54 Per Cent of IT Administrators Say Their Data Centre Networks Will Have Deployed 100Gb Ethernet by 2016

COSTA MESA, Calif, September 25, 2012 – Driven by a “perfect storm” of technology trends that includes server virtualisation, cloud computing, big data and the convergence of storage and data networks, over half (54 per cent) of all IT departments are being asked to scale their networks to support speeds of 100Gbps by 2016. That is the finding of a new in-depth survey just completed by Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX).

The survey of 1,529 IT leaders across North America and Europe focused on the issues, trends and challenges facing data centre personnel and IT organisations, particularly as they relate to data centre networks. The central theme emerging from the study is that IT departments, including CIOs and IT executives, are genuinely concerned about how to keep pace with the demand for increased throughput on data centre networks:

- 81 per cent of survey participants said that the growing demand for network bandwidth is one of the most critical issues facing data centres today;

- 76 per cent believe that network I/O is the most critical potential bottleneck in the data centre;

- 70 per cent said that improving I/O performance in the data centre was a “high” or “very high” priority; and

- More than half of respondents (52 per cent) said that their need for network I/O increases by 60 per cent or more annually.

Survey participants called out four key factors driving the unprecedented demand for network bandwidth in the data centre:

- Virtualisation

85 per cent of respondents said network I/O was a “significant” or “very significant” gating factor in limiting how many virtual machines they could run on a single physical server.

72 per cent believe that it will be practical to run as many as 100 virtual servers on a single physical server in two years.

- Cloud Computing

53 per cent of respondents indicated that the advent of the cloud had driven the need for additional network bandwidth within their corporate data centres;

40 per cent further said that the bandwidth expansion required to support migration to the cloud was 25 per cent or more.

- Big Data

Half of all respondents (54 per cent) said that over the next two years, big data would increase their organisation’s need for network bandwidth in the data centre by more than 50 per cent.

63 per cent said that over the next two years big data applications will cause the amount of storage connected to data centre networks to increase by at least 50 per cent.

More than a third (37 per cent) of participating IT organisations manage 1 petabyte or more of data, and 11 per cent said they currently manage more than 100 petabytes.

- Convergence

45 per cent of survey respondents said the convergence of data and storage networks has had a “very significant” or “extremely significant” impact on the need for increased I/O.

78 per cent said they believed it was inevitable that data and storage networks would converge into a single, consolidated network.

Nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of IT organisations have either already moved to a single, converged network for data and storage, or have plans to in the near future.

“The fact that data centre networks need to keep getting faster isn’t news to anyone,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex, “but what is amazing is the rate at which the demand for bandwidth is increasing. Today, 40 per cent have already deployed 10Gb Ethernet, and in another four years, the majority of those networks will be operating at 100GbE. It’s truly unprecedented.”

Emulex is hosting a webcast today, September 25th at 9 a.m. PST to present the full survey results, discuss the findings in greater detail, and answer questions from attendees.

Emulex has also produced an education series titled, ‘Why I/O Is strategic’ consisting of an anthology of briefs by industry analysts and a series of associated webcasts in conjunction with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), IDC, Evaluator Group and 451 Research, to demonstrate the strategic importance of I/O in the data centre.