Australian tech buyers more sceptical and analytical

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 09 August 2011 18:45

Business IT - Networking

Australian buyers do a better job of ensuring that IT infrastructure purchases will meet business needs than their counterparts in some other countries.

"Australia is ahead of the curve" in terms of the virtualisation of workloads, and buyers here are more sceptical and analytical, Duke Butler, principal engineer at Brocade, told iTWire. They have a better idea of how technology investments will address business needs, as opposed to the "success by accident" he sometimes sees in the US where large budgets allow for experimentation to see what works and what doesn't.

Thus local organisations moving to an Ethernet fabric to support virtualised environments will do so knowing it will work, he said, predicting that the takeup of such products will be relatively high in this country.

One potential obstacle is the need to be able to "collapse" the view of such switches for easier manageability. Mr Butler said Brocade's Virtual Cluster Switching approach virtualises the switching layer, allowing it to be managed as a single entity.

"It looks like a flat architecture," he said, and from a management perspective, adding a new switch becomes much like adding a new blade to a chassis.

Brocade has also chosen to integrate with VMware's vCenter and Microsoft's System Center so there is no need to learn how to use another console. Brocade's software workloads to be associated with specific port profiles, and handles event correlation, he said.

The company has committed to support the OpenStack APIs for cloud computing, and is already shipping products supporting OpenFlow (a protocol that allows packet forwarding to be controlled externally from the switch). Among other things, OpenFlow will help smaller organisations handle workload optimisation between internal and external infrastructure without a huge investment, he said.