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Market research firm Infonetics Research released excerpts from its 2013DataCenterand SDN Strategies. The highlights of the study explore the current state of the data center and North American enterprises’ plans to evolve the data center over the next 2 years.
"Physical networks continue to be the foundation for the high-performance connectivity that today’s virtualized applications demand, and our latest data center study bears this out, confirming that investment in data center technologies remains robust as businesses seek to improve application performance, increase security, and reduce costs,” notes Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research.
“Virtualization is unstoppable,” adds Grossner. “With the average number of virtual machines per server hitting 30 by 2015, we look for virtual switches running on general purpose servers to become the new network edge.”
Over three-fourth of enterprises participating in Infonetics’ survey cite “improving application performance” as a top driver for investing in the data center
Survey respondents anticipate that over half the servers in their data centers will be virtualized by 2015
SDN (software-defined networking) passes the “sniff” test: enterprises are seriously evaluating SDN, but most will wait to deploy it until they believe it’s ready for prime time
When asked to name their selection for the top 3 SDN vendors, various respondents named Avaya, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Juniper, Microsoft, Oracle and VMware – with Cisco receiving the most votes
Speed tops the list of important criteria when selecting a fabric for the data center, with 66 per cent of respondents looking at support for 10GE, 40GE, and even 100GE
Increasingly, network equipment is being purchased as part of a data-center-in-a-rack or app-in-a-rack bundle rather than as separate best-of-breed solutions for servers, storage, and networking
The convergence of Ethernet and Fiber Channel (FC) networks using FCoE is going slow, with 46 per cent of enterprises indicating they still plan to increase spending on FC technology
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