According to new research commissioned by Brocade wherein 76% of 600 CIO’s surveyed from EMEA region believed that IT consolidation is key for their enterprises and they are are looking to consolidate their existing IT infrastructure in the next 12 months. Apart from IT consolidation the other two key areas of focus would be virtualisation and security.
The study revealed that the CIOs expect tomorrow’s corporate networks to fulfill a wide range of sometimes-conflicting demands. They want unprecedented scalability but reduced management complexity (61 percent). They demand seamless mobility and increased agility (38 percent), and nearly half want emerging networking technologies to complement the investments they are making today, instead of forcing them to refresh the entire environment in a wholesale “rip-and-replace” exercise, while reducing the total cost of ownership.
“Tomorrow’s networking environment will consolidate user application traffic and storage data traffic onto a single, high-performance, highly available network that has the built-in intelligence to identify different traffic types and handle them appropriately, according to predefined rules. The benefits of a unified network are clear in terms of increasing performance and enabling business productivity, not to mention reducing complexity,” stated Alberto Soto, Vice President – EMEA, Brocade
Network performance is now a critical business driver, with over half of respondents citing reduced productivity (resulting from legacy systems) as having a significant effect on business success. As testament to this, 40 percent of IT departments are now spending between 10 to 30 percent of their time reacting to network downtime instead of investing in business development.
The findings reinforce Brocade’s vision that data centres and networks will evolve to highly unified network architecture. Brocade recently outlined its vision, called Brocade One™, which is based on customer-driven demand for simplified IT architectures and cost reduction, and is designed to optimise data centre networks to support virtual servers, applications and data.
