New research commissioned by Brocade(NASDAQ:BRCD) has revealed the information that enterprises are being restricted by legacy network resources, requiring them to say "goodbye" to yesterday's infrastructure and challenge the status quo on how to architect their data centres for the future. While many enterprises (75 per cent) have invested in the network over the last three years, a staggering 92 per cent of senior IT Decision-Makers (ITDMs) feel that their infrastructure is not agile enough to deliver robust and scalable services to stakeholders or support next-generation applications.
To further highlight the challenge facing these organizations, more than a quarter of respondents admitted to having to take remedial action on network outages several times a week, if not daily, while almost a fifth of respondents candidly stated that their network was not fit for purpose, suggesting that the legacy network is in need of change.
"The fact that legacy networks are not able to meet the evolving demands of modern business is not necessarily news, but what is concerning is the scale of the problem. Over the last ten years, the way we interact with data has evolved beyond anyone’s expectation. Billions of connected devices are overloading global networks with requests every second, and users demand always-on, instantaneous access to applications and services," stated Jason Nolet, Vice-President, Data Center Switching and Routing, Brocade.
Many enterprises are beginning to meet this challenge head-on. Acknowledging that their current networks cannot scale to meet short- to mid-term business needs, more than half of senior ITDMs are either actively evaluating Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies or plan to do so in the next 12 months. Users believe that a software-based approach will deliver improved uptime and availability, better access to real-time information and increased productivity, so they are looking to re-engineer their environments to help them on the journey to SDN. As such, 65 per cent of respondents are actively using (or evaluating in the next year) Ethernet fabric architectures in a bid to manage their current cost, complexity and reliability challenges while building the robust physical infrastructure needed for SDN.
