Beyond virtualisation to the Ethernet

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 15 November 2011 21:42

With rapidly increasing usage of server virtualisation, enterprises across the Asia Pacific region are now looking at Ethernet fabric technology to help fully realise the benefits of business agility, operational efficiencies and lower costs.

A survey of 328 IT decision-makers across the APAC region commissioned by Nasdaq-listed  networks architect company, Brocade, reveals that two-thirds of the enterprises surveyed have adopted server virtualisation, of which 46 percent are now running production environments on virtual machines. More than a third of respondents said their organisations planned to pilot an Ethernet fabric architecture within the next six months and a further 25 percent said they intended to do so within 12 months.

'What jumps out from this new report is just how fast Asia Pacific enterprises are now moving towards cloud computing architecture,' said Graham Schultz, Regional Director Australia and New Zealand of Brocade.

'They are certainly not all there yet but road-maps are in place and there is a high level of awareness about the issues they need to address. Creating a data centre networking architecture that is simple, secure, flat and virtualized is a top priority for the region's IT decision makers.'

With virtualisation initiatives underway at most companies covered by the Frost & Sullivan survey, 35 percent of respondents said their organisations had already adopted some form of cloud computing with private clouds more common than either the public or hybrid cloud delivery models. While software-as-a-service adoption has been steadily growing in Asia Pacific in the past decade, Frost & Sullivan's analysts found adoption of cloud-enabled infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service seeing a huge spurt in the past 12 months.

Andrew Milroy, vice president - ICT practice for Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific, said rolling out cloud computing is complex, 'which is why it is recommend that organisations address the data centre network challenges head on rather than waiting for bottlenecks to appear.'

Frost & Sullivan makes the point that, anticipating these needs in 2010, Brocade introduced its vision - Brocade One - of a cloud and data centre architecture with Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) as the core technology for building large, high-performance and flat Layer 2 fabrics to better support server virtualisation.

According to Frost & Sullivan, leveraging Brocade VCS fabric technology, Brocade VDX Data Centre Switches are now being deployed as the Ethernet fabric foundation at leading-edge cloud data centres across the region.