Emulex Study Reveals Bandwidth and Network Speeds Exploding with Hyperscale Deployments

POWERING THE CLOUD – Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX), a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, announced the results of a study of 1,623 U.S. and European IT professionals, in which respondents provided insight into their enterprise data center networking environments. The study, conducted in October 2014, found that 57 percent (%) of respondents have adopted hyperscale networking environments that require massive scalability in network resources. (tweet this) Of those respondents, more than half (51%) named increasing bandwidth as a major challenge in moving to hyperscale environments.

As applications become more network-centric, and the volume of data grows in the cloud, organizations are seeing increased bandwidth demand for front-end applications driven by mobility and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), mid-tier big data analytics and content distribution, back-end transaction processing and storage management. The survey results below indicate that hyperscale and multi-tenant requirements are driving demand for higher network bandwidth to manage vast volumes of data, lower latency to accelerate application delivery and performance, and increased security to meet service level agreements (SLAs), and regulatory and compliance requirements. Organizations have responded by increasing their network bandwidth, and more than 77% of respondents running hyperscale environments say the move to the cloud has already necessitated the upgrade of their networks to at least 40Gb Ethernet (40GbE). (tweet this)

Other key findings from the survey include:

Hyperscale and the cloud

• 37% of respondents are taking a hybrid approach, using both private and public cloud.
• 31% are investing in private cloud, but are cautious about moving data to the public cloud.
• 30% are taking a “wait and see” approach to storing data in the cloud.

The top workloads most frequently migrated to the cloud

• The top workloads respondents reported they have moved, or plan to move to the cloud, include customer business applications (29%), application testing/development (23%), big data/analytics (19%), Office 365 (19%), email collaboration (19%), customer relationship management (CRM) (18%), disaster recovery (13%), ecommerce (9%), ERP systems (5%) and SAP Hana (2%). (tweet this)

Hyperscale organizations are investing in open networking approaches

• 55% of respondents from hyperscale organizations have already deployed an Open Compute-based infrastructure, and 43% plan to in the next 24 months. In contrast, only 17% of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations have deployed an Open Compute-based infrastructure, and only 17% plan to in the next 24 months. (tweet this)
• 31% of respondents have already deployed an NFV-based infrastructure, and 68% plan to in the next 24 months. In contrast, only 16% of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations have deployed a network functions virtualization (NFV)-based infrastructure, and only 16% plan to in the next 24 months.
• 15% of respondents have already deployed OpenStack, and 82% plan to deploy OpenStack in the next 24 months. In comparison, only 11% of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations have deployed OpenStack, and only 20% plan to in the next 24 months.
• 11% of respondents have already deployed software-defined networking (SDN), and 86% plan to implement SDN in the next 24 months. Comparatively, only 17% of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations have deployed SDN, and only 29% plan to in the next 24 months.

State of data center networking technologies and protocols

• All survey respondents reported they are using a mix of network technologies in their private data centers. 23% have deployed 10GbE, 7% have deployed 40GbE, and 3.5% have deployed 100GbE.
• In the next 12-24 months, 68% of all survey respondents plan to deploy 10GbE, 63% plan to deploy 25GbE, 69% plan to deploy 40GbE and 70% plan to deploy 100GbE. (tweet this)
• All survey respondents reported they are using a mix of networking protocols in their private data centers. 23% have deployed Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), 18% have deployed iSCSI and 2% have deployed RDMA over converged Ethernet (RoCE).
• In the next 12-24 months, 54% of respondents plan to deploy FCoE, 65% expect to be using iSCSI and 68% expect to be using RoCE.

Bandwidth remains a major challenge

• Bandwidth remains a major challenge for hyperscale companies, versus non-hyperscale companies that are focused on security. For hyperscale companies, respondents reported increased bandwidth requirements (51%), latency (36%), and security concerns (20%) as the top three challenges in migrating these workloads to the cloud. (tweet this)
• For non-hyperscale companies, respondents reported security (70%), latency (44%), and increased bandwidth requirements (39%) as the top three challenges in migrating workloads to the cloud.

Hyperscale organizations are upgrading networking technologies at a much higher rate

• 97% of respondents reported that adoption of hyperscale has necessitated a move to 10GbE, 40GbE or higher speeds to meet demands of high-performance applications such as big data, analytics and content distribution, compared to only 48% of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations. (tweet this)

Hyperscale companies need network speed

• 38% of respondents from hyperscale companies said they have 40Gb per second (Gbps) or faster network connections to their primary data center, compared to only 22% of respondents from non-hyperscale companies.
• 93% of survey respondents at hyperscale companies expect to be at 40Gbps or faster in three years, but only 44% of non-hyperscale organizations expect to be at 40Gbps or faster in the same timeframe. (tweet this)

Executive Commentary

“The move to hyperscale is entering a second phase from the cloud providers to managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprises. This survey highlights that like every major transition in IT infrastructure, changes are required and IT professionals have to re-think almost everything they have done in the past,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. “Beyond the concept of hyperscale models, we see very specific technologies being implemented such as OpenStack, SDN and NFV. Each of these changes has performance, operational expenditure (OPEX) and team skill implications for application, networking and storage infrastructure. We are working with leading end users, ecosystem partners and OEMs to bring the right connectivity, monitoring and management tools to make these solutions viable and operational.”

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Twitter Chat: Emulex will hold a Twitter chat with Shaun Walsh to discuss these results on Wednesday, October 29th, at 10:30 a.m. ET. Follow #hyperscalesurvey and join us here: http://www.tchat.io/rooms/hyperscalesurvey

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About Emulex

Emulex, a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, provides hardware and software solutions for global networks that support enterprise, cloud, government and telecommunications. Emulex’s products enable unrivaled end-to-end application visibility, optimization and acceleration. The Company's I/O connectivity offerings, including its line of ultra high-performance Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based connectivity products, have been designed into server and storage solutions from leading OEMs, including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Oracle, and can be found in the data centers of nearly all of the Fortune 1000. Emulex’s monitoring and management solutions, including its portfolio of network visibility and recording products, provide organizations with complete network performance management at speeds up to 100Gb Ethernet. Emulex is headquartered in Costa Mesa, Calif., and has offices and research facilities in North America, Asia and Europe. For more information about Emulex (NYSE:ELX) please visit http://www.Emulex.com.

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