For 85% of Enterprises Bottleneck is I/O Capacity to Add More VMs

By Corentin Béchade, StorageNewsletter

The huge increase in services like virtualization, cloud computing or big data raises a problem in IT department nowadays. More and more data are exchanged triggering the need for better network and performances, especially for bandwidth.

Throughout August of this year Emulex conducted a survey with ESG, IDC Evaluator Group et 451 Research on more than 1,500 enterprise in North America and Europe to get a picture on the rising needs in I/O business in data centers.

Pascal Couzinet, Regional Sales Manager for Southern Europe, and Adam Winkleman, international operation VP, came to France to unveil the result of this operation, putting the stress on the necessity of evolution in the I/O sector around four major points: virtualization, cloud computing, big data and convergence.

Virtualization

While virtualizing environment is growing, more mature, and gaining more interest, the number of VMs installed on each physical server is rising. From 10 VMs in 2008, the market have gone to 24 in 2012 and is expected to reach 100VMs in four years.

This tendency pushes enterprises to better scale their I/O architecture. For 85% the real bottleneck is I/O capacity keeping them from getting more VMs.

Cloud Computing

The success of cloud-computing platform is also driving the needs towards more performing bandwidth solution.

I/O is therefore going to be important in this new scheme of work. 53% of surveyed people are claiming that this new way of working has to be paired with better bandwidth.

Big Data

The accumulation of larger quantity of data in enterprises is forcing big data applications to better manage the bandwidth.

Approximately 20% of surveyed people are planning to increase their storage capacity by 100% in the next two years, naturally driving needs for faster bandwidth.

As John Webster, senior partner at Evaluator Group says: "the amount of data transferred can be compared to getting an elephant through a series of tube"

Convergence

Until now managing the network was divided into two branches, managing the network and managing server storage. Nowadays enterprises have a tendency to turn to converging networks for economical and practical reasons.

68% estimate that a converging network is easier to work with, while 64% of enterprises said they are already using converging networks or planning to do so.

To answer these needs, Emulex has made a definitive technical choice, Ethernet. With a mixture of 10GbE and 40GbE Ethernet, according to it, they can provide adequate solutions for data center until 2016, the year in which they are planning to release 100GbE.

Even if the transition between 1GbE and 10GbE Ethernet was rather long, Emulex is asserting that, with these new ways of working, the adoption of 40GbE and later 100GbE is going to be much quicker. The company is devoted to Ethernet, "a flexible and progressive technology" putting Infiniband out of question, according to Emulex.

The firm solution is a combination of software and hardware, where the software, developed by Mericom, a strategic partner, is scalable.

Today’s sales products of Emulex products are still 80% OEM but realizing that OEMs weren’t covering the whole market, the company adopted in 2010 a full indirect sales strategy, through OEM and channel