Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 09 | Page 58

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres workloads to cloud and colocation providers. • For the last five years, approximately 50% of enterprise IT departments have reported flat or shrinking of overall budgets (combined spend for on-premise technology infrastructure of IT and data centre facilities). This figure has remained steady in each Uptime Institute survey. Some enterprise IT organisations are receiving modest budget increases, but fewer than 10% are realising significant growth. • More than half (55%) of enterprise-managed server footprints are flat or shrinking • Colocation providers had experienced tremendous growth in the last 5 years, but shrinking enterprise IT deployments are now impacting capital project cycles across the board. High customer satisfaction with co-location: • Half of respondents are satisfied or very satisfied with primary provider • Seven percent said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied • In 2015, enterprise IT organisations reported slightly more outages in their enterprise-owned sites over a two-year period than their colocation service providers Outsourcing model is not the answer to all problems: • Forty percent of enterprise respondents are paying more for colocation contracts than initially planned • Nearly 1/3 experiences an outage at a colocation vendor site • Over 60% said the penalty clause in their Service Level Agreement (SLA) would not adequately offset the cost of that outage to the business Enterprise organisations paying a premium for a 3rd party to deliver data centre capacity should hold service providers to higher standards. There is room for improvement in vetting, negotiating and managing those relationships. The Uptime Institute survey findings show that competition from service providers threatens the relevance or very existence of enterprise IT teams. Leading enterprise IT organisations will be most successful by driving efficiency and transparency in their own assets, and providing corporate governance over security, costs, efficiency and performance of Service Providers for end users. The sixth annual Uptime Institute Data Centre Industry Survey was conducted via email in February, 2016 and includes global responses from over 1,000 data centre operators and IT practitioners. 60 INTELLIGENTCIO At a glance… Brocade delivers Gen 6 Fibre Channel Directors for data centres Brocade has announced the delivery of its Gen 6 Fibre Channel directors for mission-critical storage connectivity and business resiliency solutions designed for the all-flash data centre. This extends the company’s leadership in offering the industry’s most innovative and widely deployed Fibre Channel storage network solutions, building on the first Gen 6 Fibre Channel switch that Brocade delivered in March 2016. The new Brocade X6 director family and the Brocade SX6 extension blade for Fibre Channel, Fibre Connection (FICON) and IP storage replication, combined with Brocade Fabric Vision™ technology, enables customers to drive always-on business operations, eliminate performance bottlenecks and adapt to the requirements of digital organisations. As organisations continue to digitise and adapt to new workloads, they need a modern storage network that supports business agility. Fibre Channel fabrics are the common thread that connects organisations to their most critical applications and data. Ninety-six percent of banks, insurance companies and retailers rely on Fibre Channel as the most trusted network infrastructure for storage. Gen 6 Fibre Channel provides the digital enterprise with non-stop availability and incredible performance required for tomorrow’s hyper-scale data centres. “Legacy networks will bottleneck flash storage minimising the performance and economic benefits of this game-changing technology,” said Jack Rondoni, Vice President of Storage Networking at Brocade. “Brocade’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions unleash the full value of today’s flash technology and enable tomorrow’s next-generation flash storage based on Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). NVMe will be the next disruptive storage technology in the data centre and customers will be able to seamlessly integrate NVMe over fabrics with Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel.” www.intelligentcio.com