JEDDAH – An overwhelmingly large number of respondents (91 percent) have revealed that they do not believe that their current IT infrastructures are ill-equipped to meet the demands of cloud computing and virtualization, Brocade, a leading networking vendor, said Thursday, revealing the results of its global survey of 1,750 IT decision makers which evaluated the current state of their data center environments. This global trend is especially worrying for businesses in the Kingdom wherein cloud-related IT investments over the next 3 years are expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 49.7 percent according to market expert IDC. Cherif Sleiman, country manager, Saudi Arabia at Brocade Communications, said “Saudi businesses have been known as early adopters of technology and are highly likely to be among the first in the region to welcome cloud computing. The rampant uptake of virtualization is proof of this. However, many of these organizations risk long term failure as only small fractions of their IT budgets are on network spending and this is limited to merely scaling up legacy networks.” “Unless there is a change in mindset and willingness to consider the long term implications, businesses are likely to see long term complications,” he added. Sleiman's concerns are confirmed by the report which states that a third of business experience multiple network failures each week with as high as 16 percent complaining of daily network outages. These are caused largely due to database applications (41 percent), communication tools (30 percent) and Microsoft Office programs (25 percent) as new services such as video conferencing and application delivery to remote devices add to the strain on already unfit networks. Tied in to the concerns of loss of productivity due to downtime, over half of the survey's respondents reported that network failure has either directly or indirectly resulted in financial impact. Sleiman believes that Saudi Arabian enterprises need to invest in purpose-built data centers that offer high flexibility to meet with varying pressures. “In slow periods in the summer months and during Ramadan, businesses in the Kingdom slow down and the amount of data being handled by the network decreases. Corresponding, in peak times, traffic volumes can peak and cause networks to fail. Brocade understands this elasticity which is why we are promoting our On-Demand Data Center strategy. This helps combine the best of physical and virtual networking elements to create a data center environment that helps organization rapidly react to market changes and deploy new services and applications in the most efficient manner possible. We have based our technologies on open standards, thus paving the way for incorporation of new technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) into these networks.” Brocade's focus in Saudi Arabia has been primarily on growing its data center business wherein it has the advantage of being one of only two companies globally with technologies across all four areas - application networking, virtualization, infrastructure and storage. Key to growth of the company's market share will be the uptake of fabric-based technologies. 18 percent of survey respondents already use fabric-based networks, and 51 percent planning to roll out Ethernet fabrics in the next year in order to support virtualization plans. The global further disclosed that on average, enterprises are upgrading their data center networks every two years, but 24 percent wait more than three years before investing in new technology. Seventy nine percent of ITDMs acknowledge that departments within their businesses have deployed cloud-based services, with 13 percent admitting that these actions would have happened with no guidance from IT, it added. Moreover, three-quarters of enterprises have on-premise data centers; 19 percent outsource SDN's benefits are perceived to be increased productivity (42 percent), better access to real-time information (40 percent), improved uptime/availability (38 percent) and increased service delivery (30 percent) Besides, the report said average percentage of servers being virtualized today is 46 percent; by 2015, the goal is 59 percent Network outages last on average 20 minutes, with two percent having to endure outages of more than an hour. More than a third of workers said that outages have caused SLAs to be missed, with customers not receiving goods/services; 41 percent added that this has caused customers to seek recompense. — SG
