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.
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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