IBM Power Systems leverage IBM's mainframe heritage and experience in building highly available server systems to provide high performance and scalability in a server solution that supports the IBM AIX, IBM i, and Linux operating environments. IBM offers a complete range of Power Systems servers from blade and 2U rack form factors and powerful, scalable standalone systems to high-end supercomputers. Key IBM value propositions around IBM Power Systems include: Virtualization supports high utilization levels. Power Systems architecture is designed to support resource utilization levels of more than 90%, scaling up to hundreds of virtual machines. It also offers flexibility to optimize VM size and service levels. Designed for resilience. Power Systems, by design, leverage a variety of techniques to avoid outages: Redundant components especially in the hardware infrastructure and I/O subsystem are present in the system so that computing can continue even if a single component were to fail. In computational elements, advanced error recovery techniques are used to tolerate or to limit the impact of faults, while the deployment of spare components in critical areas allows migration away from failing components, if needed. These features support very high levels of system availability, in the 4-9s (99.99% uptime) to 5-9s (99.999% uptime) range, within the context of a highly virtualized environment. In addition, Power Systems support nondisruptive upgrades with IBM Capacity on Demand, as well as active memory sharing, expansion, and mirroring. 6 # IDC

7 Designed for availability. IBM PowerHA SystemMirror supports clustering and high availability for both IBM AIX and IBM i environments by supporting the restart of workloads on alternate servers in the event of a component failure or an outage (e.g., power outage, network outage, or outage caused by a natural disaster). The clustering technology automates the failover of applications and databases to other servers if the primary partition or server goes offline. This high-availability solution works with physical and virtual servers allowing failover from a physical machine to a virtual machine, for example. Dynamic energy optimization. IBM was able to achieve four times the performance per core with POWER7 processors than with the earlier POWER5 processors. In addition, POWER7 provides intelligent energy optimization with the IBM EnergyScale and Active Energy Manager features. The Power System 795 also supports a DC power option for greater energy savings. Management with automation. IBM VMControl simplifies virtualization management, and all Power Systems have built-in automation for VM resource management. P o w e r S y s t e m s R e s i l i e n c e F e a t u r e s IBM Power Systems have a number of RAS features designed in to provide high levels of business resilience. These features start with the fact that Power Systems are built on POWER7, the latest generation of IBM's POWER chipsets. POWER7 includes a number of built-in RAS features to provide resilience at the silicon level (see sidebar). In addition, Power Systems servers contain critical RAS features at the server level. All Power Systems servers support redundant/hot-swap fans and blowers, hot-swap DASD/media/PCI adapters, redundant/hot-swap power supplies, and dual disk controllers with a dual backplane. They also support concurrent firmware updates, processor instruction retries, alternate processor recoveries, and storage keys. RAS features supported by higher-end systems (e.g., IBM Power System 780, IBM Power System 795) include redundant service processors, redundant system clocks, redundant/hot-swap power regulators (795 only), hot GX IBM POWER Chipset IBM POWER processor technology is an instruction-set architecture built on open architecture that spans applications from consumer electronics to supercomputers. POWER7 processors, the latest in IBM's POWER family, provide the foundation for all of the productionlevel Power servers ranging from volume-level entry servers (Express 710 and 720 servers) to midrange (Power 740 servers) and high-end servers (Power 795 servers). POWER7 systems are designed with workload-optimizing technologies, such as the Intelligent Threads technology that dynamically switches the processor threading mode to deliver optimal performance for different workloads. The TurboCore mode in POWER7 optimizes the system for frequency and cache utilization that optimizes performance for database and transaction workloads. The Active Memory Expansion mode reduces memory costs by allowing the physical memory of the deployed system to be doubled for purposes of running specific demanding workloads, such as ERP applications. POWER7 systems have built-in virtualization that supports both logical partitions (LPARs) and workload partitions (wpars). The wpars allow workloads to be moved to alternative systems if necessary, including running workloads still be accessed by end users. Workloads can be migrated within a system or to other systems either for planned server maintenance or for purposes of disaster recovery. adapters, dynamic service processor and system clock failover, and hot node add/repair capabilities. These features ensure that organizations can maximize application availability even as they scale to meet changing business requirements IDC #

8 Finally, PowerVM micro-partitioning, available as an option on all Power Systems servers, provides the ability to run up to 10 partitions per server core and to dynamically move processor, memory, and I/O resources between partitions to support changing workload requirements. Active partitions can be moved between servers, reducing the amount of downtime for planned systems maintenance. IBM AIX IBM AIX is an open standards based Unix operating system that was designed to comply with the Open Group's Single Unix Specification Version 3. IBM AIX 7.1, the latest version, features new cluster-aware integrations with IBM PowerHA availability software, as well as the ability to run IBM AIX 5.2 Workload Partitions to facilitate application migration and reuse. IBM supports three versions of AIX at any one time, ensuring that older systems are maintained along with newer systems. In addition, IDC notes that AIX is available in three editions AIX Standard Edition, AIX Enterprise Edition, and AIX Express Edition. These editions provide a range of capability and flexibility that addresses the IT requirements of both midsize companies and large enterprises. The three editions of IBM AIX are available for shipment on all of the IBM Power Systems models. Further, multiple editions can be hosted on the same physical server, as long as each version runs within a separate partition. Characteristics of each edition include: AIX Standard Edition. The AIX 6 Standard Edition supports Power Systems with up to 64 cores or 256 threads in a single partition. It covers the widest range of AIX deployments. AIX Enterprise Edition. The AIX 6 Enterprise Edition includes the AIX 6 operating system, the IBM Workload Partitions Manager, and the IBM Systems Director Enterprise Edition combining them into a single product. The Enterprise Edition is aimed at large-scale computing environments that want combined monitoring, automation, energy, virtualization, and network manageability capabilities. AIX Express Edition. The AIX 6 Express Edition provides the functionality of the AIX Standard Edition at lower price points. It is used on systems that have a maximum of 4 cores and 32GB of memory per core within a single partition. It is often deployed on volume servers (priced at less than $25,000) or on blade servers. IBM i IBM i running on IBM Power Systems servers offers a highly scalable operating environment in the context of an integrated software stack that supports business resilience. Designed as a platform to run business applications, IBM i (formerly known as IBM OS/400 and IBM i/os) supports a high degree of granularity and control of workloads via partitioning and virtualization (for server resources and storage resources). This isolates workloads, reducing interference between production workloads and improving uptime. 8 # IDC

9 Virtualization and workload management are built into the IBM i environment to enable businesses to consolidate and run multiple applications and components together on the same physical server system. IBM i provides a fully integrated set of technologies, including a built-in relational database, security software, support for Web services, and advanced networking and storage management required to run business applications. This integrated approach improves system utilization and delivers a better return on IT investments. IBM develops, fully tests, and preloads the core middleware components of IBM i together so that customers can avoid the systems integration exercises that typically accompany installation of new servers onsite. The preintegration and testing of IBM i is a key factor that reduces operational costs through the use of fewer IT staff hours to deploy and maintain business applications. The core middleware is a foundation for running a wide range of business applications on IBM Power Systems running IBM i operating environments. Thousands of IBM i solutions from hundreds of independent software vendors (ISVs) are offered through an extensive worldwide network of certified IBM Business Partners that is complemented by IBM's directly delivered services and support. IBM Power Systems Software, PowerHA, and Tivoli IBM Power Systems Software is designed to help companies fully exploit the performance and management features of the Power Systems servers. It enables organizations to manage both physical and virtual environments. With IBM PowerVM, organizations can run IBM AIX, IBM i, and Linux on a single Power Systems server, enabling organizations to reduce operating costs through consolidation and higher utilization. IBM Power Systems Software also provides the capability to control datacenter energy usage, monitor and maintain system security, and orchestrate processing resources to meet desired business goals. This approach to a unified technology stack, optimizing hardware and software to work well together, improves system utilization, system availability, and flexibility in deployments. IBM PowerHA is a core component of IBM Power Systems Software. PowerHA SystemMirror disk clustering solutions are designed to keep the IT infrastructure and business processes it supports running without interruption. PowerHA SystemMirror is a datacenter and multisite resilience solution that integrates with and exploits operating system technologies in both IBM AIX and the IBM i operating environment. It also is optimized to work with IBM's storage server technology. It protects critical business applications from outages planned or unplanned. The PowerHA SystemMirror solution is designed as an integrated extension of the host operating system (IBM AIX or IBM i), enabling a robust operations environment. Importantly, the IBM PowerHA purescale technology delivers high levels of database scalability and availability and is offered as a component of DB2 purescale. These capabilities allow workloads to move from one server to another if needed for example, to an alternate resource for use in cases of planned or unplanned outages or if the first server becomes too busy IDC #

10 Another key component of the IBM business resilience software portfolio is the IBM Tivoli enterprise management framework, which provides end-to-end management of the datacenter environment, linking systems within the datacenter and between geographically dispersed clusters. IBM Tivoli system automation portfolios and the IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager are key offerings that help manage application availability. Business Resilience Environment and Services Support for business resilience extends beyond the core server. IBM provides an entire ecosystem of business resilience infrastructure components and services designed to ensure continuous availability of critical business applications. The ecosystem's storage and networking components are designed to complement Power Systems installations and promote uptime for applications and databases. IBM also offers a complete line of business resilience management consulting services that build on IBM's Business Resilience Framework to help organizations incorporate best practices in six layers: strategy, organization, processes, applications and data, technology and facilities, and security. End-to-end assessments and engagements offered by IBM's professional services team can help reduce complexity and improve business resilience management visibility into potential risks and exposures. Workload Consolidation of x86 Workloads on Power Systems In multiple studies from 2008 to 2011, IDC conducted interviews with 17 IT organizations that have consolidated workloads from x86 servers to IBM POWER-based systems. This research reveals that unplanned system downtime in these organizations has been reduced by an average of 84%. The combination of reducing the total number of x86 server platforms to be managed and migrating workloads to the POWER platform reduced downtime hours from as much as 120 hours per year to an average of 1.9 hours per year per site, including some customer sites in which downtime was virtually eliminated. The drivers for workload consolidation were clear: Many of the customers that operated both POWER-based systems and x86 server systems decided to move some of those workloads to IBM Power Systems to take advantage of the efficient management, security, and high levels of uptime provided by Power Systems. IDC data regarding workload consolidation has shown that Linux workloads that shifted from x86 servers to Power servers have benefited from the underlying RAS and security characteristics of the Power Systems. As Figure 3 shows, Linux workloads that ran on Power Systems experienced a reduction in downtime, a reduction in the amount of IT staff time spent on maintenance, and an increase in end-user productivity as a result of improved access to business applications and data. IDC notes that most customers in this study will continue to have mixed environments, allowing them to match workloads with platforms. Typically, these decisions are based on customer preferences, IT skill sets, and organizational initiatives. Even so, the workloads that move to POWER-based systems especially for enterprise workloads that demand high levels of uptime and security for business continuity demonstrate business resilience. 10 # IDC

11 F I G U R E 3 C o m p a r i s o n o f R e l a t i v e D o w n t i m e E x p e r i e n c e o f L i n u x o n P o w e r S y s t e m s V e r s u s I n d u s t r y - S t a n d a r d P l a t f o r m Notes: All costs are in thousands and per 100 users per year. Downtime hours per year is the total number of annual unplanned downtime hours per platform implementation. Downtime is the time during which a computer becomes unexpectedly unavailable to users due to system failures, including human operator errors, software anomalies (e.g., operating system failure, application software failure, or general software aging), and failures due to transient or permanent hardware failure. IT staff response refers to the cost (hours times effective hourly rate, at fully loaded salary, divided by hours available per year) incurred for IT staff to handle help requests, diagnose problems, and repair and restore operations. Data is from research interviews in multiple studies from 2008 to 2011 with 17 IT organizations that consolidated workloads from x86 systems to POWER-based systems. Source: IDC's Business Value Research, IDC #

12 F U T U R E O U T L O O K A tidal wave of change is transforming the worldwide market for highly available servers as IT infrastructure evolves to become fully virtualized and to improve availability for workloads running on virtual machines. Drivers include the need to ensure end-user access to critical workloads and the need to preserve business continuity through the high availability of applications running across the server infrastructure. It is increasingly the case that business-critical workloads for which an outage would be considered a showstopper are running on x86 systems. But while x86 systems represent the vast majority of servers shipped today, at 95%+ of unit shipments, they represent only about 60% of server revenue, indicating that high-end Unix systems and mainframe systems continue to be important platforms of choice for organizations to run mission-critical business workloads with extremely high levels of availability. C H A L L E N G E S / O P P O R T U N I T I E S The market for highly available servers and Unix servers is competitive. One of the challenges for any vendor, including IBM, is communicating "what's different" about its product offerings, particularly when many of those differentiators are technical. It is important to translate the technical capabilities into statements about business results. That is increasingly important, as large organizations involve both business and IT managers in the IT systems procurement process. Customers' options for acquiring highly available servers are expanding as a result of the variety of systems leveraging virtualization and cloud computing technologies that augment traditional approaches to achieving high levels of uptime. Older systems rely on traditional approaches such as clustering. IDC studies have found that midsize and large organizations use a broad range of techniques which we call the IDC Availability Spectrum to implement high availability. These techniques include fault-tolerant server designs, the use of availability software products, data mirroring and data replication software, and virtualization workload mobility approaches. IDC believes the opportunity for IBM when marketing its business resilience solutions is to leverage its strengths and history of providing hardware, software, and services that support high availability for data and applications. Overall, it must stress its combined approach to achieving business resilience, which delivers high availability and ease of use at attractive price points. Another opportunity for IBM presents itself in the current trend toward cloud computing adoption. Cloud service providers internal or external need to provide very high levels of availability and uptime, so business resilience becomes an even greater imperative for them. These providers are looking for an infrastructure that is not only highly scalable and secure but also highly resilient. Further, in a cloud environment, the choice of server operating environment is invisible to the end customer so that the decision to deploy will increasingly be results based and linked to service levels, data integrity, and security. 12 # IDC

13 C O N C L U S I O N In an increasingly global business environment in which employees, customers, and business partners need to access critical applications at any time of the day or night, downtime of any type planned or unplanned can be extremely costly. Downtime can start with a small problem and end up costing an organization millions of dollars a day in lost revenue. That's why many organizations are looking for server solutions that offer high-availability features, built-in hardware-based RAS features, and support for disaster recovery to help them maintain business continuity. IBM Power Systems, based on IBM POWER7 technology, incorporate a number of RAS features at the chipset, server, and software levels and are designed to ensure high levels of availability for business workloads. The business resilience features and offerings found in IBM AIX, IBM i operating environments, IBM Power Systems, and IBM PowerHA software provide a comprehensive technical approach that is designed to protect the continuity and availability of business-critical applications and services. C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e External Publication of IDC Information and Data Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason. Copyright 2012 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden IDC #