News
Brocade Customer Survey Details Top Priorities of Evolving Data Centers
October 2007 by Brocade
Brocade, the specialist in networked storage solutions that help enterprises connect and manage their information, today announced findings from its fifth annual customer survey. For the fourth consecutive year, the cost and complexity of managing and maintaining storage environments and company data were customers’ primary concerns for the upcoming twelve month period. The need for faster server provisioning and server virtualization, redesign considerations for future data center needs, and file data management followed closely behind.
Brocade conducts its annual end-user survey to track the key priorities and concerns of its enterprise customers, and uses the results to improve the company’s product and services offerings.
Of the 660 enterprise customers who responded to this year’s survey:
59 percent noted that reducing cost and complexity remains their top priority
43 percent said the need to reduce server provisioning times, and provide server virtualization are top priorities
42 percent rated business continuity and disaster recovery as top priorities
37 percent indicated plans to re-architect existing SANs for growth or next-generation data center needs
34 percent identified file data management as a top priority (the largest increase in a category from last year’s results)
“The fact that solving issues around cost and complexity surfaced again as key priorities underscores the profound impact that data growth continues to have on the data center,” said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Support. “Brocade offers a broad range of data center networking solutions and expertise to address these key IT priorities. Most importantly, we’re working closely with our customers to ensure that they have the design approach and solutions to evolve their next-generation data centers.”
“We turned to Brocade because of the company’s wide selection of data center products, services, and partners that allowed us to architect our data center environment to best address our specific requirements,” said Chad Smykay, Storage Engineer, Rackspace Managed Hosting. “As a long-time trusted partner in the data center, Brocade continues to deliver efficient, reliable products and services that simplify our data infrastructure—improving uptime and providing secure, reliable access to our data.”
The comprehensive suite of Brocade SAN solutions helps customers save costs through high performance, industry-leading reliability, and lower operational costs. In addition, Brocade SAN solutions address customers’ needs for server connectivity and server virtualization, resulting in data center infrastructures with increased availability and reliability, greater operational control, and higher scalability.
The Brocade suite of File Area Network (FAN) solutions helps customers optimize their enterprise file management by increasing operational flexibility, improving data availability, and significantly reducing overall storage costs in heterogeneous, distributed environments. The solutions provide administrators with policies for automating many file data management tasks, including data tiering, migration/consolidation, replication, and failover.
All Brocade technologies and solutions are supported by its worldwide service and support organization, which assists customers in designing, implementing, and managing their data center solutions and environments.
The survey included 660 respondents from large global enterprises describing IT trends in their environments as well as their expectations for the next 12 months. To read a summary of the complete survey results, visit:
www.brocade.com/customersurvey2007.
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