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Data centres ill-equipped to meet demands of virtualisation and cloud

A global study commissioned by Brocade has revealed that many organisations still depend on antiquated data centre infrastructures, with a significant impact on both productivity and end user experience. Although three quarters of enterprises have updated their IT environments in the last three years, 91 per cent of IT decision makers (ITDMs) stated that their current IT infrastructures still require substantial upgrades to meet the ever-changing and unique networking requirements created by virtualisation and cloud computing.

Further, a third of the survey respondents admitted that their organisations experience multiple network failures each week.

As today’s organisations interact with data and applications constantly, whether it’s video conferencing or accessing database applications on remote devices, the data centre network has never been placed under greater strain. However, 61 per cent of data centre personnel confided that their corporate networks are not fit for the intended purpose, with almost half (41 per cent) admitting that network downtime has caused their business financial hardship either directly ― through lost revenue or breached SLAs ― or from their customers’ lack of confidence.

As business operations, planning and competitiveness increasingly relies on the corporate IT infrastructure, the requirement for a resilient yet agile, high performance data centre network has never been greater ― and is only going to increase.

'Many data centres that exist today are based on 20 year old technologies, and the simple fact is that they can no longer keep up with demand,' commented Jason Nolet, vice president Data Centre Switching and Routing at Brocade. 'Virtualization and cloud models require greater network agility and performance, as well as reduced operational cost and complexity.'

Many forward-thinking enterprises are making strides to deploy more scalable network environments, with 18 per cent already using fabric-based networks, and 51 per cent planning to roll out Ethernet fabrics in the next year in order to support virtualisation plans. Also, many enterprises are looking at deploying Software-Defined Networks (SDN) by 2015.

More than two-thirds of ITDMs reported that they would welcome an on-demand data centre topology. This type of an infrastructure combines both physical and virtual networking elements that can provision the capacity (compute, network, storage and services) required to deliver high value applications faster and easier compared to legacy data centre networks.