Key technology and business trends in the data networks and infrastructure

Hong Kong, 3 February 2016 – H3C, a leading IT infrastructure solution provider, has released its technology and business predictions and trends report for data networks and infrastructure in 2016.

Software-defined X and workforce mobility will be major trends in the industry, while in the area of data networks and infrastructure, SDN with network virtualization and BYOD are emerging as key technologies. In fact, SDN and virtualization have actually been an important background trend for some time, enabling many emerging technologies over the past decade.

According to the latest technology assessment from IDC, the APEJ SDN market, consisting of spending from the enterprise and cloud service provider segments, will grow from US$6.2 million in 2013 to over US$1 billion by 2018.[1]

In addition, Gartner, Inc predicts that during the next five years, consumers will add more devices to their personal portfolio rather than consolidating. By 2018, a consumer in a mature market will use and own more than three personal devices.[2] It shows that cloud service and mobility are still the fast growing segments in the past few years.

“While the overall category is mature, adoption has focused primarily on the compute layer such as servers and storage. SDN is the last and one of the most important building blocks of software-defined X. Like the move from physical to virtual machines for compute, SDN adds a level of abstraction to the hardware-defined interconnections of routers, switches, firewalls, and security gear as virtualization resources,” Joseph Lee, Product Director, H3C, Hong Kong.

“For BYOD, as the popularity and use of mobile devices continues to grow dramatically, the challenge is how to control and manage the different type of devices and access to network resources,” he said.

Today, many enterprise customers are asking for scalable data networks and infrastructures that can accommodate the speed and performance demanded by the explosive growth of new applications and devices. They are also looking for flexible solutions through which they can roll out new applications, services and make other network changes more efficient and effective.

“They also want to easily manage a virtualized environment to both provision network devices and gain visibility into the traffic passing through them.

Achieving this requires a converged solution with integration across multiple servers, storage systems and networks. So many customers are asking for solutions that can manage different types of users and devices and control their access,” said Lee.

Great growth rate in high speed switches

In 2015, there was a big growth in data center-grade switch upgrades, specifically in the area of 10G/40G high performance switches for ToR and data center core applications, which require switches that are capable of supporting SDN and network virtualization for future expansion. H3C predicts that this trend will keep growing.

In addition, with the increasing adoption of virtualization in computing and storage, customers are spending more on re-architecting data center networks as well as upgrading from 1G servers and storage connections to 10G connections. Many are also upgrading their Campus Core switches to increase bandwidth and enhance performance to avoid networks becoming a bottleneck.

“These will be the same key spending areas in data network and infrastructure to meet the new data center and campus IT requirements in 2016,” predicted Lee.

The biggest challenge is on the way

As evidenced by the great fluctuations in global economy and the China stock market, economy factors will be a major challenge for IT managers in 2016. Accordingly, IT spending will be under pressure, and its role will also change from an operational and supporting role, to one that helps businesses create value.

“This means IT will be about more than just spending money – it will help to generate revenue. Of course, its ability to do so will depend on the speed of IT transformation,” said Lee.

Following the latest developments in storage, one important trend is clearly in the area of SSD cache, which can help organizations to increase IOPS and improve R/W performance, delivering high performance and low network latency.

Software Defined Storage is one new technology that uses a distributed model, where all of the metadata and operations are scattered across the entire cluster of servers and storage devices. And it works incredibly well, eliminating bottlenecks and enabling predictable scalability without limits. However, that performance depends on extremely low latency and a flat network architecture.

“With the increasing demand in networking and big data, H3C predicts that the needs of enterprises will keep growing in 2016. We are constantly developing new products to help enterprises to tackle all difficulties in this unstable environment,” said Lee.