EMEA research shows that enterprises are putting the cloud at the heart of their IT strategy, with 48 percent seeing it as key to empowering agility and business performance. As organisations strive to compete in today’s economy, with workers demanding instant access to information wherever they are, the cloud is becoming a critical part of modern business strategy. Supporting this trend are the results from a new research project from Brocade indicating that 48 percent of EMEA businesses are already actively deploying cloud architectures, with more than half of respondents citing business agility as the key driver.
Read More…

Avnet Technology Solutions recently launched its “Storage Academy” in association with HP to educate its channel partners the importance of designing efficient storage solutions and enhancing their skill-sets. With data growing at an explosive rate, storage has become a main component of HP’s Converged Infrastructure model. Avnet took Storage Academy to Kuwait, Riyadh, Beirut, Cairo and was overwhelmed by the large participation of HP Channel Partners everywhere. During the program both Avnet and HP highlighted various techniques that can be used to design an effective storage infrastructure, such as data tiering, thin provisioning, data de-duplication, archiving and backup strategies to protect precious data. Brocade added value to the academy with a presentation about the latest developments in SAN infrastructure. It also covered key topics like cost competitiveness, margins. Another important topic was Storage Virtualization and the advantages of this technology compared to others.
Read More…

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). Read More…